"Perfect is the enemy of the good"
Having trained as an engineer, I have to admit that I
am susceptible to the engineer's credo: "If it ain't broke,
fix it!" An engineer never resists the temptation to tinker
with something that works until it ceases to function
entirely. CEOs of high-tech companies will tell you that
without strict deadlines, products would never get
developed. Why? Well, engineers are never completely
satisfied and want to continue to rework the design until
it is perfect. The trouble is, perfect is the enemy of the
good.
And it's a trouble not just confined to engineering
departments within technology companies, either. The
concept, unfortunately, seems universally applicable to
large organizations. While it's in part driven by the
desire for perfection, I think the dominant reason people
in large organizations keep reworking designs, ideas,
processes, procedures, memos and so on is fear of failure.
Bureaucracies typically do not reward success and certainly
do not value risk taking. Rather, they tend to penalize
failure and emphasize playing it safe.
Why does it take the FDA so long to approve drugs,
even for diseases with 100 percent mortality? Because a
single mistake by the FDA appears on the front page of
The New York Times, while rapid approval of
important drugs is only likely to be noted — if at
all — deep inside the pages of The Wall Street
Journal.
HopkinsOne is
a massive organizational undertaking to reinvent our
business processes. We need to engage the entire Hopkins
community in developing more efficient and effective ways
to administer our enterprise. One of the important aspects
of this endeavor will be engaging our employees in rapid
cycle process redesign. In other words, "try it, fix it"
and then "try it again, fix it again." Progress comes
through using multiple iterations, each one an improvement
on the last.
Contrast this to a methodology that uses elaborate and
time-consuming planning followed by a single
implementation. First of all, we will never reach
perfection, no matter how much planning we do. You will
always encounter the unexpected when you redesign
processes, regardless of how much planning you do. So
rather than shooting for a single rollout of a new process,
when we use rapid cycle change implementation, we get many
opportunities to fix things that don't work. And with short
cycle times, it turns out that the people who work on the
process redesign feel empowered and valued. Because we
expect that the initial implementations will have
imperfections, there is no penalty assigned to the group
when the process has "bugs."
In the late 1870s Thomas Edison announced he was going
to devise a safe, reliable, affordable electric alternative
to gaslights. Even though inventors had been trying to work
out the bugs in electric lights for 50 years, Edison's
reputation was such that a syndicate led by the
Vanderbilts, J.P. Morgan and others quickly advanced the
money to found the Edison Electric Light Co. Edison and his
team set to work, and soon found out why so many others had
failed to find the right way to make a durable electric
light. But they kept working. Reputedly, at one point the
inventor was asked how he could continue to try to invent
the light bulb when he had failed over 1,000 times. Edison
is said to have replied: "I have not failed 1,000 times. I
have successfully discovered 1,000 ways that do not work,
and I do not need to try them again."
So, if you are engaged in the Hopkins-One design and
implementation teams, develop a sense of impatience and
urgency, don't be afraid to fail and remember: Perfect is
the enemy of the good.
William R. Brody is president of The Johns Hopkins
University.
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