When 9/10 is Mediocre: An Epiphany Reshaping a Factory

Rajiv was the CEO of a factory that had suffered a string of serious accidents, some of them fatal.

He cared deeply about safety. The company had invested in procedures, training, consultants, signage, audits. When I asked him to rate his own commitment to safety from 1 to 10, he said 9.

I asked about the missing point.

He bristled.

“You don’t understand. Workers do crazy things. Most of them are uneducated. I can’t be on their backs every moment. 10 is impossible.”

I remember thinking that his answer made perfect sense. If safety depended on making thousands of people behave correctly, then of course 10/10 commitment was impossible. He could not watch everyone. He could not control every decision. He could not prevent every foolish act.

At our next coaching session, he was smiling.

“I found my 10 out of 10,” he exclaimed.

He told me how he had come across a janitor who had been slipped and hurt himself. He stopped to help the man and waited for the safety people.

“That’s what I would always have done,” he said. “That’s a 9. But I kept asking myself, what would a 10 be?”

The safety team determined that the man needed to go home, rest, and avoid putting weight on his foot for a few days. Normally, that would have been the end of Rajiv’s involvement.

Instead, he said he was surprised to find himself wanting to drive the man home himself.

He described helping him into the car, then helping him into his house. He met the man’s wife. They sat together and had tea.

Nothing in the safety manual had changed. No new procedure had been introduced. But something in Rajiv had shifted.

His 10/10 commitment did not mean taking responsibility for controlling every worker. It meant seeing his people differently. He had been seeing them, at least partly, as uneducated workers who did stupid things and needed to be watched. Now he was seeing one man sitting at home with his wife, wanting what every person in the factory wanted: to finish the working day and get home safely.

The way Rajiv talked about safety changed, and the change travelled through the organisation.

In the weeks that followed, incidents fell sharply. For a period, the factory recorded none at all.

I have told this story many times since. For years, what stayed with me was the shift in where responsibility lived.

At 9/10, Rajiv could still locate part of the problem somewhere else: with careless workers, weak education, poor judgment, the practical impossibility of being everywhere at once.

At 10/10, there was nowhere else to stand.

That still feels important to me. But over time I have noticed something else about the difference between 9 and 10.

We tend to imagine commitment as incremental. If I am at 6, I work harder and get to 7. Then perhaps 8. Then 9. And 10 becomes the distant summit: more discipline, more effort, more vigilance.

Yet I keep seeing something different.

Moving from 6 to 7 can be hard. Moving from 7 to 8, or from 8 to 9, can feel hard. There is always more to improve, more to monitor, more to control.

Oddly, 10 can feel lighter.

Because getting to 10 may require letting go of something that 9 still allows you to keep.

For Rajiv, that was the belief that his commitment to safety depended on getting other people to behave differently.

As long as he held onto that belief, there was always more to do: more training, more monitoring, more enforcement, more reminding, more trying to stop people from doing stupid things.

His 10 was not another layer added on top.

It was something dropped: the need to stand outside the problem and point toward the people who still had to change.

That is why the difference between 9 and 10 now feels less like one point on a scale and more like a different category.

That may be why 10 can feel strangely light. And easier to get to than an 8 or a 9.

You are no longer carrying the exhausting work of controlling everyone else.

You have let go of the heaviest thing.

You already understand this as a parent. “I love you 9/10” isn’t almost love. It’s incoherent. Love doesn’t hedge.