Calling something “good enough” borders on the pejorative, as in “good enough for government work.” Less so, but still found wanting, is the sense in which a second-best result is good enough only because the optimal is not–promise, promise–yet realized (think: efficiency benchmarks in microeconomics).
Here are two (hopefully familiar) conditions under which good enough is better than said optima:
1. When it comes to complex policy issues, efforts at full or direct control to achieve results may produce effects well short of what would have been the case had one managed by adapting to the inevitable contingencies in trying to get there.
We of mid-twentieth century US were told that an annual economic growth rate of about 3% and an unemployment rate of about 4%, while no way perfect, were good enough compared to the grief entailed in authoritarian measures to achieve substantially different rates at the same time.
2. Managing for good enough in processes that adapt to contingencies can produce results even better than the initial “best-case scenario.”
Examples include Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela (or on a smaller, lesser known stage, Botswana’s Seretse Khama and Ketumile Masire). Each was a very imperfect person, comrade and leader, but each prevented some fresh hell on earth. They were good enough to take us further than we could have expected, albeit we would want to go further still.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 