"The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30." ... it's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
Patty and I often talk about how the projects we are working on inspire our blog posts in terms of what they teach us about wHolistic ChangeSM. For the first time in my career, this summer I have been working for a start-up company. The company has a major deadline this weekend (everything launches Saturday), which reminded me of Tina Fey's lesson she learned from Lorne Michaels.Even when working for Fortune 100 companies, I have seen change teams get nervous before the launch of their change. It is often within the last week before deployment that sponsors start to question whether the change is ready for prime time, and new ideas surface that may give the change agents reasons to delay so they can add additional features, or address gaps that may give resisters ammunition to undermine the change, or revise process flows to be even more detailed...My advice to all change agents is to not let perfection be the barrier to progress! Once you actually get data from people who are trying the change, you are going to continuously improve the process, training, templates, etc. And, depending on the amount of time it will take for your change to be fully implemented, your change will likely morph from what you initially designed anyway. Do not waver from going out to your trusted customers (whether internal or external) and having them try the people, process, services, and technology changes on for size. You never know, you might be even more ready for prime time than you knew!