Striving to be better, oft we mar what’s well

Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene IV

Early in my career, I was something of a perfectionist. The ‘That’ll Do’ attitude that pervaded many client teams was – to me – unacceptable, and I would push back firmly. Even though perfection was typically subjective, it always seemed the appropriate target to aim for.

But I was wrong. On a number of counts. First, in many cases those I was working with were not actually seeking perfection. They were simply trying not to fail. And second, in most endeavours, there are some very good reasons to deliver something less than perfect: Time. Cost. Sanity.

I first saw this in the planning and delivery of Information Technology (IT) outcomes. We often define the success of an IT project on three critical axes – being on time, being on budget, and being on spec(ification). Failure to achieve any of these three dimensions results in the project being deemed – at least to some extent – a failure. When you see reports stating that around 80% of IT projects fail, keep in mind that failure is based on this three-legged definition. Failure does not (necessarily) mean the project is abandoned or terminated, or that it failed to meet any of these three axes.

We can consider this more broadly in business, beyond just the IT realm. The reality of any people-oriented process, a process relying on the variable skills of the contributors, is the likelihood of variation from an idealised or standardised expectation. Things don’t go as expected. We experience this all the time, with varying degrees of tolerance. If we use the same dimensions of success in these endeavours as we do in IT – time, cost, specification – then we would have to accept a much higher level of failure. In most cases, renovating your kitchen, having a dental procedure, and even having your accounts audited will result in an element of cost over-run, time over-run, or under-delivery. We can’t lock down people-based processes with such certainty as to avoid these variations. Rarely, though, do we deem these variations ‘failures.’

I believe a contributing cause of these variations to be the common, and essential tension, between perfection and good enough.

My career started in early 1987 when I set up a software company with a colleague. The mid-80s in New Zealand were an interesting time, with a bouyant sharemarket and PC technology starting to make its way into businesses. Our little company set out to commercialise software that had been used by a well known ‘market informer’ newsletter to track share trading fundamentals. With the New Zealand sharemarket hitting new highs weekly, enabling individual investors to do their own analysis with data we provided daily seemed to be a profitable niche. We spent months designing and developing and testing the product. The product’s working name was ‘Share Perfection.’ And perfection was my aim. We held off release until the system was ‘ready.’

If you know anything about the sharemarket in the late 80s, you might be able to guess what happened: we ran out of runway. Before I could perfect the platform, the sharemarket crashed (‘Black Monday’). Retail investors – our target market – fled. We didn’t have deep enough pockets to continue full time. After a couple of desperate months the company closed down. Trying to build a perfect solution was meaningless.

This lesson taught me a new aphorism: Version 1 is better than Version 0. Version 1 simply needed to be Good Enough. Good enough to meet the core requirements of a set of customers, giving us a market toehold – and more importantly – a revenue stream. And from there we could have iterated and improved. By extension, Version 2 is better than Version 1, but only because there was a Version 1.

Later in my career, as a manager, I have seen this perfectionist thinking from many team members, and it was often one of the key things holding them back. I also recognise it in businesses and business systems. It needs to stop.

Legitimising Good Enough

The first step to taking the good enough approach is to legitimise the step back from perfection. You need to give licence to your team members that good enough is acceptable, and then be consistent with that message.

There will be pushback. Some will argue you have lowered the bar. Well, you have. You have lowered the bar from impossible to pragmatic, and that’s the core of the argument: semantics. We are arguing over definitions. The ‘Good Enough’ bar is subjective, and won’t mean the same thing to different people. Good enough therefore requires definition and context within your firm.

This, based on more rigorous measurements, is the basis of the quality movement: define what is acceptable (‘in control’), reject what is not, improve the process to reduce rejection. Over time, the definition of acceptable may change, but this is done with the understanding of the business.

Accepting less than perfect is not the same as settling for mediocrity. Too often, a belief in perfection supresses the desire to experiment, and to try new methods: perfection favours the tried and true way.

The good enough mentality needs to be pervasive, from planning to execution to review. Your strategy will never be perfect. Your execution will never be perfect. Perfect is a polestar: you aim for perfection, but accept good enough.

Perfectionism is a rejection of reality, at the very least a difference in definitions. As a manager, being a perfectionist is destructive. Setting unrealistic expectations, even to teach a lesson, induces a fear of failure. It rewards avoidance and procrastination.

The idea of Good Enough also extends into business: operations, marketing, strategy, IT, HR. In this context, the idea can even be illustrated:

This is a single dimension model, with the Y-axis representing a linear measure of capabilities, such as ‘fit’ or ‘features.’ To work through this example, consider your decision to buy your current car. We can create three zones: inferior (below the GE line), superior (above the GE line), and Good Enough – those things perfectly on the line. I generally illustrate the GE line as a band to allow for the typical ambiguity of GE definition.

Now: think about your car. At the time you purchased it, your car would have sat on or above the Good Enough line. We reject those things we deem inferior (even though others mightn’t define the item in the same way).

From a strategic point of view, as the supplier, we should be aiming for our customer’s Good Enough line. Exceeding this line is giving away value, which you might choose to do for competitive reasons – although in most cases this over-delivery is demonstrative of a lack in understanding of the customer.

There is another name for this line: Meet the Market. This is the point at which you go from having an inferior offering – and therefore failing to meet the needs of customers (potential and actual) – to meeting the requirements of your market. In most cases, we understand the need to meet the needs of our market.

Once I developed my understanding of the Good Enough approach, I started to see it all over the place. I found it gave me a more practical approach to decision making and sensemaking in so many different aspects of business and life, from strategy and competitive dynamics, to choosing a car, making an acquisition, or choosing a new team member.

Because, in most cases, That’ll Do.