Too much perfection kills progress

Shelter Chieza Change Management
When my daughter started taking lessons to swim competitively, her teacher called me and said she must stop swimming.
I bit my tongue and asked for an explanation. A thousand thoughts were already racing through my head.
My blood pressure was already shooting through the roof as I pondered why the teacher would suggest such a thing when I was paying an arm and a leg for my child to be taught competitive swimming.

She then told me the principle behind her suggestion, which I still hold to this day.

She said that teaching beginners requires special skills and psychology.

She said over-training can stifle or hinder progress, the progress of beginners just as much as over-engineering can create products too complex to use.

She added that during the training phase, there is a time to stop rehearsing, to step back a little and get over the nick to look for perfection.

She said that this was the case with my daughter.

She needed to reflect on her chosen path before committing to swimming.

Sometimes over-pushing and overemphasising will produce unwanted reactions. I related this to information technology systems.

There are products that cannot be released on to the market till they are perfect and flawless.

Research, experiments and pretesting are all done hand before the system is launched but the downside is that at times when the product is released onto the market, it would have lost its competitive advantage
In the psychology of teaching beginners, enthusiasm and motivation is usually high and progress is rapid and measurable.

However some beginners may lack confidence after several failed attempts to learn and may be easily discouraged.

Others may have dogmatic ideas about how they want to learn.

I have realised that sometimes perfection is the enemy of accomplishment.

A lot has to be learnt from jazz musicians. I once watched a documentary on how they perfect their music from the start.

It is said that music is a conversation, with experience comes competency and spontaneous reactions are borne.

Have you ever noticed that there are times when a musician is called onto the stage and they play with a band they have never practised with before and it just starts flowing?

That willingness to let go and let the sound do the talking is what people will appreciate.

In our push for a perfect product, we tend to over-engineer. It is almost like pasta that is over-cooked.

The rules for cooking pasta are that you must remove it from the stove when it is “Al-dente” , Italian for ‘‘to the teeth’’.

It refers to pasta that is cooked just long enough that it is neither crunchy nor too soft.

We need to balance grabbing opportunities as they present themselves and being prepared to utilise them.

We need to give people the space to take calculated risks, learn and apply.

This got me thinking, however, that letting go of perfection is a challenge because we have many cultural paradigms that reinforce the need to make it so.

We are so wrapped up in getting a perfect score, 100 percent on tests in school.

This is just one of the ways we instil a false sense of achievement equating perfection.

I have seen the desire for perfection get wrapped up into our egos and our sense of self-worth making it even more difficult for many to let go.

The swimming teacher was right after all, it’s important for leaders, innovators, teachers, to take a step back and evaluate their intentions.

Sometimes getting things just right makes the difference between life or death, but most of the time we take ourselves too seriously and will benefit greatly from letting go.

Till next week, may God richly bless you.