Striving for Excellence, Not Perfection

Voltaire is credited with saying, “Perfection is the enemy of good enough”.

Perfection implies that no degree of error is acceptable, whereas good enough implies that what you have is usable for the purpose you require. While we should strive to be more than just good enough, perfection is an unreasonable goal. No matter how good your organisation is at what it does, you should never assume that its systems and processes can be perfect. To complicate the striving for perfection, multiple people rarely perceive perfection similarly. So, what is perfection to you is likely not perfection to someone else. Perfection could well be a myth!

Team members can and should strive for excellence (rather than perfection) as they create innovative solutions to business problems.  Although a “continuous improvement mindset” is good, there can be a temptation to attempt to achieve near-perfect outcomes at the expense of other vital elements, such as producing documentation and sticking to deadlines.

When your team is in the midst of their creative work, it is wise to allow them to continue unabated within pre-agreed timeframes. Purposeful delays in producing deliverables should only be accepted when a plan B is available or deliverables are very near completion to a level of excellence that stakeholders deem appropriate.

However, stakeholders must be deeply involved to genuinely produce excellence. I’ve experienced more than one instance where a technical team’s perceptions about excellence were substantially different from those of stakeholders who would utilize their deliverables. That realization is excruciating; you’ll want to avoid that at all costs.

Here are tips to avoid issues as you strive for excellence in project delivery.

• Utilize change control. Even when finding a way to over-deliver, if your product differs from what stakeholders expect, go through the change management process.
• Trying something new that doesn’t work isn’t a failure. (Unless you let the trying go on too long and miss project objectives.) Given that, you learn something from your attempts to make improvements. This allows you to be smarter when you try again or gives you the knowledge that what might have seemed like a good idea isn’t practical.

Small steps are best. Deploying tools or processes that create significant changes for stakeholders can be very challenging. Sometimes, it is wiser to make changes via a series of small steps so you allow stakeholders to adjust their processes and expectations.