Making Pizza

My wife bought me a pizza oven on my last birthday.  We usually eat pizza at least one night a week, so it was a reasonable investment!  Besides, I've been wanting to make my own pizzas in a wood-fired oven for a long time.  I've learned (actually, we've learned - the hard way) that making pizza by hand takes a little practice.  Here is how the first pizza turned out:

As you can see, the edges were burnt, the middle was still a little doughy, and the whole thing is rather a mess!  It wasn't the worst pizza that we've ever tasted, but it was far from what we had envisioned!  

Rather than giving up, we reviewed everything that we did, identified some things that we could do better in the future, and changed our approach on the next round.  We used a little more flour on the pizza dough, placed a little flour on the pizza peeler (the device we use to place the pizza in the oven and then turn it), decreased the heat inside the oven, and turned the pizza constantly while it cooked.  The next version turned out much better.

We've certainly improved our technique over the last several iterations.  We've even tried some different variations of pizza!  Finally, we were brave enough to serve pizza to our extended family members, and we are now at the stage where we may try serving our pizza to friends!

Making pizza, as it turns out, is all about continuous improvement!  Making pizza then (i.e. "continuous improvement") is the ongoing process of analyzing performance (what worked well and what didn't work well), identifying opportunities to do better, and making incremental changes to processes, products, and personnel.

Incidentally, author and blogger Seth Godin came up with what he calls "The Pizza Principle": "Good pizza is rare, even though the method to create it is well known.  Any efforts to make it more convenient, cheaper or easier will almost always make it worse.  If you think this post is about pizza, I’m afraid that we’re already stuck."  Indeed.