Perfection: the enemy of progress.
“I’m a perfectionist”. This is something that people often list as a weakness because they secretly see it as a strength. It’s a way of signalling that you’re obsessive about high standards although you know that can be hard for those less committed people around you; it’s something that plays well in job interviews (confession: I’ve used that line in the past).
And who wouldn’t want perfect? Perfect is, by definition, flawless, the highest quality, the best. Everyone wants that right? Perfection is the pinnacle of quality. Anything less would be inferior.
The truth is, being a consistent perfectionist actually is a big weakness. Although you might produce high-quality work, you’re almost certainly slowing down the process, constraining output and wasting effort.
The cult of perfect
I have to hold my hands up. I’m guilty of demanding perfection in things like presentations and emails because I’m very conscious of messaging, language and aesthetics. It’s arguable whether this level of quality is always necessary and people who have worked with me can attest to how infuriating it can be to have me tweaking language and changing diagrams. Is it always wrong? No. Is it sometimes wrong? Yes.
Modern organisations often demand perfection (or at least high quality) from individuals in a broad range of areas rather than a few. This might seem like a great way to build an organisation of highly skilled generalists but it’s the opposite — generalists are good in a broad range of areas but rarely excellent at any. The striving for perfection across the board seems like a cultural trait worth cultivating, even though it’s probably an unrealistic standard and can dilute focus. This also applies at organisational level — Jack Welch knew this when he exited General Electric from any category where they weren’t leaders or in second place.
More recently, the era of mass startups has been fuelled in part by lower barriers to entry and the development of processes and thinking about how to have laser focus on what really matters. Yet the MVP concept popularised by Lean Startup, is now very well-known but rarely properly adopted, particularly in larger organisations. Try turning in a few hand-drawn diagrams or bullet points to summarise an idea to your boss and imagine what the response would be. Part of this is due to the perception of quality — if it’s presented in a nice slide, we tend to think the content is better regardless of whether that’s true.
Another part is the logistics of how decisions are made in large organisations. Managers often want to receive and share things by email, and once things are shared electronically, you lose control of who’s seeing it — so a picture of your Post-It note doodle for a new product probably isn’t going to cut the mustard if it lands in the inbox of the COO.
Perfection, high-quality and good enough
The counter argument to perfection is quite simple. Sometimes you need things to be perfect or as good as they can be. Sometimes you need things to be ‘high-quality’ — not perfect but very good. And sometimes you need things to just be ‘good enough’ — the minimum standard required to allow you to progress.
What most organisations (and by implication people) overlook is the ‘good enough’ category. Good enough seems like a compromise, an acceptance of lower standards. It can even lead to a fear that it encourages a culture of sloppiness and shortcuts. If you allow a few things to be just good enough, who knows where you’ll end up in terms of quality across your business?
Why perfection vs. good enough matters
Science around decision making shows that our daily capacity to make decisions degrades in relation to volume. ‘Decision fatigue’ occurs after a certain point, so the more decisions we make in a day, the worse they tend to be. It’s been much lampooned but this is why Steve Jobs always wore the same black turtle-neck sweater and jeans, and Mark Zuckerberg wears the same grey t-shirt every day — it’s one less decision to make. Barack Obama had the same approach to the suits he wore and the meals he ate whilst in office.
Like decision-making, our capacity to perfect things is also finite. If we try to perfect everything we do in a day, we’ll get less done because two critical things are finite in every environment: time and resources. In practice, this means we need to constantly triage what needs to be perfect, what needs to be high quality and what needs to be good enough.
It’s particularly important in high growth and high change environments where progress in the form of testing and iteration are critical for learning. It’s even more important at the individual level where aiming for perfection from the start will stop us from ever launching that venture idea, writing that novel, starting that side hustle, painting that picture — or even drafting that LinkedIn article you keep meaning to write. Aiming for perfect can stop us ever getting started and slow down how quickly we finish.
Is perfection always bad?
In some fields, and activities, perfection is appropriate and essential. Implementing regulatory standards in a bank for instance, is not something we want to be slapdash about; it could have catastrophic consequences if done with a ‘good enough’ approach. Likewise, if I’m having heart surgery I want to have a surgeon who’s committed to excellence rather than ‘good enough’.
But in both these cases, once we break down the top-level goal into activities, perfection isn’t necessarily needed in every area. If I’ve hired a team of regulatory consultants, I want to feel that they’ve pored over every detail of the regulations to create detailed requirements for how my organisation should respond because that’s mission-critical. But should I care if their slides don’t look nice or they’re not very skilled at communications planning? If I want to perfect those things, I can augment the team with additional resource rather than pay expensive regulatory experts to do so.
And I want my heart surgeon to be completely rigorous about pre-op hygiene procedures and attention to detail when she’s working on my clogged arteries. But should I care if her bedside manner is a little blunt or cold? That’s a role to be perfected by the post-op ward staff, it’s not a good use of time to ask her to be great at that too. This is why we have multi-disciplinary teams.
“Do you know what’s better than perfect? Done. Done is better than perfect.”
James Victore
How to get past perfect
Whether you’re a leader or junior member of an organisation, the only place this change can start is you. That change isn’t a commitment to lower quality, it’s the cultivation of that skill of triaging and deciding where resources should be best spent whether that’s businesses, projects, your teams focus or your own workload.
There some simple questions that can help with this, for every single thing that competes for time and resource:
- Who is it for and will they care if it’s not perfect? If you’re just sharing some initial rough ideas with a colleague, do they need to be in a slide or can they be bullet points or scribbles?
- Where are the standards most important: where should you apply your limited resources? If the plan for this year is to close three new clients, you probably need ten times that many so perfecting your sales funnel and focussing resources on the blockages is probably a good place to start.
- Is this a process task or an output task? Is this something that just gets the product to the next stage or is it the delivery of the final output to the client?
- What’s most important right now: content or presentation? If you only have two business analysts available, get them to focus on producing what they’re best at (analysis and thought-based content) rather than polishing outputs.
- Is the incremental increase in quality worth the delay in delivery? If you spend an extra day on increasing the quality of those slides, is that worth the delay to delivery and ‘frustration overhead’ within your team? Is there something else of higher-value you could be focussing on?
The biggest challenge here is in applying real rigour and honesty in asking yourself these questions. It can feel unthinkable to let something leave your desk when it’s not perfect but the only way to get past this is to keep asking those questions. Eventually, the practice becomes second nature behaviour.
The short version of this article
Perfection is like a currency. We have a limited supply of it so we need to choose where and when to spend it. By challenging perfection, you’re not choosing to reduce quality, you’re balancing quality, time and resources and making a judgement in what’s needed to progress.
