Incremental Improvements & Progress Over Perfection
Incremental Improvements
In order to improve, we must always
complete positive changes. Because of this, it's important to focus on incrementally improving, rather than focusing on huge changes that take large time blocks to complete. While we sometimes take on large projects that result in big changes (and hopefully improvements), making consistent incremental improvements is an easier way to effect big positive change over time.
A good analogy for this concept is a "Hail Mary" play in football. This is when one team is far from the endzone and time is running out, so they make a long pass. Teams don't make these plays often because they are highly unlikely to succeed. (They pray that it will be caught, and they've likely said a "Hail Mary" before the play.) Teams don't win by bombing Hail Marys often, though. A winning strategy is to make strategic small plays to work your way down the field with a few big exciting plays when the opportunity arises. (If only I could go back in time and coach my younger self in Tecmo Bowl.)
- Improvement doesn’t have to come only from big, sweeping changes. While it is sometimes necessary to tackle big problems using big projects, this is not always the case. Incremental improvement is an approach to process improvement in which you and your staff focus efforts on smaller solutions that slowly but surely move the business toward success.
- Incremental improvements typically have a low barrier to implementation, largely due to the fact that the ideas are coming from front line staff and often relate directly to their daily work.
- Asking people to change the work they do or add any perceived burdens to the workload is often met with strong pushback. In addition to a natural resistance to change of any kind, people are particularly sensitive about top-down changes that often don't actually improve anything.
- Incremental improvement draws upon the collective knowledge of your staff, allowing you to harness the collective power of your employees to make your business better.
Progress Over Perfection
We often focus too much on perfection when we can implement progress as a step towards perfection. A great observation is in academics: The student who scored 90% on a test earned the same grade as the student who scored 100%. In business, we often focus too much on perfection when we have a fantastic process or product already complete that is ready to ship. One could argue that the student who scored 100% on their test was less efficient than the student who scored 90%, just as one could argue that the businessman who ships a great/profitable product or service today is much more efficient than the businessman who ships a perfect product or service 3 months from now.
- Effective work is about moving toward the desired destination, and not necessarily about ensuring that nothing gets spilled or knocked over in the process. Mistakes will happen. Missteps will occur. It’s momentum that matters, and ensuring that time is not wasted obsessing over the little things that won’t end up moving the needle anyway.
- Great things take time to unfold. Set deadlines and stick to them. Nothing encourages perfection more than movable deadlines. As soon as you get in the habit of postponing, suddenly whatever it is you’re working on isn’t good enough.
- The truth is, tomorrow’s idea will always be better. Every day you’ll improve, and you’ll see what you can change, adjust and make better. So it’s not about waiting to get it perfect before you implement it, share it or release it; rather, it’s about getting a working version out the door and then refining over time.
- Especially in the world of entrepreneurship, you can’t expect your first at-bat to be a home run. Even the most seasoned entrepreneurs and business leaders know that when launching a new product or service, it’s going to take time to get it right.
Exceptions That Need Perfection
It's important to note that perfection (or close to it) is sometimes more important than progress. When writing a contract, it's very important to focus on details and aim for something close to perfection. While you can usually amend a contract later, it's much easier to get it right the first time. The same can be said for accounting, where 90% right is much closer to an "F" than an "A". While you can always fix accounting mistakes later, it's much easier to check your work and get it right the first time. Spelling & grammar are somewhat different examples that also ring true. If you send an email riddled with spelling & grammatical errors (and 10% would most certainly be considered "riddled"), then you have presented yourself as someone who doesn't care about details, and you have likely irreparably damaged your reputation in some way to the recipient.
In general, if the time it would take to correct a mistake is much greater than the time it takes to complete the task correctly initially, then you should strive for "close to perfect" on the first revision.
Examples of Incremental Improvement & Progress Over Perfection:
The best example of incremental improvement is our own wiki/doc set. Our 500+ page wiki started with a single MS Word doc that was written roughly 7 years ago. Over the years, that has expanded into an imperfect doc set that includes a large amount of information that we can all look to for guidance. We all know this doc set is imperfect, so we always try to improve it.
Another fantastic example of incremental improvement is our marketing program. We try new marketing ideas constantly. 95% of the time, these new marketing ideas fail, but we learn in the process. When an idea fails, we hopefully get some direction on what will work, so we improve that marketing piece and try again. This is how we've grown from a single agent with a $300/month marketing budget into a team with a relatively large budget that's ROI positive.
The best example of progress over perfection is preparing a property for market. You can always improve any listing and it's very difficult to decide where to stop. Generally, we look at how long it will take to make any improvement on a property and make the decision on that improvement based on how it will affect the property's list date. Paint, landscaping, and staging are almost always implemented because they take a relatively short amount of time to complete (generally one week.) New hardwood floors are almost always ROI positive, but not when you take into account the amount of time and headache that are required to complete this improvement.
Another excellent example of progress over perfection is our new SOI Marketing Campaign. We know this campaign is good, that our clients will appreciate it, and that it's likely to result in more referrals. We also know that it could be better. However, what we currently have is a massive improvement over no SOI Marketing Campaign, so it's important to build our databases, ship the new program/process, and adjust it over time with real-world feedback.