The drive for perfection
This is supposed to be a very flammable article so please light the fire. I attended two talks by Linda Rising one at a Bay Area Agile Leadership meeting, the other at QCon. That added to some other readings fueled the thoughts in that post.
I believe that all humans are naturally driven to perfection. It is the way the human brain works, using pattern and simplifications to accelerate reasoning. When people imagine something it is always perfect. At least initially. Or ideal. It is really unfortunate that many of us realized very early that real things are not perfect. Some may argue that this is the source of the religious fact but I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher.
Working with people, knowing that they are not driving for perfection proves beyond any doubt that they are not motivated and committed. I am not saying it is wrong, I think at some point everybody will stop believing and will try to find something different in which to project their drive.
Now, in many agile talks you hear people saying that one of the founding principles of agility is to abandon the idea that you can make a perfect product in favor of a reasonably good target. This however is only a half truth. It is true that you need to realize that the finished product will be the results of trades off, compromises and misunderstanding because that influences how you are doing things. On the other hand, Kaizen, continuous improvement of the process and the product are all signs of the drive for perfection. The proof ? No one gives the termination condition of these iterations. The termination will always be arbitrary. In other words, it is almost impossible to give a definition of good enough until you see it.
I would further contend that for each item of work, a motivated individual will always do as good as he can. Never good enough.
What are the implications of this for agility ? One is that I think it explains why there is not strong competition among agile team members. To compete you want to do things better than the other team members. If you are trying to do things perfectly you will ask all the help you can. Is this what keeps agile teams motivated or is it a result of the motivation ? I think it is a self-sustaining feedback loop (or something like that). Command and control typically does not achieve that because it is much harder to keep people motivated in that kind of environment which means that sooner rather than later workers will shift their perfectionist mind to other subjects.
I will finish this article with a saying ‘Better is the enemy of good’ which essentially means that you never achieve good if you are aiming for better. I would add that to achieve good you have to aim for perfect.
