Perfection IS the enemy of good.
“Perfection is the enemy of good”, along with numerous iterations, is one of those expressions which you understand at first glance, then you don’t, and then finally you do.
It revolves around the belief that sometimes good is good enough if that means you make progress - as opposed to waiting until something is perfect and missing the opportunity altogether.
It’s both a helpful and risky philosophy, and it’s important that ‘good’ is properly defined. This is NOT a license to compromise or to fail to meet the expectations of the customer. It IS about setting quality and feature benchmarks and then moving on once they have been achieved. The underlying drive for ‘better and better’ can continue in the background (indeed it MUST) but it cannot get in the way of momentum.
Creating something new also cannot be a one-sided operation, sooner or later (again sooner is better) the customer needs to interact and feedback to allow you to continue to enhance and troubleshoot or pivot. When mobile phone companies launch a new device they will have eliminated the bulk of the errors but there will be unknown bugs that would take months to identify and remedy in the lab but mere days when the paying customer starts to use those devices in a million different ways. The trick is to make sure anything that is a ‘show stopper’ stops the show before commercial activation. (It will be interesting to see what the various inquiries into Boeing and the 737 MAX show in terms of that perfection / good balance).
Of course often ‘perfection’ is used as a cover for lack of confidence. The pursuit of ‘one more thing’ or adding to the proposition is a way of avoiding a market launch - that suggests one of two things, an inherent lack of faith in the product (never a good thing) or a lack of leadership confidence (an even worse thing).
And of course it doesn’t just hold true to business, with the eyes of the world on the United Kingdom at the moment you can see the architects of Brexit jeopardise their objective because the Government’s proposal isn’t quite right. Their desired outcome stands to be delayed or stopped altogether.
So as the working week draws to a close it’s worth reflecting what you can push over the line today and set hard deadlines for next week. Get it out there, launch, publish, circulate, sell - perfection really is your enemy.
About the Author
The author is a brand consultant and founder of Mission Critical, a high focused and curated weekly briefing for time poor and information hungry decision makers.
