Someone at some time in the not so distant past (in the last 60 years is the not so distant past to me), someone said that you can make a good decision when you have 75 percent of the information you need.
Just 50 percent is probably not enough to make a sound, logical decision, but waiting for 99 percent, or heaven forbid, 100, is expensive and usually results in making no decision at all. The bottom line there is that 75 percent if ‘good enough.’
Unfortunately, a lot of people are never satisfied with ‘good enough.’ I once worked for a lady who could never get her paperwork done on time. She would write a reply to a business letter, then rewrite it, then rewrite it again, searching for that one hundred percent perfect phrase.
She and I often clashed because my focus was on getting the recipients the information they required even if my prose was a little terse. We never did come to agreement, despite the fact that she was always late and being criticized by the boss above us for it, and I was always on time and lauded for my responsiveness to our clients’ needs.
I worked for another individual, a man in this case (dithering is not gender specific) who was never satisfied with anything, unless it was what he decided was ‘perfect.’ The problem was, he never seemed to know what was perfect. Once, I wrote a report he’d asked for, and he suggested massive and major changes, not in the substantive content, but in the prose and style. I complied and resubmitted it.
A day later, it came back with even more suggested revisions, again not the content, but the style. This happened three more times, over a space of five days. Frustrated, but aware of this particular individual’s predilection, I saved each marked up copy.
Finally, as the deadline approached for submission of the report, I received his fifth change. As I read it, side by side with my original submission, I was thunderstruck. You’ve probably guessed what comes next, but I’ll tell you anyway. The fifth change resulted in my original report, verbatim. I mean, it was exact, down to the punctuation. I typed it up and put it in the mail before he could change his mind and make more changes, but that incident has stuck in my mind for over forty years.
I spent nearly a week writing and rewriting a report, seeking perfection for a boss who didn’t have a clue what the ‘perfection’ he sought looked like, only to end up back where I started. A total waste of valuable time and energy.
The lesson here is that ‘good enough,’ is quite often good enough. Or, as they used to say when I was in the army, ‘it’s good enough for government work.’ There’s an old saying that’s often attributed to the philosopher Voltaire, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good.’ What it means is that an insistence on perfection can often prevent implementation of good things that get the job done.
The Pareto principle holds that it takes 20 percent of the time to get 80 percent of a task done, while it takes 80 percent of the time to finish the last 20 percent, which, if left undone, doesn’t negatively affect the final outcome.
In other words, people, ‘good enough is good enough.’ | NWI
