Turkey Trauma KM

Cooks all over the United States went through turkey trauma last week. I was one of them.

To be fair, if you believed that no one at your table cared about the turkey other than as a mere vehicle for the more flavorful side dishes, then you wouldn’t care about serving a tasteless, desiccated bird. However, I took the position that everything on our Thanksgiving table had to be delicious. So that amped up the pressure and induced a pretty serious case of turkey trauma.

Causes of Turkey Trauma

What causes turkey trauma? As with many problems, it has many parents. To begin with, most of us don’t roast a turkey regularly. So we are out of practice before the big day. It’s not surprising then that when Thanksgiving rolls around, it’s almost as if we are cooking a large bird for the first time. Our memory plays tricks on us, we don’t remember crucial details.

Secondly, unless you have a tried and true recipe, you likely will find yourself drowning in a sea of internet recipes, all of which promise to deliver the “best-ever foolproof” turkey. And then the pain begins as you wade through competing recommendations on whether to brine or not, whether to cook at a low or high temperature, or (in the case of particularly mischievous millennials) whether to cook the bird in the microwave. (Microwave? Please don’t!)

Thirdly, and most frustratingly, as you begin to discern the basic architecture of these competing recipes, you realize the biggest danger of all: nearly each of these recipes leaves out something critical. This isn’t because their writers are malevolent. Rather, there are details so obvious to them that they don’t seem necessary to mention. Unfortunately, these details may not be so obvious to us so their omission creates a gap in the recipe.

In the case of the recipe I decided to use, they gave instructions for a 14lb turkey but didn’t give any guidance for the 16lb bird I had. I was left with the vague instruction to cook it longer. But when we attempted some basic math to figure out how much longer, there was a four-hour difference among the cooking charts we found. That four-hour swing is a LOT when planning to serve a roomful of hungry guests.

Turkey Trauma and KM

So how does turkey trauma relate to knowledge management? It illustrates several workplace challenges that benefit from good KM:

• Infrequent Practice Requires Detailed Guidance. When you regularly repeat routine procedures, you develop a muscle memory that can allow you to operate on autopilot. In the absence of an unforeseen circumstance, you can rely on your muscle memory without overthinking anything and without unnecessary stress. If, however, you do something infrequently, you will need an inversely proportional amount of guidance and support to do it right. In this situation, effective KM can connect you to good documentation coupled with access to friendly experts to help you succeed.
• Abundant Information Can Be a Handicap. Too much information can sometimes be as debilitating as insufficient information. When you have too much, how do you make sense of it all? How do you identify the most reliable? This is where effective KM steps in to find and feature vetted information so that you don’t have to repeat someone else’s research and validation efforts. Curation by trusted experts (or another KM system) is a big help.
• Information Obvious to You May Not Be Obvious To Me. This is the persistent knowledge transfer challenge that arises when we assume a shared basis of understanding and don’t make our tacit knowledge explicit. This is a case where it helps to reality test your recipe (or practice guidance) with a relative beginner. Are they able to follow the guidance and reproduce the results? If not, what missing information needs to be added? (See David Snowden’s seventh KM principle.)

In the case of my turkey dilemma, the issue was that there were glaring holes in the recipes I consulted that could be filled only by making explicit — and then sharing in simple terms — the tacit knowledge the recipe writer had. They might intuitively know how to adjust cooking times for different temperatures and weights but they didn’t share that valuable information with me.

Next-Level Turkey KM

So I struggled through the process and served dinner a bit later than planned. Nonetheless, I’m pleased to report that my new technique* yielded the juiciest turkey ever to grace our Thanksgiving table.

More importantly, like any good KM professional, I conducted an after-action review and made careful notes regarding what worked and what didn’t, as well as any open issues that remained for me to research. Hopefully, when I tackle my next turkey in November 2024, these notes will fill in some crucial gaps in my turkey recipe and significantly reduce (or, better still, eliminate) my turkey trauma.

(*In case you’re interested, I slow-roasted the turkey overnight. It was fabulous. And no one ended up in the emergency room. I’m never going back to the standard method!)

[Photo Credit: Kraken Images]