Japanese
7Skies’ consultants are given the opportunities to participate in various projects. It is extremely rare for all of us to work in one project and frequently meet face to face in the office or online. Therefore, several times a year, we set aside time for team-building activities.
Recently, we experienced raw chocolate cooking as one of these activities. Raw chocolate is a very healthy food that uses organic sweeteners instead of sugar and is cooked at a relatively low temperature so that nutrients and enzymes are not lost. And of course, we wish to make chocolate delicious and beautiful, as well as healthy, and the key to this is temperature control. During the process of heating and cooling the cacao butter, we need to keep it at the right temperature (sweet spot, exactly), not too warm, not too cold.
It sounded very easy, but for beginners, it was quite difficult to put the temperature under our control. It was hard to cool the cacao butter down to the sweet spot, then the butter suddenly got cooler than necessary. And the same story when heating it; the temperature did not go up at first then it picked up too quickly and ended up in exceeding the sweet spot.
The pressure to avoid failure only intensified, and everybody of the team got totally focused on the thermometer. Silence filled the cooking room…
As the team learned to what extent we could deviate from the sweet spot and how we could recover from there, the pressure disappeared and we got conversations back in the team and smiles back on our faces. Once we were able to share the tolerance level for failure, we began to enjoy cooking.
In the end, we managed to achieve delivery of the raw chocolate and enjoyed the beauty and the taste of our deliverables. It was slightly bitter rather than sweet, and we believe this was not because we missed the sweet spot many times but because it is the original taste of cacao.
In our daily work, we give it everything we’ve got to avoid failure because we believe it should be in the best interest of the customer to accomplish missions without failure. However, it was a valuable experience for the entire team to practice failure (and recovery) together in a situation where it only bothered us. We will continue looking for what we can fail in for the next activity.
(Special thanks to Ms. Chie Ando for her support to the team-building activity, who specializes in raw food and raw sweets and is the founder and president of the Association of Raw Chocolatiers.(https://www.instagram.com/rawfoodhaccolab/ )