Kitchen Factor

Twenty years ago, when we founded one of the agencies that later became the seed of SUPER, we remodeled an old house in Palermo to set the shop up. We built a beautiful meeting room and a gorgeous space for creatives, but the account people got an expanded kitchen. We knocked down the wall that divided the kitchen from the living room, and in that large space, we integrated the account team, which seemed to be inside the kitchen. 

At first, we were a bit embarrassed that clients would see that space, and we always tried to receive them in the meeting room or the creative space. While we dreamed of implementing agile methodologies in a more formal environment, we discovered that many of the best ideas, the most creative, the most innovative, the most different, and, above all, the most polished ones arose when people from different areas would get together in the kitchen to prepare a coffee or a mate and speak about cinema, football, fashion, music, and life in general. 

In these encounters, where people who wouldn’t usually work together as a team would receive input from each other horizontally and without filters, solutions to our projects started to glide smoothly. Inevitably, those talks ended up with new concepts, new insights, new projects, new proposals, and new points of view, catalyzing and leveraging the ideas.

It was then when we realized that instead of moving the kitchen to a separate area as we originally had in mind, we needed to upcycle this fact and glorify the encounter. The kitchen became “the place” where different people from different areas gathered to discuss ideas. It soon became the meeting room for some of our clients to have a coffee and talk things over with our teams.

Years later, when we moved to a four-story building remodeled to house the agency, we decided to include an open kitchen on each floor for people to gather for a coffee and hold discussions and exchange opinions. We were already calling this environment “the kitchen factor”.

Many companies where creativity is an essential component do not understand this “kitchen factor” dynamic, which arose from apprehending the true interests of the people. Many companies in which creative solutions are necessary to grow the business would benefit from understanding and integrating this quasi-casual factor that enhances iteration and innovation, breaking down the (much-feared and disrupting) meetings, calls, zooms, etc., of a typical company dynamics. 

Everyone can take advantage of the Kitchen Factor, from a software developer to a food producer. It works for those who use traditional methods or even more for those who implement agile methodologies. Offering people to spend time in a place to stimulate creativity beyond the typical criterion can turn their interests into a hub of creativity and will significantly improve the performance of the business.

This is part of the culture from which Super was born.