Perfect or Good Enough?
One of the issues that a lot of my high potential leader clients find challenging is summed up in this item from the list of leadership behaviors in our Next Level 360 degree survey:
- Effectively differentiates between efforts that require perfection and those for which "good enough" is sufficient.
It's easy to understand why that one is a challenge to get right. As the oil rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shows, there are some things that absolutely have to be perfect. Good enough isn't in those cases.
Still, not everything that we as leaders or our team does has to be perfect. In fact, the urge to always have the optimal solution in every circumstance can almost ensure that we won't get perfection when we need it. There's simply too much to do to optimize everything. How do you know, though, when going for the "good enough" solution is the right way to go?
I've been talking with my clients about that question and here are some criteria we've come up on how to decide between going for the perfect solution or embracing the good enough solution:
- What's the cost/benefit ratio on going for perfect?
- What's the scale and potential impact of the issue?
- Is this a life or death situation?
- What additional resources would we need to spend to get from an 80% or 90% solution to a 100% solution?
- What would be the cost of failure?
- If we fail after implementing a "good enough" solution, how would we remediate the failure? Could we remediate it?
- What would a failure mean to our public image and relationships with key stakeholders?
- What's the impact on our time to market by going for a perfect solution? Could we learn some important lessons from a "fast failure?" Can we live with a fast failure?
I'm not qualified to comment on the risk management and decision making processes that BP and their contractors have used related to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Still, a lot of those criteria questions seem pretty relevant in that case. Likewise, they also seem relevant for a team that's building an iPhone app. Clearly, the stakes are different. With offshore oil exploration, you're looking for perfect solutions. With iPhone app development, you probably want to err on the side of good enough because the fast failure aspect drives innovation.
What do you think? What's been your experience with choosing between perfect and good enough? What criteria do you use to decide? What would you add to the list?
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ABOUT THIS BLOG
Executive coach Scott Eblin’s goal is to help you succeed at the next level of leadership. Throughout the week, he’ll offer his take on the leadership lessons in the news and his advice on your most pressing leadership questions. A former government executive, Scott is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is the author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success.
EPA is always chasing after the perfect at the expense of the good. This often results in costly and overcomplicated environmental protection schemes that don't work very well in the real world. When narrowly-focused ideologues drive the debate, as they do in the environmental field, it's hard to reach agreement on the optimum cost-benefit ratios that provide good, if not perfect, protection, while preserving scarce resources to, for example, feed the hungry, treat the sick and defend our nation.
Ron Posted Tuesday, May 4, 2010 11:41 AMIt would be wonderful if we could allocate resources toward how important the problem is. Unfortunately, that's not how our leaders view things. We have been told the "perfect is the minimum." We are actually expected to do better than perfect, to have less than zero errors. No bull, we actually had to spend a day's training on having less than zero errors. Completely unrealistic of course, but that's their expectation. How can you take anything seriously when they say things like that?
bmj Posted Tuesday, May 4, 2010 11:43 PMIn the past, I worked for an organization that demonstrated the old "paralysis by analysis". In an attempt to get documents perfect (or to avoid all possible risk), decisions that should have been possible in a few weeks took, literally, over a year. Your point about risk (what would happen if a less than perfect document went forward?) and about resources are spot on. If the organization wanted perfection, then THEY and we would have had to be staffed up enormously. But rather than doing that, they created a total bottleneck by trying to require perfection, yet not being staffed for it. Great article and question...may use it in future interviews!
Jennifer Posted Wednesday, May 5, 2010 8:02 AMOne more thing, perhaps another question to add to the list. Is there such a thing as perfect? Who decides what it is? In some things, of course, it is clear. But in much of what we do in our bureaucracy, there is no real standard of perfect. It is more a matter of judgment or personal preference, and the last reviewer is the one who defines what is perfect or acceptable, be that the person responsible, or GAO, or an auditor, or the public. Just another thing that, to my mind, makes reaching for perfect unrealistic for some things. You can never please all of the people...
Jennifer Posted Wednesday, May 5, 2010 11:15 AMJust because something was not operated at a "good enough" level, does not logically or reasonably lead to a conclusion that the requirement must be for "perfect" in that instance. It is even less useful, in my experience, to extend the expectation of "perfect" to classes of operations using such generalizations. It is valuable to differentiate goals (e.g. perfect as a driver of risk and gap assessment) from the tactical approaches that allow achievement of good enough for both specific activities and the integrated results.
Dave Posted Thursday, May 6, 2010 10:00 AMA checklist such as the one above is sort of -- if you don't mind the reference to another portion of your blog -- Pavlovian. It discourages individual thought and judgement, and it misses a critical aspect of good management...knowing your people. Every one of us exhibits a mix of perfectionism and pragmatism, but the ratios are all over the map. Use the checklist as one management tool in assigning responsibilities to the right people, rather than trying to mold personality traits to match the degree of precision you require. The person we would label as 'OCD' if he were in charge of the lunch room is the same person we would label as infallible if he were responsible for payroll.
JDV Posted Thursday, May 6, 2010 10:36 AMPerfection requires a perfect plan, and there is not always time for that. When I joined a law enforcement agency, I was taught that the important thing was to act, to make the decision, and that anything could be corrected later except a discharged weapon. If you're sending a man into space, get every detail right. If you're providing shelter for the homeless, just do it.
Ted Bean Posted Friday, May 14, 2010 1:37 PM