Confessions of a recovering perfectionist

Our profession has always valued precision, and rightly so. But when the world moves faster than our forecasting processes, we need to ask: are we optimising for the wrong thing? Sometimes approximately right, delivered quickly, beats perfect.

Back when a lot of us were at school, our teachers inevitably asked us if we thought we’d be walking around with calculators in our pockets. Little did they know how wrong they’d turn out to be.

But, as the wheel turns again, I’m here to suggest that we break up with our ubiquitous calculators – just a bit – whether that is the one on our phones, on our desktops, or built into Excel.

Shocking, I know! But if you have read my columns this year, you might be arriving at the same conclusion.

In the face of unprecedented change and chaos, we need to build adaptability and flexibility into our clients’ and businesses’ DNA for them to survive. To do this, we need to sacrifice some financial accuracy at the altar of speed.

I don’t see how else we can give businesses the ability to recalibrate and pivot at the speed of the change we are experiencing.

I’m not saying we should abandon the professional rigour that is the foundation of our profession. But I am suggesting that we reassess our relationship with accuracy quite carefully when the assumptions that underpin our forecasts change weekly and even daily – something we are not unfamiliar with, given our volatile exchange rate.

Think of accuracy and speed as a seesaw. The more we pile onto the accuracy side, the slower we become, and vice versa. Our skill lies in finding the right balance point for each client's needs. We should use our training, experience, nous, and knowledge of our clients and their business to make careful adjustments. By optimising the accuracy-speed balance, we can enable agility as well as meaningful information.

Using this lens, we’ll find that, using integrated modelling, we can be a bit more aggressive with speed in some areas of the business than others. When an assumption changes, this ripples through the affected line items, freeing us up to apply closer scrutiny to remaining, more critical line items.

And the real clincher? Multiple studies, including those by McKinsey, show that faster decisions are usually better ones, delivering more value and returns to the organisation. Put another way, moving faster, smartly, improves outcomes.

Perhaps it's time we started a support group: Perfectionists Anonymous. Step one is admitting we're powerless over our need for decimal-point precision. Step two is understanding that being approximately right can, counter-intuitively, better serve our clients. Who's ready to take that first step?

Real talk

In a world where forecasts can be past their sell-by-date before they are even signed off, as a profession we don’t really have a choice about embracing speed. And far better to stay at the table, providing oversight and professional rigour, than to be sidelined along with our completely accurate, yet completely useless forecasts and budgets. So if you are spluttering into your coffee about me appearing to play fast and loose with accuracy, perhaps see this as an opportunity to flex and evolve our profession, rather than an existential threat.

As published Accountancy SA - October 2025