Connected

I picked a Japanese restaurant to celebrate the fifteenth wedding anniversary this year. That's a restaurant with open kitchen, by itself a good place to keep my daughter amused. Jasmine spent more time watching the chefs than having her dinner. Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, the chef made a new dish from the teppan, the way a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat. I stayed with her in front of the kitchen, delighted. That may seem hard to believe, but I forgot to pay the bill - my wife did that.

The beauty of an open kitchen, of course, is more than children's entertainment. Recently, an opinion piece in the Harvard Business Review caught my attention, and it was titled "Cooks Make Tastier Food When They Can See Their Customers." It was about a research carried out by Harvard Business School's assistant professor. The experiment is about diners and cooks in a real cafeteria. There are four scenarios. In the first, diners and cooks could not see one another; in the second, the diners could see the cooks; and reverse in the third; and in the fourth, both the diners and the cooks were visible to one another.

So what does the customer satisfaction survey tell us?

The food quality was rated better when the cooks could see their patrons. Peculiar indeed. And even higher rating when they saw one another. As it turns out, cooks appreciate the chance to see the diners - a human connection that seems to speak to the power of being appreciated. So much so, in fact, that transparency matters not only to the chefs, but many others. Not too long ago, we've heard about similar research on radiologists' earnest wish to connect with humans. The idea of the experiment is pretty similar to that of Harvard Business School. The story begins with 318 patients referred to a hospital for CT, or computed tomography, imaging examinations. The researchers took pictures of the patients and added their photographs to the medical images. In other words, the photograph appeared automatically when the radiologists opened a patient's CT file.

You should have guessed the study result by now.

Yes, the radiologists reported more empathy, read the medical images more meticulously, and ferreted out many incidental findings beyond the scope of the original examinations. The researchers then picked 81 CT scans with incidental findings and showed them to the same radiologists in a blinded fashion three months later, this time without the photographs. In the end, almost 80 percent of the incidental CT findings were not reported, simply because of omitting the patients' photographs.