Voltaire: “The best is the enemy of the good.”
Whatever the origins of the phrase, you’ve heard it many times expressed in many similar ways: ‘Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good’. It represents the intersection between thought and action, investment and reward and has been a steadfast mantra to those seeking to remain relevant in a fast-moving market.
Coaches and transformation leads have worked with organisations for years to help them find a better balance between thinking and doing. Why spend 18 months shaping requirements when we can take an iterative and incremental approach to product development and learn about what we need much earlier from customer feedback? Why take an army of consultants to create a theoretical target operating model when we could take a principle led and experimental approach to organisation change that re-enforces the notion of continuous change? Organisations are increasingly rejecting the former in favour of the latter – we are looking for action and learning over theory. This is great news as conventional wisdom now accepts that this ‘perfection’ in organisational terms has always been nothing more than an expensive illusion.
However, we’re not home and clear quite yet. In fact, we are seeing a new enemy of the ‘good’ arising, much more subversive and just as damaging as perfection: Good enough.
Us: ‘Good enough is the enemy of the good’
What is ‘good enough’ anyway and why is it not enough? ‘Good enough’ has become doing the thing that will stop you from failing rather than doing the thing that will help you succeed. ‘Good enough’ is saying ‘it’s ok’ not ‘that’s awesome’. In fact, just because ‘good enough’ has the word ‘good’ in it, doesn’t actually mean it’s any good at all! What it really means is, ‘It’s a bit crap, but it will do…sort of’.
Over the years, we’ve seen the rise of the ‘good enough’ throughout organisations that are being pulled in very different directions by their constraints and good intentions. Challenges and false expectations of all kinds limit their ability to set the intent at excellence (not perfection!) at the beginning and then to find a compromise at good. As their intentions are lowered from the beginning, the overall result is to end up at ‘good enough’. Our experience of organisational transformation has taught us that ‘good enough’ manifests in many ways, but this phenomenon is most damaging when it occurs at the beginning of initiatives, where it becomes very difficult to recover – as they say, it’s all downhill from here!
So, how have we seen this manifest in reality? On area in which we see this very often is in Enterprise Transformation where ‘good’ is not effectively defined before the organisation becomes overwhelmed by a desire to scale. Change itself is ‘good enough’ resulting in a scaling of poorly established and loosely defined concepts and practices, which only leads to the scaling of mediocrity. Mediocracy becomes ‘good enough’ because it’s the scaling that was valued; the message around organisational excellence is lost, because excellence in this instance was not tangible. ‘Excellence’ or ‘good’ had not been firmly established before it was scaled.
Perhaps the most common example that we see of ‘good enough’ resulting in poor outcomes is at the beginning an initiative, be it products, projects, features etc… ‘good enough’ means ‘can we just start something?’ even when conditions are not sufficient to properly understand any significant scale of delivery. We regularly see an incomplete understanding of the customer and their needs, poorly described and incomplete user stories, little or no solution design, ineffective or non-existent estimation and a poor understanding of operational impact.
Now, you might say that truly agile teams don’t need these things to be successful as they will establish them on an as-needed basis. And we would agree with that. However, such teams are few and far between and tend to be associated with organisations at the pinnacle of agile product delivery. For the rest of us, these basic practices form the basis of learning that might eventually lead to getting to that level of delivery. Failing to do them inevitably results in mediocrity, waste, confusion and failure. This is a problem that has been solved in initiation definition for at least a decade and is best described in the great book ‘The Agile Samurai’ (Jonathan Rasmusson) yet we still see this issue time and time again. Accepting ‘it’s crap, but it will do’ as ‘good enough’ is at the heart of these failures.
While we agree that ‘Perfection is the enemy of the good’, unless you truly understand what good means in your context, ‘good enough’ is likely to mean ‘it’s crap, but it will do’ in your organisation’s vocabulary. If you are unsure about what ‘good enough’ means, perhaps your organisation should be striving towards excellence.
If you don’t know what excellent or even good looks like how do you know what’ good enough’ is? You might know how not to fail but do you know how to succeed? Our current focus is organisational transformation, and we are planning a series of upcoming articles around what good looks like.