99% is Good Enough Right?
After Ritz-Carlton won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the owner of Ritz Carlton William Johnson said, “now they would need to work even harder to earn the respect that came with the award.” Because quality is a race with no finish line.”
What did he mean by that? He was saying that to achieve excellence requires 100% effort all the time!
Some have even tracked the consequences of the 99% rule. If 99.9 % were good enough, according to the research by Natalie Gabal, then look at what would have happened this year alone in 2020:
*Twelve babies would have been given to the wrong parents every day.
*Surgeons would have performed two hundred and ninety-one pacemaker operations incorrectly.
*Doctors would also have miswritten twenty thousand drug prescriptions.
*The IRS would have lost two million documents. (info above from insight.org)
So is fair enough good enough? Would we put gasoline in our car that was 99% pure gasoline and 1% Koolaid?
It reminds me of a story my wife mentioned to me the other day about two young grade-school daughters telling their Dad that they were going over to their friends’ house to watch some PG 13 or R rated movie. The girls said, “yes, Dad, we know that there are a few ‘bad’ scenes in the film, but we already know they are wrong anyway.” So the Dad responded to them after dinner by handing them a plate of brownies he just made. He told them, “Here, have some. The brownies are 99% pure, and only1% of the brownies have Fido’s (their Dog), dog dirt in them. Please have some!”
Would the girls eat it?
Most of us want more than ever for things to launch at Compumatrix by opening up the new revised CDAP. I can’t tell you just how much I would like to see it open too! But do we want it to open only functioning at 99%? Isn’t that just good enough? Would it be OK if there were only 1% of errors in the system? We often feel, “let’s just get it open”! But at what cost if it opens at 99%?
I am not a computer programmer. After taking only one class in college on the Pascal Computer Language, I quickly realized that computer programming would not be in my wheelhouse! The professor had us writing elementary programs, and we would submit them to see if they would work. I couldn’t have been more frustrated trying to write code and realizing that if just one comma was missing or a period was in the wrong place, the entire program would loop and loop and never work. It was far too much of an exact and perfect science for me. People like Henry, the DEVS, Jane, and so many others thrive on this kind of preciseness are wired for it.
I know this one thing regarding the impact and scope of Compumatrix: If it is to have the kind of effects we desire and need it to have, it must be done right! As my father repeatedly said,” if something is truly worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” As members of the Compumatrix team, we need to get this right from the very start. When building a skyscraper, if the foundation is just a few degrees off or unlevel at the foundation’s deepest place, the whole building’s slant and lean get more prominent the higher you go. To begin with, the foundation must be perfect.
NASA knows all about this. How many times have we watched NASA go through all the preparations before a lift-off only to abort the launch at the last minute? If testing found out that something in their systems was not 100%, they canceled the launch. I think those astronauts inside those rockets were pretty happy that NASA’s standard was not just 99%, don’t you?
We, too, will be thrilled and delighted when our rocket finally launches high and mighty into the deep blue skies. Success!
In the meantime, let’s rest in good faith. We will leave it to those who know their craft better than anybody in the field and be thankful that they are the ones with their skillful finger on the blast-off button.
Originally published by Jeffrey Phelps at https://www.compumatrix.ph on October 30, 2020.
