Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, a pioneer in the development of radar, was instrumental in creating a system to detect airplanes that many say contributed to the Royal Air Force’s 1940 victory at the Battle of Britain.
Explaining the decision to employ the far-from-perfect radar to protect the British shores, Watson-Watt said, “Always strive to give the military the third best because the best is impossible and second best is always too late.” This attitude of being good enough, not perfect, has been dubbed ‘the cult of the imperfect.’
Voltaire summed the attitude nearly two hundred years earlier when he wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”
One reason the goal of perfection is counter-productive is that the effort needed to try to reach it is so consuming that if you do reach the goal—a big if—, that which was sought has come too late to be useful. Britain needed radar detection in place by the summer of 1940. Third best would have to do. If they had waited to employ the best system possible, they may well have been run over by the Nazis.
