IDEO Chicago Sad Iron Chef Competition

One piece of advice I give people when they want to spin up a new workplace ritual is to build on things people are already doing. You'll give your new ritual a shot of grassroots energy from the start.

Which is how our Sad Iron Chef Competition came to be. Our designers were always on deadline, making it hard to find time for lunch, so we'd stock the communal kitchen with staples like bread, cheese, lunch meats, lettuce, etc. One designer was notorious for his hastily made "sad sandwiches" — white bread, a slice of cheese, and a dollop of Sriracha — which quickly became a studio meme. But several others were more discerning foodies who casually whipped up Michelin-starred salads and refreshing aguas frescas from humble ingredients. This cheffy creativity, combined with the popularity of the show "Iron Chef" and IDEOers' natural love of team-based competitions, bred (or should I say "bread") the idea for Sad Iron Chef.

The rules were simple. We recruited three two-person teams to compete. They had 20 minutes to make whatever they wanted out of our standard kitchen supplies, but they had to incorporate a secret ingredient we revealed at the start of the event. Their creations were judged by a guest chef, a professional food scientist, and a picky eater. We turned our cafe into a Kitchen Stadium with posters and uplights, and made custom awards from cutting boards for Sad, Sadder, or Saddest Iron Chefs. Two designers, dressed in sequins and sporting head mics, interviewed the contestants and provided color commentary throughout, while a fake camera crew, composed of other designers, followed them around, live-streaming the action on a big screen.

The competition was fierce and fun, soon going down in ChIDEO's history books. We planned to make it a yearly event, but a studio renovation the following spring and then the start of the pandemic the year after that put a kibosh on those plans. Once we were able to work in person again, our community and working patterns had changed so much that reviving it felt out of sync.

We were able to use some "leftovers" from the event format, however, to craft other experiences later on. During the pandemic, members of our Workplace Experience team designed and hosted a remote team-building competition called the "Charcuterie Board Challenge," in which a project team and their clients were tasked with creating the most innovative charcuterie boards using whatever they had in their kitchens that day. We had custom cutting boards made and shipped to the clients that acted as game boards and tangible mementos of the virtual competition. My colleague, Katie Beach, was the event designer and MC. I played the role of judge.

While the virtual "Charcuterie Board Challenge" wasn't exactly the full-on, immersive production that the one-and-only Sad Iron Chef was, it was perfect for the moment: a scrappy creative re-jzhuzhing very much in the spirit of the OG event.