The Science of Good Enough
The Power of Systems Engineering
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s topic is Part Ten in the Keys to Innovation series, continuing to explore how to unlock your capability both personally and professionally. The Science of Good Enough helps to put aside the fear of imperfection, bracket the outcome against continuous maturation, and reduce the overall effort of success.
When I started my Master’s Degree in Systems Engineering, the first thing the professors said was that this discipline was “The Science of Good Enough.”
On the one hand, that sounds uninspiring, as we love to be exceptionally confident in the details.
On the other hand, it’s perfectly reasonable and the most intelligent path forward because we suck at actually getting the details right.
The thing is, regardless of how you feel, it’s absolutely true. The 80% solution today is significantly more useful than the 100% solution that never gets out. This is true for engineers, writers, and everyone else. You just have to start moving and learn to adapt along the way.
Case in point: when I started my Systems Engineering program, I was told to kiss my family goodbye for the next three years, as every extra moment would be dedicated to the class. Given that my youngest was 2 months old and my other two were toddlers, that wasn’t going to work out for me. So I had to figure out how to reduce that load.
The trick was easy, I embraced ‘good enough’ and the number of hours I spent on my school work was roughly 30% less than my closest peers and upwards of 50-75% less than the hardest workers. As a result, I was not only able to spend time with my family but also manage to complete building our house, an endeavor in which I had taken on a sizeable portion of the finishing work.
But what about my grades?
I graduated with Honors. Straight A’s. Top of the class. (Which I’d never done before)
I wasn’t sacrificing my quality to cut back on the time. I ensured I understood the expectations, started the work early, got feedback from my professors, and challenged my teammates not to overthink things. I was emulating lazy leadership, and it was what my family and everyone else needed.
For example, in one class, we had a team member who constantly wanted to add just a bit more. More complexity, more polish, more features, more… It was easy for him to suggest it because the weight of execution was spread amongst the rest of the team. But when I finally put my foot down and said, “Go for it, we won’t stop you, but we aren’t going to help.” Suddenly, the ‘good idea’ became too much work for him, and he stopped demanding it. We still got an A on the project.
When we hit our capstone class, this was the crucible that everyone really feared, as it generally consumed the teams for a full 20 weeks. I sat at the table of our first team meeting and laid out the project expectations and grading rubric. I told them that this effort’s goal should be ‘good enough.’ I explained that we needed to take the pressure off the team, and how Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast helps maintain our sanity.
The team agreed and held tightly to that and by the time we finished, with our A in hand, and talked to the other teams, we found that, by total hours, we were 30% fewer than the next group and 50% fewer than the other two and our work wasn’t any less quality, we just stuck a pin it it when we hit good enough and moved forward. Let’s flip that another way. Two teams put in twice as much effort with zero additional outcome. To be fair, their solutions were more complex, but that wasn’t valuable.
Finding Balance
There’s a balance here, though, as I’m also constantly pushing back on teams that want to Fail Early, Fail Often, or any other Silicon Valley mantra. I hate the idea of multiple course corrections and no voyage planning. “Not my circus, not my monkeys” doesn’t fly for me either. I’m frequently pulling proofs of concept out of the weeds to ensure they’re successful, as they lost focus trying to prove it’s good enough that they're forcing it to work on such a simplified problem as to be irrelevant.
That’s because “The Science of Good Enough” needs to be paired with two other mantras I learned from my core discipline of Operations Research:
“Answering the ‘Why’ before the ‘What’ or ‘How.’”
“The Science of Better.”
These two ideas provide a nice bracket because ‘good enough’ only works when coupled with a clear ‘why’ and a method for improvement. These provide the goal-line from which you can measure both ‘good’ and ‘enough.’ That’s why the grading rubric and project instructions were so important in the Systems Engineering course.
Further, saying ‘good enough’ didn’t mean we were done because Operations Research, as “The Science of Better,” is constantly improving processes.1 This adds an iterative loop where you start with the core idea, get it good enough, and then move forward. However, when you find an issue, you can cycle back and make incremental improvements because you keep yourself loosely coupled to your idea and are willing to adapt. This is a core element of Agile program management as well.
Now, add in a little speed, and you’ve got the major elements of F.I.R.E. - Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, Elegant. For the project, the expense was our personal time, and the others were the means by which we bound the effort. Because we tried to keep it inexpensive in our time, we focused on rapid, iterative, yet restrained execution that provided a usable and elegant design, a feature our professors regularly complimented the team on over our peers.
In Application
I used an example from my education to illustrate “The Science of Good Enough” because it immediately demonstrates its power. However, if you click through the rest of the Keys to Innovation, you’ll find that pattern emerges over and over throughout most of my career. It’s baked into everything from Lazy Leadership to the idea that Polymathy doesn’t require exceptional expertise to add value.
And it goes deeper: even among writers, too many are terrified to publish something imperfect and so never publish at all. The consequence is that their good idea never matures into a great idea through refinement and exposure. The same is true in every single domain and discipline. Simply put, the Science of Good Enough is a philosophy that can be applied anywhere when bound with answering the Why and ensuring continuous improvement.
You’re also in good company if you give up the demands of perfection:
Voltaire: “The perfect is the enemy of the good” (or “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”).
Salvador Dalí: “Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it”.
Confucius: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
So find that balance between the “Science of Good Enough,” “Answering the Why before the What and How,” and the continuous iteration of “The Science of Better.” In doing so, you’ll unlock new innovation while maintaining momentum and remaining agile in your execution. It’s not unbound innovation, it’s “Good Enough.”
When are times when good enough has worked out better than perfect for you? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!
Also, check out the Keys to Innovation for other great topics.
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Resilient Mental State Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
If you want to know more about Operations Research, check out this essay on how OR birthed Lean Six Sigma, Industrial Engineering, and even Data Science.
Well said. Perhaps the most powerful advice you have given. It is a simple idea that requires discipline which makes it hard to accomplish. Focus on the “why” is key to the required discipline. I am happy to see your OR roots run deep.
80% is better than 100%… really interesting. If most of us know that done is better than perfect then why are there so many perfectionist? And achievers who always move the finish line father out?