Lean Term: Better, Not Perfect (+Lean PDF)

The message is simple: perfection is elusive. In most cases, getting an improvement in place now pays off higher dividends than searching for that ideal solution that might, or might not, come later.

Improvement stalls when people shoot for perfection. Trying to take a project from ‘pretty good’ to ‘perfect’ wastes a lot of your time and energy—both of which are probably in short supply. It also likely takes you away from another problem that needs your attention. In most cases, the hours or days you could spend taking your current assignment from ‘good enough’ to ‘great’ don’t pay off as well as if you had used them on another pressing project—one that needs to go from ‘poor’ to ‘good enough.’

At home you probably practice this philosophy as well. Imagine you are painting your kitchen. Chances are, if you put in a reasonable effort you end up doing a pretty good job. After you finish painting, if you were to do a final inspection and take a really close look at those walls (especially the brightly colored ones) you would notice tiny areas that were missed. You would probably also see small blotches of paint on an adjacent wall where it leaked through the tape.

So, you have a choice when you are done painting. You can say that the paint coverage meets your expectations and that the kitchen now looks much better than it did before. Or, you can spend your time on the detail work. Working on the minutiae can easily turn a six-hour painting job into a twelve, or even twenty hour job.

Your weekends are precious and you probably have better things to do on a Saturday than spend it with a magnifying glass, a jar of paint, and a fine point artist’s paintbrush. Your choice all depends on whether you value your time off more than you want perfectly painted walls.

The decision you make is really at the heart of ‘better, not perfect’. It is about a concept called ‘opportunity cost.’ That simply means that the resources—time, money, space, etc.—that you use for this project could also be used for something else. If you only have $4 in your wallet and have to choose between putting gas in your car to get to work or buying a latte, what would you choose? If you spend the money on the latte, and lose your job as a result, isn’t the cost a little higher than $4?

By all means, if you have unlimited resources, shoot for perfection. For the rest of us though, we live in a world where demands outpace our ability to meet them. The point is that we all have to manage our resources. Every decision we make has a cost to it.

Make sure you take these points into consideration when you decide how much work to put into a project:

• Don’t confuse ‘better, not perfect’ with slacking off. You are not settling for ‘better’ in order to be done with a project. You are wrapping things up when you get a workable solution that frees you up to start on the next issue. Make sure you still deliver quality solutions. Just don’t get caught up in details that don’t pay off.
  
  

  Law of Diminishing Returns

• Watch out for diminishing returns. This is where it starts to take more and more effort to get increasingly smaller gains. Think of how you might go about trimming your grocery budget. You might be able to shave the first 10% with relatively little effort. Reducing the second 10% would be much harder. It would be extremely difficult to trim that 5^th or 6^th 10% chunk, right? As you get closer and closer to perfection, you face the same problem. It gets harder to make gains.
• Make sure projects meet their goals. ‘Better, not perfect’ doesn’t mean cutting corners. Rather, it means avoiding the extras when there are other, more pressing projects that need attention first.
• Perfection is a myth. There is always some way to improve a process, so it will never be perfect. And the closer you get to the ideal of perfection, the more effort it takes to make tiny, incremental improvements.

Don’t focus on how things look unless that is important. Prototype tools and fixtures might end up working well, but look bad. Make sure appearance matters before you spend time rebuilding.

You have to, of course, do enough to meet the standards that your boss sets. But if you want to exceed the standard, you have to balance the extra benefit with the time you will have to spend. You might find that your boss seems inconsistent in her response to your efforts. Sometimes she will praise you for the extra work, and other times she will seem to think you should not have spent so much time on the project. The reaction normally stems not from the project you are working on, but from whether your boss had something else she wanted you to do.

Nothing stalls your employee’s drive for continuous improvement faster than criticism about the progress they made. Many times, your teams will be trying to squeeze improvements in wherever they can. Don’t expect perfection from them. Expect that they make good use of their time and that use their resources wisely. That means you should lead with specific guidance (if you want specific outcomes), clear expectations, and proper training to make improvements.

• ‘Good enough’ is not bad. It means ‘meets the standard.’
• Everything you do takes away from something else. Is the extra benefit worth that cost?
• Leaders and employees must be on the same page regarding when a project is ‘better.’

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