This post “Don’t share your best practices! Share the ones that are ‘Good Enough’” is now located at OpenGovBlog.Org.
Don’t share your best practices! Share the ones that are ‘Good Enough’.
April 9th, 2009 by Ken Fischer Leave a reply »
Advertisement
Absolutely agree. Reminds me of something Steven Sample (USC President) wrote in a book called The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. One of the ideas that stuck with me is that anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly. That’s not an exact quote, but the idea is that we shouldn’t let the quest for perfection stand in the way of doing what we know is right, even if we can’t execute perfectly.
Here’s the exact quote from the book (Love the search feature in Amazon!)
“When I was a junior in high school one of my teachers said to me, ‘Steve, you are by nature a perfectionist; you never know when to stop making a thing better. So here’s something for you to keep in mind: Anything worth doing at all is worth doing poorly. It may be worth more if it’s done well, but it’s worth something if it’s done poorly.’”
Does a practice need to be “best” or “100 done” to be shared? I say, “No way!” Anything worth doing is worth collaborating in the early stages, just as you’ve suggested.
I love this. One of my takeaways is less about sharing good practices-in-the-making than it is about collaboration in general, where you wrote, “if sharing final plans were enough, then there would be no need to collaborate.”
In working on a cross-agency team that had some communications breakdowns, a very wise facilitator said our rule of thumb should be that as soon as you realize that someone else is going to be involved in making a plan come to fruition, that’s the point at which you inform and engage that person. That’s probably not the point at which your plan is final….
That sense you describe of being personally (not just professionally) invested in something that you consider to be completely done is so often a block to any form of collaboration and growth. I’m constantly reminding myself that–brace yourself–I don’t have all the answers and other people have great ideas. Whoa.
@BarbChamberlain