Practice Makes Perfect

Hint: click on the cartoon to zoom in

Reflection: People who spend all their time debating about perfection, without any action, achieve nothing.

"A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault." - John Henry Newman

Comments

[Steve G]

So many people don't dare to fail ... it's much easier to postpone a difficult decision by debating it forever. This is like the Nike slogan, Just Do It. good one.

[Anton]

this cartoon is like your reflection Games inDecisions maker play... One of the games was something like this: Keep talking about an item hoping the time will pass and it will go away.

As one friend says :The best part of learnign is doing.

[Tan]

Agreed – I am always the believer for this!

Btw, did you draw all these cartoons – not bad 

[n]

This cartoon could be a description of the Agile programming approach that an 8 year old would understand

[Avi]

Ridiculous! This cartoon seems to be implying that red team reached perfection through trial, error and learning.

It's implying that somehow, you cannot reach perfection by carefully planning and analyzing all possible options in detail with all possible stakeholders in conference rooms, using elaborate planning documents and elegant theories.

Pff! That goes against everything I've ever been taught. What's more, in a corporate environment, why would I stick my neck out and try something that could fail?

[phtrivier]

Real life (bad) corporate scenario :

Request :

You must make 20 perfect pot. We need them yesterday. And the marketing guys say you should not have handles, cause theiy look 'too 90's, you know ?".

Response :

Kindergarteners techies watch pokemons (or read slashdot) all day. They make a few half-decent prototype cups using some cool technology.

Net-effect :

Not much. No one really needed those cups anyway.

[Bob]

Real life: "Blue team, your pot isn't perfect but it's pretty good. And red team, you've created 20 misshapen lumps of clay but the indentatioon on the top is sufficiently pot-like that they qualify."

It doesn't matter if you make 20 billion pots or debate until you make one perfect pot, if you don't actually want to achieve perfection then practise will, at best, make consistent and not make perfect.

And besides, I thought the agile people said that "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and therefore attempting perfection is the wrong thing to do. Or maybe management by proverb is a bad idea.