“How much unreliability can we get away with?“
Seems like a strange question for a business leader to ask, doesn’t it? And yet, every single part of a business relies on this question. Providing the level of service our customers demand while keeping costs under control and risks managed is the ultimate goal of a profitable business. Asking about unreliability is a huge part of this equation.
Still, the temptation to think of this as a “lazy” question is real. We’re taught from an early age to strive for perfection. We want it all: quality, efficiency, performance, speed. Despite the allure, “having it all” is a mirage—perhaps even a lie.
Excellence means doing better than expected. It means doing so consistently over many repetitions.
Even if you have a small team – maybe one person delivering a service to a few customers – striving for perfection is overkill. If you have very few “moving parts,” mistakes happen: you’ll be late to a meeting, forget a customer’s name, or drop the ball in some other way. Of course, you can’t do this all the time or you’ll get a reputation for being too unreliable. But many of those everyday mistakes will be acceptable to your customers. And in most cases, your response after a screw-up matters more than your mistake.
Even with unlimited resources, we can’t attain perfection. How are we expected to reach it on a budget? If we set the goal to put a human on Mars and we’re given nation-state levels of resources to put towards safety, redundancy, testing, contingency, and overall reliability what happens then? While many missions will succeed, some will, sadly, end in failure.
Perfection is not only elusive: it’s unattainable, impractical, and too lofty an ideal to discuss in an abstract sense. If NASA can’t do it, why would you expect your company to be able to?
So if striving for perfection is quixotic, what then? Should we avoid lofty goals? That sounds equally ludicrous!
The ideal situation is to have a reasonable goal – one that’s slightly out of reach. Let’s call it “excellence” (a term that is a bit easier to define than perfection but not nearly as difficult to achieve).
Excellence means doing better than expected. It means doing so consistently over many repetitions. It also means improving and handling unexpected situations with ease. Excellence is achieving results in a way that goes far beyond chance or casual management.
One example of excellence is the Michelin star reviews we often associate with high-end restaurants like The French Laundry. The rating system starts with quality and ends with consistency of experience from one visit to the next. As with Michelin stars, we should strive to consistently deliver the “core product”.
It’s hard, sure. But doing this “at scale” is even harder. Today, this is all part of our software systems that support our business. And providing excellent service in a way that creates a competitive moat (meaning it is impossible to replicate by competitors or newcomers) is the bar to get over here. While excellence—consistently creating a premium experience—is an incredibly high bar and one that may be expensive to deliver, it is an infinitely lower bar than perfection.
Business has gone digital and now we need to address excellence in our customer facing software systems. Achieving excellence cannot be done by simple choice or determination. Excellence must be designed. There are six critical design principles to abide by to live on the edge of excellence:
Much like striving for perfection, you can’t just exist on the edge of excellence without making constant adjustments. Instead, you will cycle back and forth between expensive over-delivery and slightly under-delivering. So set your sights on maintaining a slightly-better-than-excellent service and design your system to sit in that sweet spot just out of sight.
As you can see, perfection is almost impossible to discuss, much less design or implement. As long as you believe your company – even theoretically – can deliver a perfect service, the longer you’ll be in denial. Instead, embrace failure as a reality of the universe you cannot escape and build a system to handle the risks of failure. Design your business to live on the edge of excellence, consistently servicing beyond expectations, even by a little.
If you want to learn more about how SLOs and Error Budgets can help your organization achieve consistent levels of excellence at a reasonable cost, let’s talk.
Follow @nobl9 on twitter!
Image Credit: Louis Hansel on Unsplash