What inspires more trust?  Someone promising the “best” way?  Or someone promising a “better” way?

(Must interrupt briefings from the Scrum Gathering in Barcelona to offer the following passage from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  It can be read as a love letter to the creative workplace, pulsing with people who see “perfect” as a verb.  ENJOY!)

From A Song of the Rolling Earth, 3-4

***

I swear I see what is better than to tell the best,

It is always to leave the best untold.

When I undertake to tell the best I find I cannot,

My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots,

My breath will not be obedient to its organs,

I become a dumb man.

The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow, all or any is best,

It is not what you anticipated, it is cheaper, easier, nearer,

Things are not dismiss’d from the places they held before,

The earth is just as positive and direct as it was before,

Facts, religions, improvements, politics, trades, are as real as

before,

But the soul is also real, it too is positive and direct,

No reasoning, no proof has establish’d it,

Undeniable growth has establish’d it.

…

Delve!  mould!  pile the words of the earth!

Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost,

It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use,

When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear.