Rehabilitating Perfection
It is, after all, somewhat paradoxical that perfection has become a dirty word. Don’t abandon it, but strive toward it through continuous improvement.
Perfection: A Dirty Word?
These days, perfection isn’t in vogue: running out of reasons to turn down that job offer? Just say you’re a perfectionist!
Joking aside, we all have that image of the person who gets lost in unnecessary details and misses the big picture. An extreme concern for a job well done can, of course, run counter to the priorities dictated by competition and a company’s pressing need to turn a profit. Effectiveness, efficiency, and pragmatism are, quite rightly, core values in business.
But admit it: the fact that perfection has become a dirty word is, after all, a paradox. Before it was seen as an excess, perfection was indeed a virtue. How can we resolve this paradox?
An ideal to strive for
Perhaps we should view perfection as an asymptote: 1-1/x. As x approaches infinity, we get ever closer to 1 without ever actually reaching that value. In other words, perfection is not of this world; perhaps perfection does not need to be achieved, but that does not prevent us from striving toward it.
Perfection, then, is an ideal, an ambition that guides us, a value that spurs us on and makes us better. We can, and indeed must, strive to approach it, because if we abandon the idea of perfection, we abandon the very idea of improvement. If we don’t strive to do very well, we don’t strive to do better, and we no longer strive to do well at all.
Continuous improvement as the lever
Continuous improvement is, of course, what helps us the most: I won’t go over the basics of compound interest again. It’s a driving force, a constant quest, almost a game: how can I improve things even further? Every improvement opens the door to new improvements, often ones we never even suspected.
But continuous improvement also means celebrating successes as they happen, day after day. Focusing solely on the goal, perfection, is a surefire way to never be satisfied. Recognizing progress, on the other hand, is a surefire way to experience simple, often recurring joy.
In other words, while perfection is a fantasy, continuous improvement is the most concrete thing there is. It rightfully holds a prominent place in Agile, through the retrospective.
Let’s rehabilitate… ambition?
Contrary to what the title of this article suggests, it may not be perfection that needs to be rehabilitated (that would only lead to misery and tyranny), but ambition. Together, let’s rehabilitate ambition. Let’s aim higher; let’s dare to raise the bar. The Software Craftsmanship Manifesto, in fact, opens with these words: “As aspiring Software Craftsmen, we are raising the bar of professional software development…”
This ambition is a value, and a highly divisive one at that. If you don’t share it with the person you’re hiring, you’re unlikely to see eye to eye.