Rounding up
I’ve noticed that people almost always round up. Maybe you’ve seen it too.
The almost-candidate becomes close enough. The design is fine if you don’t look too close. The code looks good to me. And so you call it done and move on. That’s rounding up.
It’s like there’s a kind of gravity that pulls things toward the easy option. It’s always there, and it’s hard to resist.
The pull gets stronger after a long stretch of bushwhacking. And pressure to get something over the line makes rounding up more appealing.
So you do it. It’s self-soothing. A quick hit that feels like progress. And now you’ve done it once, it’s easier to do it again.
But it’ll cost you later. The next hire gets compared to the new lower bar. The next promotion does too. It’s true for designs and code and emails, maybe everything. Over time standards get squashed under the weight of all that rounding up, and “close enough” sticks around.
And it’s not only your standards that get hurt. I’ve seen teams drop the bar to move faster, and it’s always the junior people who suffer most. They pick up bad habits and mistake them for good ones. Those are hard to lose, especially when they don’t know they’re bad yet.
This is how organisations forget how to do great work. One round-up at a time.
So what can you do? It might sound like I’m saying chase perfection, but that’s not it. Perfection has its own ways of breaking things.
Standards depend on context. An MVP should be scrappy. A first draft should be messy. A junior person should need help.
So you need to work out what standard the situation deserves. I don’t think there’s a formula for it. It’s part experience, part instinct, and mostly honesty.
But once you’ve got it, you can’t unsee it. Awareness itself becomes a kind of defence. Then you just need to stick to it. Which is easy to say but hard to do.
With your own work you at least have a chance. Are you really done, or are you rounding up? Usually you know.
The harder part is everyone else. The same gravity that pulls you toward the easy option pulls them too, and you can’t stop it.
That pull never goes away. You don’t beat it. But maybe now you’ll see it sooner. And once you can see it, you get to choose whether to go along with it or not. That’s about as much control as anyone ever has.
But who knows. Maybe I’m rounding up.