Cost vs. Excellence Curve
In the church, I know many leaders who struggle with decisions to invest resources. This is especially true with technology investments. There are so many opinions from consultants, vendors, staff, volunteers, and the “peer pressure” of wanting to follow what other churches do.
I wish there was a one-size-fits-all solution for church technology, but there is not. There are, however, a couple of principles that might be helpful to those of you making investments that I’d like to share this week.
Principle One: Cost vs. Excellence Curve
So many churches and businesses (including LifeChurch.tv) have “excellence” as a core value. This is a great thing, because the Church for decades had grown lazy at excellence and we had old run-down, unclean buildings and programming and materials that were riddled with mistakes and errors. Many people had no desire to visit a church let alone leave their kids in those environments.
While there are still many examples where there is not excellence in the American Church, I see a new problem emerging in some places: Too much excellence. You might ask how can you be too excellent? This graph will illustrate my point.
In my experience, I have found that for the most part the excellence level rises very quickly with an investment of time/money and then flattens out. As you move along that curve it becomes increasingly more expensive to increase excellence. In fact, it might even be ten times as expensive or take ten times the amount of time to get just a small incremental gain in excellence.
The other problem is that there is seemingly no end to the excellence curve. Something can always be more excellent. There are more and more leaders who are chasing after the “most excellent” solution and in some cases at all costs.
As a leader, you need to decide where you want your organization to be on that curve. There is a right answer, but it will be different for different organizations. The important thing is that you are intentional, because if you are not, so much time and money can be wasted.
Where have you seen excellence go too far…either in your organization, or another organization?
Visit 
Bobby, this is an excellent graph…not excessively excellent…just excellent enough;)
Seth Godin recently had a great post about excellent vs. interesting. His premise was that too many organizations are spending too much money on being excellent. While other organizations are focusing on being good enough, but spending their money on being interesting.
His conclusion was that you don’t have to be over the top excellent, just interesting. It’s not excellence that creates a buzz, it’s interesting.
We’ve chosen to try to determine where the excellent enough mark is in our church, and then invest everything else into being interesting…and by the way…interesting is way cheaper.
Great post!
Excellent Post Bobby,
I would totally agree with you. I think for the majority of “bigger” churches your curve absolutely holds true. I do think that there are still a ton of churches in the 200 to 800 attender range that aren’t pushing the excellence envelope hard enough and just settle for mediocrity because that’s what there used to.
Pushing those churches to incremental increases in excellence sometimes can be like trying to turn the Titanic. I think trying to help those churches see the changes that can be made that will give the most “excellence” for the dollar or bang for the buck, is what is needed. Maybe like a top 10 things we could do that would make a big difference. Then way the cost of each and see what can get implemented.
It s sad to see the “keep up with the jones’s” game get played among churches though. Good stuff!
This is the law of diminishing returns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns
Great post.
How true this is. There comes a point when a church or organization needs to decide to embrace something. That could be those that haven’t found Christ or just a goal they have in mind. Either way, excellence is what we are commanded to give. Not sure why some leaders don’t get that these days? Mediocrity kills the soul.
the 80/20 rule almost always applies in business. once you get to 80% of your goal, the extra 20% is many times too expensive to achieve and has the previously quoted characterstic - ‘law of diminshing returns’
if you always reach 100% of your goal, the goal was set too low, or you paid way too much for that last 20% of the goal. there are always exceptions - but at least 80% of the time this is true - if want to spend $’s researching the other 20% - so be it.
someone ragged on me for my misspellings and my reply was - i get 80% of the words correct, the other 20% take too much time to fix!
I’ve talked about this very topic with lots of people in ministry but you expressed it so clearly. I think you’re exactly right that at a certain point the cost only incrementally increases excellence.
That’s a tough point because the natural response is just to throw more money at things hoping they will continue to improve when the answer is a paradigm shift.
Brad Ruggles
http://www.bradruggles.com
Great insight!
Does anyone know the link to Seth Godin’s post that daleschaeffer referred to above? I searched for it but can’t seem to find it.
Great thought Bobby. I know that we have has this discussion many, many times. “Good enough” is usually a bad conclusion, but on your scale, there has to be a good enough line. I agree that it differs from church to church - and even area to area. What is your non-church competition? I would think Las Vegas would be vastly different than Cowpens, SC.
Good stuff Bobby. Here at LifeChurch our mantra for excellence is, ‘excellence honors God and inspires people’. Excellence is subjective though. I think environments that are functional, clean, comfortable, and cool are excellent. ‘Cool’ is highly subjective :). Sometimes too much excellence makes things feel sterile. When I think of going to church I think of worshipping, hanging out with friends, and growing spiritually. I’m not looking for a country club or a four star restaurant. However, I am quite anal about the quality of all things audio and video. That had better be excellent :). At the end of the day, I side with Dale Schaeffer’s comment to error on the side of interesting over excellent. Add a splash of friendly people, passion, and excitement and I’m there.
I love the graph! The difficult thing for me (tech director) is always feeling like I’m just slightly below the flat point. Perhaps my perspective of my “return on investment potential” is not always accurate. While I think I can do more with more, the truth is I’ve already flattened out on the curve! How do you guys keep yourself in touch with reality on this curve?
The Seth Godin post was actually called “The Problem with Perfect”. Here’s the link:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/the-problem-wit.html
enjoy.
Great question Cody!
I had a conversation yesterday with my Dad who has been a pastor of smaller rural congregations his whole life. I was discussing the fact that we both seem to be gifted in similar ways in that neither of us are really all that “excellent” at any one thing. We strive for it, but we really are not the world’s best preachers, storey tellers, teachers, care givers or evangelists. Yet we are moderately gifted in all of these areas. The fewer pastors a church has on staff the more its one or two pastors need to be “good” at many things- while rarely being excellent at any one thing.
Personally speaking, at times that is frustrating.
In the tech side of the world, the buzz word is “HD”. As in High Definition video. But what’s interesting is that while a church might see wide screen, crisp and bright projectors in some of the largest churches, most of it isn’t HD.
The perception is fueling the funding. Yet I’ve been to very few churches where HD video was a NEED. Not to get too techy, but a church can go 16:9 (widescreen) and have killer content (the most important part of the ‘quality’ factor) look great in SD - standard definition.
The point of diminishing returns that your graph illustrates is indeed significant. In the end, things can usually be prioritized by using the Truman Triangle (Cheap, Fast or Good - pick two).
I’d rather see churches go 16:9 SD and spend their money on creative artists and great content creation tools than on HD for the sake of HD.
But regardless of the technology and regardless of the cost, the underlying question must be asked: What is your vision and how can you accomplish it? The answer will naturally define the options and budgets necessary to fulfill that vision.
Great post, Bobby - looking forward to more!
- Anthony
Several years ago, my team (LifeKIDS) was having a hard time coming to terms with the disparity between the excellence we were able to produce and the excellence we strived for in commercial children’s programming. Bobby gave us some great direction similar to his line of thought today.
Basically he helped us define a similar excellence curve–the five o’clock news vs. a blockbuster movie. We can’t have a final product that is movie-quality because we don’t have the two year planning and production time (not to mention the lengthy list of credits). We can and should be better than something that generally gets pieced together over a few days and is read live from teleprompters.
Why? Sundays come every seven days no matter what–our ministry mission requires us to produce a week’s worth of curriculum in one week for 6-8 different experiences and age groups.
We recently created a really awesome three-week series that just started last week and runs through Easter. We’re all really pleased with it, but honestly, it took a lot of people (several more than we usually involve even) over three weeks to create. We can’t do that every time. To make up for it, the next series we are running took one day to shoot and less than it’s four week running time to produce. It’s still good, but we didn’t knock ourselves out.
Maybe you can’t pull off the same excellence level with every single thing you do, but you can strategically choose when to pull out all the stops.
Great post. This is really critical with small churches. We see even our rural communities that people are demanding high quality in the services we offer, because of the many choices we all have has brought us to expect nothing less. It puts pressure on our budget to meet these expectations. We have had to be very careful of how we allocate resources since there seems to be a unlimited supply programs and products that are being thrown at us every day. It seems that we are always trying to find that balance that will fit in our budget and do the job people have come to expect.
From a people standpoint I find that the more I build into relationships with people those expectations seems to be less important because they know my heart. We still need to strive for excellance but it isn’t the only thing that matters.
[...] 12, 2008 at 5:52 pm (Video) This is a great post by Bobby Gruenewald about the law of diminishing returns when it comes to [...]
so i’ve been thinking about this today off and on. Love it.
I’ve long thought that excellence isn’t a biblical value, it’s an american value. So often I’ll write it off. But today I’m second guessing myself.. at least a little bit. I tend to be a perfectionist… for others… not so much with myself. It’s a flaw I daily struggle to work through. I personally think about doing things well, doing things right, and impressions people get when they encounter things I lead or am responsible for. I’m wondering if is the same thing you mean when you say excellence. I still believe that excellence is an American, or at least heavily influenced by western thought. Regardless of where it comes from, I don’t see it as a Christian ideal. To me faithfulness captures it better. Today I think I’ll add missional stewardship to the list of kingdom values.
Now, I am thinking that embracing a cultural value to reach a culture can make a lot of sense and may be one of the many reasons lifechurch has connected with people. This is contextualizing the gospel to a certain people with a certain worldview. (I’m slow, but this afternoon I’m connecting these dots.) Every church does this to an extent, it’s just that some are connecting cultural values to people that the world no longer holds. (ie denominationalism, republican, social justice, if you build it they will come, and seeker stuff etc)
So this is interesting to me. Where this can become unhelpful and dangerous is when we claim or start to believe that the American values are actually God’s values, or biblical values. Then we are making the same mistakes as the dying churches who are struggling in our cities. We’re just a bit more current, but only relatively so.
Not every growing healthy church embraces excellence, just as not every growing healthy church embraces anything one thing.
What do you think?
Great comments everyone.
Cody,
That is the challenge. It can always be a little more excellent…the curve does not actually go flat…just a very slight increase.
The only way I know to manage it is to keep asking the question. Since most churches have limited resources, another exercise that might help is one where you compare opportunities. If I had $1000 to spend, which of these three areas would improve the most? Sometimes you can then begin to see where the curve has flattened.
Mark,
Though I don’t process things in quite the same way that you do, I am tracking with your thinking.
Craig - I dig the graph! I would’ve been happy with just the graph but I agree with your words too.
I like that you said that there is a right answer. Sometimes it doesn’t seem so.
I think when it comes to excellence we need to think outside the box and not align ourselves with the American version of excellence like Riddle referred to.
Excellence does not equal more.
I always dig your post’s Riddle.
First I don’t think that it would be fair to say that excellence is a western or American value if it means exclusion of other cultures. Certainly every culture in one way or another has people who seek after excellence. I don’t know that that is what you meant, but I’m just mentioning it.
Also I like that you mentioned faithfulness as an ideal to strive for. I think that too often we loose focus of faithfulness in search of something else. The “something else” that is usually sought after can possibly be an abstract “excellence” but I think that that abuse is actually a derivative of seeking success or personally glory. So the excellence is not the issue but the question is what we are striving to be excellent at?
When it comes to faithfulness I see no reason why we should not seek excellence in faithfulness. When we read “Well done good and faithful servant” what does the “well done” mean?
The focus is on excellent people not projects or programs. We are called to build lives that honor God. We use stuff with excellence to build lives! Just a thought!
There is a church which meets right next to us which has a similar vision to reach unchurched people. It is a fantastic church that was planted by a fantastic leader.
SIMILARITIES
> We are both about 3 yrs old
> We both average about 200
> We are both very effective in reaching unchurched
> We both run seeker-sensitive services
> We both recommend each others church
MAIN DIFFERENCE
> They were a plant from a megachurch in Hawaii. We started with a bunch of mates with no money or staff.
> Their pastor was trained at a megachurch (he is awesome). We had no formal ministry experience.
> They spend a truck load of money. We are very cheap to run.
> They have colour bulletins. We have B&W.
> They have multi-level inner-city office space. We hire one office room for $100/wk.
> … you get the picture.
MY POINT…
Us smaller churches have so much to learn from Megachurches, but we need to do it without the mega-budget. There is a lot that mega-churches do which add to excellence, cost money, take time, but may not really add to the bottom line of making disciples.
“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do , do it all for the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:31 (NIV)
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Col 3:23-24 (NIV)
If everything we do is in service to the Lord and for His glory, shouldn’t it be the BEST we can offer? Under the law of Moses the people were not allowed to sacrifice just any animal–it had to be SPOTLESS and WITHOUT BLEMISH.
That sounds to me like EXCELLENCE is a Biblical quality–with the caveat that it depends on what the definition of “IS” is.
Tom,
I’m not sold bro.
I think that our current understanding of excellence was completely foreign to Paul as he’s writing these passages.
1 corinthians 10:31 isn’t talking about excellence at all. Paul is talking about faithfulness, but not even in performance, but in terms of living within the freedom of believers to be able to eat meet sacrificed to idols, if it’s no big deal to the person offering the food. not quite the same conversation as an american perspective, yeah matt i still think it’s american, work toward excellence.
In Colossians Paul seems to be talking about appropriate ways to treat slaves and ways in which slaves should respond to their masters. this passage is way closer to the point you are trying to make, but it still misses the mark.(imo) to compare the relationship of slaves and their masters to a church running a program that has the perceptions of flawlessness is a different thing.
and finally, I’m at a loss for how to respond to your Moses line of thinking. If you want to equate running a church with excellence to the sacrifice of animals, and the Jewish practice then I think you can probably develop biblical support for whatever you might fancy.
How about a little fun: (and this is for fun… and a bit of an indictment on myself in many regards.)
“Then Jesus gathered his staff of leaders together and did gift assessments. He told them. We need to build a big church building with lost of attendees. Each disciple was delegated to according to their myers-briggs profile. Jesus said, “look… folks around here are hungry, so let’s tell them we’re going to feed them food, but before we feed them, we’ll preach at them. We’ll give them the four spiritual laws so they can go do heaven. Blessed are the poor…er.. wait.. I mean, God will bless you if you do things well for him.”
The disciples each did their ministry with excellence.
Peter started a surfing ministry, and while many thought he was drunk often, he had the best boards, with the best teachers money could buy to get people to accept Jesus as their person Lord and savior.
John started a children’s ministry. He did it with excellence. Parent’s were happy that they didn’t have to spend the time with their kids, and that the staff took care of everything. They did oil painting, though for some reason John avoided the hot oil, and occassionally they would have andrew come in and tear a phone book in half to entertain the kids. this was always followed by an invitation to heaven. Mark tamed a lion, which impressed the large crowds.
Bill Gaither, then only 16 sang a song.
Matthew did a drama to “the champion” and told large crowds that God doesn’t care about politics, or the environment, he just wants you to go to heaven.
James decided that he’d take up an offering to pay the bills for such an impressive ministry, and so it could be done with excellence.
Judas started an accounting firm named Arther anderson.
For the finale Jesus would walk on water, heal a few folks, pray for a few others, and say something like, “Now that I have your attention
do you know that that you know that you know that if you died tonight that you’d go to heaven up in the sky in the 4th dimension somewhere else.” some people raised their hands others just looked at him like wondering what he was talking about as heaven and messiah meant radically different things to the jewish people.
Then Jesus said something like, “Go into all the world start churches an advertise about how great your church is and how relevant you are to their lives. then when you get them there, tell them about heaven.” The people who raised their hands felt pretty good, until the disciples started being killed off.
or maybe not.
I see your perspective Riddle. If striving for “excellence” means the church has a better sound system than the House of Blues I would agree that it is a rather western/American understanding excellence and may be at odds with faithfulness. But in another aspect of ministry, one a pastor is preparing to preach and he decides to prepare the most excellent sermon that he is able to within his various constraints. A second pastor decides that this week he will just do an adequate job and get by. Which one is more faithful?
Surely the issue is NOT Cost vs Excellence
But rather
Cost vs Results?
I mean, if we are all about excellent rather than results then we miss the point don’t we?
Steve,
Actually, there is a difference between excellence and “results” (assuming your singular desired result isn’t to be excellent)
The post I did yesterday on cost vs effectiveness should illustrate that.
You are right in the sense that I hope that what we “get” from this post is a focus on results and/or stewardship.
I agree with Mark Broadbent. I am a member of a church plant that always amazes me with the quality and variety of ministry they can pull off with a small budget. God has blessed them with awesome volunteers for video, graphics work and church tech.
Great post.
[...] I’m in with churches where “Excellence” is a core value. I’ll let you go to swerve to read the entire article but I want to sit on this statement for a second… While there are still many examples where [...]
[...] this post on the cost/excellence and then this one on [...]
[...] this post on the cost/excellence and then this one on [...]
[...] simple, and just designed to prompt thought. So hit up the introductory article, then check out the Cost vs. Excellence article, and finally read the Cost vs. Effectiveness [...]