“Better,” said Voltaire, “is the enemy of good.”

I used this quote last year, describing it as a healthy attitude, to finish a column proposing seven warning signs of a culture of complacency. In response, the estimable Frank Hayes, who writes “Frankly Speaking” for Computerworld and is one of the best commentators in the industry, was kind enough to respond:

“It’s an incorrect translation. What Voltaire wrote, possibly quoting an existing French proverb, was: Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. “Mieux” does translate as “better.” But “le mieux” is always translated as “the best.” (No, I don’t know how they say “the better” in French.)

“So the translation should be: “The best is the enemy of good” — (unattainable) perfection is the enemy of (attainable) quality. Which is a worthwhile thing for us to remember, but it’s the flip side to the point you were making: better is (and should be) the enemy of good enough.

“Which doesn’t need to be translated from French — just translated into a lot of people’s brains.”

It’s an outstanding point (as you’d expect from both Voltaire and Frank Hayes): While satisfaction with mediocrity defines complacency, insistence on perfection is paralyzing. It’s pointless anyway, because the universe is a stochastic place where just about anything can happen. All the molecules of air in your bedroom could congregate in one corner while you’re sleeping, leaving you in a vacuum to asphyxiate. All of the uranium atoms in the nuclear reactor closest to you could decay at the same moment, causing a colossal explosion. Microsoft could release a version of Internet Explorer without security holes.

Hey, I didn’t say these events were likely. But they’re possible given the laws of physics as we know them. All that’s kept them from happening to you are the mathematical laws of probability.

In IT, competent project managers, system administrators and application developers all recognize the stochastic nature of their domains. Project team members get sick, hired away, or reassigned. Servers fail for indeterminable reasons and won’t come back up. The state-of-the-art development tool being used for a bunch of mission-critical code turns out to multiply wrong under certain unlikely circumstances.

Based on much of the correspondence responding to last year’s columns on complacent IT organizations, it appears some readers don’t live in a stochastic universe at all: In a truly well-run IT organization, they assert, everyone can leave promptly at 5pm every day because everything is always under control.

I don’t think so. Yes, in a well-run IT organization there will be days where nothing untoward interrupts the plan. In large, well-run IT organizations, though, the laws of large numbers take over and the odds that something goes awry increase to the point of inevitability. If a culture of complacency permeates, that won’t matter — everyone will leave at quitting time. In a healthier culture, professionals will work late to get the job done.

Quite a few readers agreed with my point — that if IT is a ghost town at 5pm it’s a symptom of complacency — but argued I shouldn’t have said so, because many executives would read it to mean that if anyone leaves at 5pm there’s a problem. That’s in spite of my also saying, in the same paragraph, “If everyone works late hours and six or seven day weeks all the time, it suggests a very different problem: Desperation. It comes from strong motivation — usually fear — coupled with severe ineffectiveness.” Their argument, while correct, is dangerous advice.

Writers are responsible for clarity. We’re responsible for avoiding ambiguity to the extent possible given constraints of space, limitations of language, and last-minute changes imposed by the copy desk. We’re responsible for marshaling persuasive facts and logic into a narrative framework that guides readers through the complexity of the subject matter.

We aren’t, however, responsible for every reader’s ability to comprehend. Some can’t. Others choose to mischaracterize because they read to gather ammunition, not new ideas.

This matters to you. As an IT leader, communication — listening, informing, and persuading — is a critical skill. Often, you’re informing and persuading non-technical executives of the need for hard-to-explain yet vital investments, such as those required to maintain a healthy IT architecture.

Communicators who spend their time and energy worrying about the ability of others to misunderstand them avoid controversial topics altogether, concerned that the consequences of someone misunderstanding their message are too large to risk. Business being a political environment, it’s a valid concern.

If you allow this concern to outweigh all others, though, you’ll have earned two labels: “craven,” and “politician.”

If you’ll forgive the redundancy.