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You rarely hear anyone say, “Yeah, I love my boyfriend, he’s good enough.” Your colleagues don’t congratulate you when the boss says, “That presentation was good enough.” In fact, they’d probably offer their condolences.
Good Enough has become an insult. It’s a half-hearted acknowledgement that, well, you tried, but you weren’t good and you were barely enough. But maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe Good Enough is a lot better than we think it is.
Everything we do is measured against standards: personal, professional, and social. Often, standards set the threshold for viability. They determine what actually gets put out into the world and what gets held back. In other words, standards determine what’s good and what’s not.
Consider this: an eight-month-old starting to walk is awesome because most kids don’t take their first steps until at least nine months, if not a year, old. A thirty-something learning to walk though? Not so impressive. Our collective definitions of qualities like “awesome” and “impressive” are entirely relative.
Okay, here’s another example, one that may sound familiar. One of my best friends was working at a mid-sized company. She was once tasked with making the case for a new product that the company was interested in making. She got to work, conducting in-depth research and generating models to assemble proof that this was, in fact, a good idea.
Weeks turned into months, and months turned into more months. It became apparent that all her research pointed in an obvious direction, but somehow, company leadership always found ways to debate the data. “We need more information to make this decision,” was the story, but my friend began to realize that the decision-makers were afraid to put their necks on the line in case the product failed. And so her effort resulted in limbo, and all that hard work went into selling the idea within the organization, instead of making and selling the best product possible. Did the company avoid a failure? I don’t think so. Preventing a Good Enough idea from proving itself in the real world is a form of failure too.
There are many reasons why this paralysis – let’s call it The Fear of Good Enough – happens:
The first step in eliminating the paralysis is establishing, and communicating, a clear definition of what Good Enough really means within your organization. “But wait,” I hear you saying. “We’re SuperCompany X! Our brand is perfection! We operate at scale! We accept nothing less than the very best, from our product to our marketing to our customer service to the temperature of the coffee in our break room! Any new idea has to meet this standard, or we will take it out back and set it on fire!”
And to you I say, newsflash: in this complex and ever-changing world, perfect knowledge of any idea’s success is impossible. Perfection is a terrible measure of Good Enough.
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic here: organizations develop high expectations because they are good at what they do, and those expectations increase the more they create, build, and innovate. At the same time, scaling means failure carries greater risk, whether it’s a public relations snafu or loss of revenue. But what gets lost is the fact that growth isn’t possible without embracing Good Enough. Otherwise, momentum slows, the organization stagnates, and employee morale takes a nosedive. When ideas have to hurdle over endless internal obstacles, they tend to die of attrition. Of course, some ideas are better than others, but when the process is painful, nobody wins.