The night of our renovation is a come as you are affair. The natural byproduct of our personal reconstruction is a considerable amount of dust, an acceptable mess. There is no classroom, no laboratory, no test case, no disposable first draft when it comes to life. It is purely a build-the-airplane-as-you’re-flying event. There is no certification for birth or parenting; it just happens. And often it is quite messy. The most extraordinary flowers bloom in the most retched filth, the good earth. That’s just the way it works. The best tasting sandwiches are oftentimes the messiest ones. The most precious humans, the little babies, are the untidiest of us all. And when we work on ourselves, the fruition of our transformation requires mistakes, failures, and imperfections: the dust of our own change. The question that must remain rattling inside us is “If a thing is worth doing, is it worth doing poorly a few times first?” Please pardon our dust.

When we walk into the workshop of the woodworker we do not condemn them to incompetence for debris and sawdust strewn in random unkempt piles on the floor. When we see the little toddler stumble and fall so many times when they are beginning to walk, we do not demand their legs be removed. When the young ones take their training wheels off their little bicycles and have difficulty riding unassisted, we do not assume stupidity and sell their bikes to cut our losses. In all these instances and many more, we have patience, understanding, and react with encouragement and assistance. But when the leader is learning and changing, we get nervous and gravitate to assumptions of travesty and disaster. We are oblivious that the power of this collective premise often cajoles leaders into hypocrisy. In many cultures this cultural presupposition is so powerful that leaders adopt a correlating unfounded notion that they cannot afford to learn by mistakes, they must be what they are undoubtedly not: perfect. The inevitable dust of a leader evokes our condemnation, where in most other cases the dust of others causes us to smile and pick up a broom to help. Please pardon our dust.

Leaders’ changing themselves is consummately the prime directive for flawlessness. The road to flawlessness is paved with our flaws as we navigate them effectively. When leaders are not constantly changing and adjusting, they are usually stuck and failing. When we discourage learning and change by the condemnation of the accompanying dust, we encourage failure. Through our intolerance, we tacitly create a greater ineptitude and hypocrisy. Please be careful where you step in these construction sites. Stop shaking your head in disgust and intolerance, and start rolling up your starched sleeves and help to clean up a bit. Please pardon our dust.

I worked with a leader once that employed an over-simplified model by asking his employees at times, “is this a journey or a destination?” He did this in a cute attempt to help them realize that their efforts at completion were not yet effective. His destination thinking was effective when it came to the content, output or accomplishment of their tasks, but it was ineffective when dealing with their developmental journeys. Life is not merely a series of destinations; it is also a journey. Both paradigms are valid and helpful. However, destination mindsets are rarely helpful in making us more fit for the greater journey. If I am only concerned with the destination, I might become too busy driving the car to stop and get gas. As leaders, we need to embrace both ways of thinking: destination thinking and journey thinking. From a systems perspective, journey thinking is about structure and process fitness and improvement, and destination thinking is about output effectiveness. For many systems, the keys to incremental effectiveness are often found in structure and process improvement. For many leaders, the keys to enhancing flawlessness are often found in enhancing our fitness for the journey. And there is a good deal of dust that gets pretty much everywhere over the course of a long journey. Please pardon our dust.

Beautiful craftsmanship only happens in the midst of dust and debris as the rough edges and extraneous material is removed and the sanding and polishing produces a greater level of existence and experience, the art of the everyday, the miracle of the methodical and mundane, the creation of holistic flawlessness from raw and flawed materials. The transformation of a flawless leader is similar. Please pardon our dust.

What imperfections and dust generation do you avoid in your hypocrisy?

When are you unhelpfully critical of dust and contribute to trapping value in others?