is striving for perfection a waste of time?
Trying to achieve perfection in any endeavour is a bit like looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The closer you think you are, the further away it gets.
A friend of mine recently suggested that I read Skunk Works, by Ben Rich. The Skunk Works was an offshoot of the giant Lockheed Martin aircraft corporation (it’s now been re-branded as Advanced Development Programs). The original Skunk Works team made up their own rules, did things their own way, and fought tooth-and-nail to keep their projects small, innovative and profitable. The secret aircraft they produced (including the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk, and the U-2 Dragon Lady that Top Gear's James May recently scored a ride in) have changed the face of military aviation.
In the book, Rich talks about the dangers associated with striving for perfection. This seemed counter-intuitive to me: shouldn't combat aircraft be perfect? Not according to the author:
"Having today's high-speed computers would have accelerated the design process and simplified much of our testing, but perfection was seldom a Skunk Works goal. If we were off in our calculations by a pound or a degree, it didn’t particularly concern us. We aimed to achieve a Chevrolet's functional reliability rather than a Mercedes's supposed perfection. 80 percent efficiency would get the job done, so why strain resources and bust deadlines to achieve that extra 20 percent, which would cost as much as 50 percent more in overtime and delays and have little real impact on the overall performance of the aircraft itself?
"As it happened, we achieved 70 percent efficiency [on the Blackbird project] within the first half year of our work, but to tweak it above that to our target of 80 percent took an additional fourteen months."
Just think about that for a moment. Six months to reach 70% efficiency, and an extra fourteen months to improve everything by 10%. Now we are talking about an aircraft here and not a book or a presentation or a blog post but I’d wager that the ratio remains the same.
Later in the book, Rich remarks: "We cannot enjoy total product perfection and really don't need it. The only areas where the final result must be 100 percent are safety, quality and security. That final 10 percent striving towards maximum perfection costs 40 percent of the total expenditure on most projects."
Before I read Rich's book I always believed that anything less than perfection was unacceptable. But if I really am investing four out of every 10 hours just tweaking my work to make tiny changes then it might be time for a re-assessment. Rich's observations have got me seriously thinking about which parts of a project are worth spending that amount of time on. And which aren't.
In the book, Rich talks about the dangers associated with striving for perfection. This seemed counter-intuitive to me: shouldn't combat aircraft be perfect? Not according to the author:
"Having today's high-speed computers would have accelerated the design process and simplified much of our testing, but perfection was seldom a Skunk Works goal. If we were off in our calculations by a pound or a degree, it didn’t particularly concern us. We aimed to achieve a Chevrolet's functional reliability rather than a Mercedes's supposed perfection. 80 percent efficiency would get the job done, so why strain resources and bust deadlines to achieve that extra 20 percent, which would cost as much as 50 percent more in overtime and delays and have little real impact on the overall performance of the aircraft itself?
"As it happened, we achieved 70 percent efficiency [on the Blackbird project] within the first half year of our work, but to tweak it above that to our target of 80 percent took an additional fourteen months."
Just think about that for a moment. Six months to reach 70% efficiency, and an extra fourteen months to improve everything by 10%. Now we are talking about an aircraft here and not a book or a presentation or a blog post but I’d wager that the ratio remains the same.
Later in the book, Rich remarks: "We cannot enjoy total product perfection and really don't need it. The only areas where the final result must be 100 percent are safety, quality and security. That final 10 percent striving towards maximum perfection costs 40 percent of the total expenditure on most projects."
Before I read Rich's book I always believed that anything less than perfection was unacceptable. But if I really am investing four out of every 10 hours just tweaking my work to make tiny changes then it might be time for a re-assessment. Rich's observations have got me seriously thinking about which parts of a project are worth spending that amount of time on. And which aren't.