The 70% Solution and the Power of Imperfect Progress
Last weekend I took my daughters to a theme park for our annual Halloween trip — a tradition that’s equal parts nostalgia and chaos. Between the pumpkins, roller coasters, and caramel corn, we found ourselves at the entrance to one of the park’s “Express” lines. This year, the park was testing a new entry system that used face recognition to speed up admission.
It was operational — cameras in place, prompts on screen — yet attendants were still scanning passes manually. My oldest daughter noticed.
“Why are they still checking tickets if the face thing already works?” she asked.
I told her the park was doing what we in the evaluation world call a field test. They knew it wasn’t perfect. They were using real people, real volume, and real variability to surface the problems no lab environment could reveal.
She nodded, mildly interested. But as we moved through the line, I kept thinking: that right there is a masterclass in progress.
This wasn’t a parable about technology or privacy. It was about leadership — about how progress really happens when we stop treating perfection as the goal and start treating imperfection as the system.
---
The 70% Solution
Years ago, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described a principle for decision-making under uncertainty: if you act with less than 40 percent of the information, you’re gambling. If you wait for more than 80 percent, you’re too late. He said the sweet spot is around 70 percent — enough information to move decisively, not so much that you lose momentum.
Powell was talking about leadership decisions, but the principle scales beautifully to execution and improvement in any performance domain. Once you’re about 70 percent ready — whether it’s a plan, a process, or a prototype — the next step isn’t to perfect it. It’s to put it into motion and let feedback do the rest.
In other words, what Powell applied to deciding also applies to doing. The threshold for action is the same: enough to move with confidence, not so much that you lose momentum.
It’s been called the 70% solution, and it’s one of the hardest disciplines for high-performing people to accept. We’re conditioned to polish, to proof, to prepare for every contingency before acting. Yet the longer we wait to “get it right,” the less right it will be — because the world keeps changing while we’re perfecting our draft.
The theme park understood this instinctively. They could have spent another year refining the algorithm, running simulations, tweaking code. But none of that would teach them how actual guests behave when sunlight hits the camera lens, when masks cover half a face, or when a family of five all steps up at once.
Perfection was never going to reveal those truths. Only imperfection would.
---
Why Perfect Is a Trap
Perfection feels safe, but it’s a dead end.
Perfect stops iteration.
Once something is “finished,” the feedback loop closes. There’s no reason — and often no permission — to keep improving it. Organizations that prize perfection end up maintaining monuments to old thinking, because nobody wants to disturb what’s already “done.”
Perfect invites fragility.
Perfect systems depend on perfect conditions. When something unpredictable happens — a new variable, a market shift, a crisis — the system cracks. Adaptable systems, by contrast, are built on imperfection; they expect disruption and know how to absorb it.
Perfect kills ownership.
When the goal is flawlessness, people start hiding flaws. They edit the data. They downplay the red flags. They tell leaders what they think leaders want to hear. The pursuit of perfect breeds silence — which is the opposite of learning.
Perfection is maintenance. Imperfection is growth.
---
Why Imperfect Wins
Imperfect action doesn’t mean careless action. It means incomplete by design — intentionally open-ended, deliberately flexible, always ready for revision. That openness is what allows continuous improvement to take root.
Here’s why imperfect actually beats perfect over time:
1. Imperfect creates motion.
2. Imperfect invites feedback.
3. Imperfect builds safety.
4. Imperfect sustains excellence.
The irony is that imperfection is the only sustainable path to mastery. The system learns faster than any individual can.
---
Iteration: The Engine of Greatness
Iteration is what turns the 70 percent solution into enduring success. It’s how you move from guessing right once to getting better repeatedly.
In product design, iteration means rapid prototyping. In leadership, it means experimenting with small changes and observing what sticks. In personal growth, it’s the willingness to try, learn, adjust, and try again — without labeling every incomplete attempt a failure.
The best performers I’ve worked with — from engineers to executive coaches — all share the same habit: they make peace with revision. They understand that feedback isn’t judgment; it’s fuel.
The most resilient systems are iterative by architecture. They expect imperfection and turn it into adaptation.
---
When 70% Goes Wrong
Of course, “move fast and break things” can turn reckless if misunderstood. Acting at 70 percent readiness doesn’t mean abandoning discipline or accountability. The difference is intent.
Bad iteration says: We’ll fix it later.
Good iteration says: We’ll learn it now.
One launches to escape responsibility. The other launches to invite learning.
The key is designing safe feedback loops — ways to collect information quickly and adjust responsibly.
Iteration without learning is chaos. Learning without iteration is theory. The balance of both is progress.
---
How to Apply the 70% Solution
1. Decide at 70%.** When you feel about 70 percent confident, act. Don’t wait for the last 30 percent to magically appear — it only arrives once you’re in motion.
2. Design for feedback.** Build observation points into your plan before you start. Ask: What will tell us if this is working?
3. Iterate visibly.** Don’t hide your process. Share early versions, let stakeholders see how improvement happens. Visibility normalizes learning.
4. Celebrate corrections.** Praise the person who found the flaw, not the one who hid it. Improvement is a team sport.
5. Reflect before re-launching.** After each cycle, pause. What did we learn? What will we try next? Then roll version 1.1.
The rhythm of decide → act → learn → refine becomes second nature — and over time, it compounds into expertise that perfection could never produce.
---
The Lesson at the Gate
Back at the park gate, our new “facial recognition” system still needed human backup. The attendants smiled, scanned, adjusted, logged notes on tablets. I’m sure a few guests grumbled about the extra step. But to me, it was beautiful — the sound of a system learning.
Later that night, as the ghosts and ghouls screeched and my daughters laughed, I realized they had just witnessed one of the most valuable leadership lessons imaginable. They’d seen a team confident enough to be imperfect in public — and humble enough to learn from it.
That’s the paradox of performance: the people who insist on being flawless rarely evolve. The people who accept imperfection as part of the process often outpace everyone else.
That’s what it means to perform on purpose — to act before perfection, to learn in motion, and to turn progress itself into the plan.
---
Closing Thought
Perfection closes the book.
Imperfect writes the next chapter.
The park will get its recognition system right — not because it hid its flaws, but because it exposed them. The same is true for any of us leading projects, teams, or lives.
Start at 70%. Learn out loud.
Progress isn’t the absence of error.
It’s the mastery of correction.