I heard this idea at a coaching conference a year or so ago (thus my vague attribution – I don’t actually remember who said it), in a talk about powerful questions.
Coaches spend most of their time listening and understanding, and use questions to help spark insight.
What do you think happens when a coach sits and waits for the perfect question, the perfect phrasing? Nothing. The moment passes. The coach loses connection with the person or team, because she’s stopped listening. Coaches have to aim for good questions, not great ones, because in shooting for great, we miss and don’t do anything.
Has this happened to you?
It happened to a team I observed a few weeks ago. They’re a software development team planning the next release of one module of a system. What they’re building is quite different from what they’ve built before – it’s challenging to figure out.
Aaaaand… they got stuck.
They got stuck on figuring out the perfect way to break up one small part that they actually understand pretty well. Then they got stuck in a semantic argument about the meaning of words about that same piece of work. These are smart people, and they stalled for an entire day on one thing… one thing that will probably change in another day or so.
They made so much more progress & such better decisions – they got much closer to perfect – once they let go of perfection and decided to be happy with “good enough” instead.
I think we all start to believe that there’s one perfectly right answer to every question, one perfect question for every scenario, and we can stall just like this when we try to get our work exactly right.
You’ve probably heard the Voltaire quote “The perfect is the enemy of the good”. Same idea. Fixate on doing a thing just right, more often then not, and you won’t get it done at all.
This doesn’t mean that all pursuit of awesomeness is useless! Ironically, the best way to let awesome emerge is to get out of the way. We aim for good to make room for amazing.
Today’s photo was taken in high wind, crouched in front of an aged cannon, squinting against the sunlight with one eye watching out for airport security types and my probably-illegally-parked car. I think it’s good enough.