The High Cost of "Good Enough": Why Temporary Fixes Kill Growth

Jan 5

There is an old adage that haunts architects, software developers, and—if we are being honest—marketing leaders: "There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It reminds me of the dormitories at my college. We called them "The Circle."

They were these drab, boxy structures arranged in a ring, explicitly built during a housing crunch decades ago. They were designed as temporary housing—meant to stand for a few years, solve the overflow problem, and be torn down.

By the time I was a student, "The Circle" had been there for twenty years.

I never lived there myself, but the people who did developed a strange culture around it. They took a weird sense of pride in surviving the thin walls and the "temporary" vibe. But the reality was, the college had fallen into a trap: once a solution is "good enough" to function, the urgency to replace it vanishes. The temporary becomes permanent by default.

As we kick off a new year, I see business leaders building "The Circle" inside their companies every day.

The Cost of "For Now"

I saw this play out at the ad agency I worked at, but honestly, I saw it in every job I held before that too.

A team would have an urgent need—a new way to track leads or a gap in project management. Someone would inevitably say, "Let’s just use this spreadsheet for now. We’ll build the real process next quarter."

Fast forward three years. That "hack" is now the backbone of the department. It’s clunky, it doesn't integrate with anything else, and it requires hours of manual labor to maintain. But because it is deeply embedded in the daily workflow, ripping it out feels like surgery.

This is Operational Debt. And usually, it happens because leaders are terrified of Analysis Paralysis. They are so afraid of picking the wrong permanent solution that they pick a bad temporary one instead.

The GPS Framework

So, how do we make smart decisions that set our future selves up for success, without getting stuck in endless deliberation?

I developed a method I call the GPS Framework.

Most leaders jump straight from the problem to the solution. That is how you end up with "temporary fixes." To build for the long term, you need to hit all three steps:

G — Goal

This is the "What." What are we actually trying to achieve?

Example: We need a way to track customer interactions.

P — Parameters

This is the step everyone ignores, and it is the most critical. This defines the "box" we are working within.

What is the budget?
How much time do we have to implement it?
How many people must it serve today vs. next year?
What other tools must it integrate with?

If you skip the Parameters, you might choose a free tool (because it's fast) that caps out at 5 users (when you plan to hire 10 people this year). You have just built a "temporary solution" that will break in six months.

S — Solution

Here is the secret: If you do the work on the Goal and the Parameters, the Solution usually reveals itself.

If the goal is a CRM, and the parameters are "Zero budget, needs to be live in 24 hours," the solution is a spreadsheet. (And that’s okay, because you made the choice consciously).
If the parameters are "Must scale to 50 reps and integrate with HubSpot," the spreadsheet is disqualified immediately.