Behold, the Golden Task
What is a Golden Task? An expert’s tried and true way of doing a specific activity from start to finish in a way that guarantees a successful outcome.
It’s easy to venerate the process of mastery if you know how to recognize it. A brilliant and expletive-filled example of this is a scene from the show Billions in which the character Wags (Mike Wagner) scolds two entitled bankers at Sushi Nakazawa for desecrating perfectly executed sushi by dousing it with soy sauce. When they tell him to chill out, he shouts across the restaurant, “He had to spend TEN years learning how to make the tamago. The egg. THE EGG!”
The difference between them is that Wags understands and respects the dedication, diligence, and self-sacrifice it took for Chef Nakazawa to achieve that level of mastery, and can appreciate its end result. The pair of philistines (or “heathens” as Wags calls them) do not, despite having the expense accounts to eat at whatever elevated dining establishment they wish. In other words, an impeccable, masterful meal is wasted on them.
Here’s the problem with mastery: It’s easy to misunderstand it because it looks effortless when it’s achieved. But achieving it is an absolute grind, requiring repetition, scaffolded guidance, and years of one’s life.
Some may bristle at the idea of prescriptive teaching and repetition, believing that rigidity stifles creativity or teaches people how to be automatons rather than innovators. (The more attractive alternative might be diving straight into experimental and trial-and-error learning.)
More often than not, though, mastery and excellence are most misunderstood by organizations whose success hinges on whether or not people can do complex things without making a mistake. This might be employees aseptically filling a vial of biologic drug product without introducing a single contaminant, or customers assembling an IDANÄS wardrobe from IKEA. (Which one’s harder? No one knows.)
Yet, despite these high expectations, the same organizations have no idea how to set people up to succeed, and complain when they fail. In other words, we can admire mastery and excellence — even demand it. But the onus falls on the individual and their personal conviction to achieve it, rather than the organization or system to facilitate it.
What if, instead, the focus was less on mastery and more on the exemplar of a single unit of excellence? What if we could really capture the expert’s execution of a task with incomparable clarity in all its beauty and depth? And what if we were to do this in a way that was more clear and accessible to learners?
This is where we’d like to turn our attention to — something so overlooked it doesn’t yet have a name: The Golden Task. You heard it here first, folks!
The Golden Task and the Cheesecake Factory
The Golden Task is simply defined. It is an expert’s way of doing a specific activity from start to finish in a way that guarantees a successful outcome.
Take the Cheesecake Factory, which was recently featured in a must-watch Business Insider video. The restaurant is as famous for its mile-high cheesecakes as it is its novella-sized menu. But what most people don’t know is that nearly everything on its 250+ menu with the exception of cheesecakes is made fresh, in house, every day. This means that the organization contains a staggering 210+ Golden Tasks that must be executed the exact same way for each and every customer, across all its 251 locations.
The Avocado Egg Rolls? There’s a Golden Task for that.
Its wildly popular Chicken Madeira? There’s a Golden Task for that, too.
And at a time when comparable businesses are closing locations or disappearing completely across the American culinary landscape, the Cheesecake Factory’s revenue is up and to the right, year over year, and tables are consistently filled.
Obviously, Cheesecake Factory’s success doesn’t just boil down to one thing. There is not a shred of doubt, however, that capturing and teaching these Golden Tasks exceptionally well is a critical factor.
This is where the Cheesecake Factory bears more in common with companies like Toyota and AstraZeneca than it does with other restaurants: There is no room for departures or creative liberties during the day-to-day execution of Golden Tasks. Assembly lines, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and global restaurant groups contain myriad processes ranging from simple to complex that should be adhered to with the strictest of compliance in order to be successful.
Whether this actually happens depends on how successfully organizations conduct training, but more on that below under “Golden Tasks and ROI.”
“Mastery that can’t be passed on is not an asset. It’s an expiration date.”
When Golden Tasks Meet Heightened Complexity
Tying one’s shoes contains fewer actions than driving a car, which contains fewer actions than flying a plane. Not only are the sequences longer, but the complexity of tasks and the number of variables that have to be navigated at any given moment increase exponentially as well. Does this mean that Golden Tasks become less relevant as activities get more complicated?
An emphatic no! Every golden outcome is the result of a Golden Task, or collection of Golden Tasks. At their core, Golden Tasks are a series of actions, conducted in a sequence, that might change dynamically when required, based on judgments informed by experience and knowledge.
The challenge is that the more complex an activity is, the harder it is to define, observe, or document the Golden Task. It takes hours upon hours of repetition and observation, often under guidance and instruction, for one to understand and internalize all the knowhow required. A master mechanic diagnosing a car that won't start doesn't run through a fixed checklist. They listen for the engine's turnover, rule out the battery, then the starter, then the fuel line, adjusting their sequence in real time based on what each step reveals.
But complexity raises the stakes on a much bigger question: How useful is a Golden Task if it can't be documented or taught? How risky is it when an organization's ability to function rests on but a few individuals who possess all the knowhow but no real means to share it with others?
The answer is: not very useful at all. Mastery that can’t be passed on is not an asset. It’s an expiration date.
Capturing and Teaching the Golden Task: The Dual Empathy Approach
“We take pains to document our expert’s knowledge,” an organization might say. “Some of our manuals are 720 pages long!”
There are two things wrong with this statement. First, the expert probably has enough knowledge to fill three times as many pages. Second, 719 of those 720 pages will likely go unread.
The Golden Task is the archetypal way of doing something, but as we stated earlier, it’s of little use to anyone else if it cannot be taught. A Golden Task reaches shimmering, glowing, iridescent status if it can be captured in a way that the learner on the other side can actually execute the task.
Our approach to capturing expert knowledge for learners to recreate is simple. The Golden Task has to be:
Clear. The Golden Task is demonstrated in a way that is crystal clear to learners. Important angles must be covered. In terms of visuals, our platform mustremove as much uncertainty as is humanly possible.
Deep. The needs and questions of the learner must be thoroughly anticipated. Opportunities to offer more detailed instruction on physical techniques or the “why’s” behind specific actions should always be seized. We will never underestimate human curiosity for deeper knowledge.
Dynamic. Many Golden Tasks are not static. Certain materials might not be available, other if/then scenarios might arise. This is fundamental to GPS technology — if you’re driving from Point A to Point B but decide you need to make that Starbucks run, your GPS will adapt to where you are. Similarly, Golden Tasks should be able to branch off into different actions if needed.
Where the Learner Is. Not just in terms of skill, but literally where they are physically. Tasks and activities are done on the job, but so much of “training” happens on a laptop at one’s desk or long beforehand. Golden Tasks should be available and learned in the moment, in the environment, whenever it’s needed.
It’s almost less about the tasks than it is the people — namely, the expert and the learner. Capturing all that knowledge that lives in the expert’s brain and body, and crafting it in a way that makes complete and total sense for the learner requires empathy for both. This is why we call our method the dual empathy approach. Ultimately, it’s about bridging the gap between the two, ensuring that the expert’s earned knowhow lives on and can be built on in perpetuity.
It’s not daunting or “more work.” It’s a paradigm shift that is worth its weight in, well, gold. And Larabee’s platform has made it simple and fun.
Golden Tasks and ROI
Here’s what someone might say when rejecting an investment in Golden Task capture.
“We’ve already invested in training. It’s called ‘compliance.’ Boxes are checked, auditors are happy.”
“Instruction manuals are cheap and easy to edit.”
“The Cheesecake Factory video is great, but that’s a food business. We’re not a food business.”
Every real-world outcome or consequence of inaction proves otherwise. In pharma, a true Golden Batch (zero deviations, zero contamination, zero rework) is so rare that entire departments scratch their heads as to how they don’t happen more often. Complex medical devices and kits go unused or misused by customers. Huge dressers are returned by angry, red-faced customers because something went wrong in the assembly process.
This cost compounds quickly. In biopharma, a single failed batch due, in part, to operator error can mean tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue (Pharma's Almanac). A departed employee costs 50% to 200% of their annual salary to replace (Blender Solutions). For products, up to 51% of customers leave a product after one negative experience. Returning furniture can cost $55-90+ per piece (First Chair).
As for #3, if you don’t know how to see and apply learnings in excellence across industries, we don’t know what to tell you.
The real ROI of a Golden Task is this: tens of millions in batches that don’t get scrapped. That $1.5 million in institutional knowledge that doesn’t walk out the door. The repeat revenue from customers who stay because they’re not only successful but have experienced something so overwhelmingly positive. It’s not avoided cost, it’s provable retained revenue.
Conclusion
Many people think it was Pablo Picasso or the Dalai Lama who said some version of “Learn the rules so you know how to break them.” Snopes.com will quickly disabuse us of this, but that doesn’t take away from the near universality of this sentiment. Alexander McQueen said it. Experts and masters of all stripes have said it. Cavemen probably grunted it to their caveteenagers.
It was Aristotle who said it best in The Nicomachean Ethics, where he argues that the only way human beings develop things like virtue, skill, and knowledge is by learning and doing repeatedly, under instruction, and in the prescribed way, for genuine competence to form. Only when that knowledge lives so deep in the bones can a person transcend the need for instructions. Then, and only then, can they truly innovate, shake things up, or problem solve.
Their focus was rightly on the process of attaining excellence, not the idea or outcome of it. If an organization demands the highest standards or they create products that are highly complex to use, it is also incumbent upon that same organization to invest in the process of accomplishing those things successfully.
Experts are living Golden Tasks. Systems like Larabee exist to convert their knowhow into doable frameworks. And companies like the Cheesecake Factory? They show us it’s altogether possible.
Email us to request a demo and further discuss your Golden Tasks.
