Cost vs. Effectiveness Curve
Yesterday, we talked about the problem of being too excellent. Today, I want to introduce another important principle that can help you as you make decisions about investing resources.
Effectiveness is far more important than excellence.
Similar to excellence, my experience has taught me that the level of effectiveness can grow very quickly and usually at a steeper curve than excellence. What is different about effectiveness is that there is sometimes a point where more money and more time yield a less effective result.
How can that be? Well in the Church, sometimes too much money or too many things cause people to feel like the church (as an organization) has an abundance and needs less of their time and less of their money. “My church has a lot of money, so they don’t need me to give.” “My church has a lot of staff, so they don’t need me to serve.”
Basically, people feel less needed and as a consequence, they may end up less engaged and committed. This puts a whole new perspective on the excellence curve as it shows that sometimes the quest for more excellence does not just have the potential to be more wasteful, but possibly less effective.
Now, this entire discussion begs the question “How do you define effective?” A question that must be asked first is “Are you defining what effective means in your organization?” If you’re not, start now…and then apply this principal.
I want what I do to be excellent, but more than that…I want it to be effective.
What has been your experience with defining effectiveness and/or making decisions based on that definition?
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Thanks for these posts. It is so easy for us to keep striving to be better, but sometimes it seems we are just getting better to get better, not to be more effective. It helps to be able to chart, where are we and where do we want to be with those things that really matters. It seems to always come back to be faithful and effective in your call.
I must say, the challenge of too many ministry dollars sounds like a challenge that would be fun to take on some day!
This curve makes sense… at some point excellence can maintain itself with less effort. You have to continue to work hard, re-create, adjust… to ensure that effectiveness does not dip and continues to have peaks.
effective is when you are excellent but not over 80% of total excellence costs - thus the divergence of the curve- just put an 80 and a 100 on the graph
Man, you’re absolutely right, Bobby. What do you think, does the typical church overdue excellence or effectiveness? I wrote a book a few years ago called The Five Star Church, but seems we’ve moved away from quality toward effectiveness, but even then we rarely come up with measurable strategies.
Alan Nelson
http://www.rev.org
A mentor of mine defined excellence as doing the best you can with what you have. It’s relative to your situation. Effectiveness follows suit. It’s getting the best desired result that you can out of what you have.
Bobby,
How do you offset this at Life? It seems from outside the process that leadership, vision, ideas, curriculum, etc all comes from a central HQ. Effectiveness involves owning the vision, and giving leaders opporutnities to lead, but I assume that becomes difficult in this model of multi site. If that’s the case, how do you guys continue to with excellence, effectiveness, while keeping key decisions, ideas and vision central?
Is it a forced choice, where you pick one, or are you attempting both? It seems that if there isn’t vision, leadership, and key decisions on the local level, then it makes it difficult to sustain effectiveness over the long haul.
Again, it may depend on your def. of effective.
But I’m interested in your thoughts.
Mark,
Your assumption is partially right. Though we do create a lot of what we do at central, we actually have a significant amount of input and feedback from our campuses and in some areas it is much more a collaborative effort. I would invite our campus pastors to respond, but we are counting on them to lead…we just all share the same vision, so there is not the type of tension that you are implying.
“Owning” vision doesn’t mean that a person (staff or lay) has to create it or be the origination point of it. Through leadership (both campus and central) we have thousands of people who have embraced a vision and “own” it.
When too many resources (paid staff and financial) are brought to a smaller campus, the size/perception of the church (organization) can cause some people to feel that they are not needed to accomplish the vision. It is a challenging balance that we certainly don’t have figured out, but are learning more about every day. In the past, we have over invested…still learning on where the right point is.
On an unrelated side note…the thing that many people are missing in these posts is that the choice to invest fewer resources because of diminished excellence or effectiveness is done so that those resources can be invested somewhere else that has a better return…not so that they can sit in a bank account somewhere.
Our vision to “Lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ”
This is how I see the effectiveness:
Craig’s sermons’ certainly have led people to become more fully devoted to Christ.
Life Groups are essential in leading to become more fully devoted to Christ.
I do have a concern with the initial coming to Christ and that person responding to the call of becoming more fully devoted to Christ. I work with Guest Services and know that there is a place for someone to go to ask questions about their decision to be born again. But, wonder if something could be set up for someone who has heard the call and is in a very sensitive position; may need to discuss his/her decision with someone. I would think that a person would not like to stand in a hall area and discuss their decision among a crowd of people. Maybe a room (like the prayer room) can be set up for this? or is it already?
Just a thought.
Everything else that I can see within Life Church is very effective…especially our pastor…and his precious way of showing us the light!!!!
[...] This post from LifeChurch.tv discusses the relationship between cost and effectiveness. Bobby Gruenewald explains that there is a point where the more money you spend to make your event “excellent”, the less “effective” it is. [...]
Thanks for the response Bobby, and Beth! Rock on!
Bobby, maybe this is a coffee conversation for the future, but I’ve got a follow up if that’s cool.
I get that vision stuff you are referring to. There’s a sense that big picture vision is always top down in a multi-site or otherwise.
The difficulty I’m guessing you face is how detailed to be. For instance, is there a place for great leaders with vision within one of the campus churches? Vision that fits under the greater umbrella of HQ/Leadership’s vision.
Keeping excellence up, especially with inexperienced leadership, or young leadership, or new believers means vision within ministries to children, youth etc probably becomes pretty specific when it comes to how things go down. Please don’t take this as an indictment on your staff, it’s not meant to be.
So if vision become specific, then how do you grow great leaders in that environment? and how do you transition to empowering them…
sorry for so many questions.. i’m just trying to learn more about what you are doing.. and how it works…
Mark…I understand what you are asking. I’m not sure if the question is as related to vision as it is the balance between flexibility and control.
It is an area where we are learning more every day. I would say that we have much more flexibility at the campus level than we did 2 years ago. It’s still the same vision though…for example, as part of our vision we want our people engaged in local missions (we call them micro missions). Each campus expresses that is different ways…our South OKC campus has embraced a home for recovering addicts that they are consistently investing themselves into. Our NW OKC has been pouring themselves into helping teachers in the public schools. Each of those were concieved and directed by the campus pastors and/or their teams.
I think if you asked any of our campus pastors if they have been developing as a leader while in their role…they would confidently say yes. And they are all great leaders to begin with.
I hope that helps answer your question.
Mark -
As a member at a local LC church, I find that the vision is both easier and harder to maintain. On the one hand, because there is a top-down plan, I can just come in and just be a part of the team. I set my alarm for 6:05 AM and run out to Bixby to help setup - I know exactly where I need to be, how long it is going to take me, and I can be part of something big without having to run it myself.
At the church I was going to, I had the ability to essentially “own” a ministry myself - in my case, I ran the Alpha program for a few years. It was nice in one way - I felt I was exercising my gifts a lot closer to the full. On the other hand, I had to deal with a lot of unpredictability, and the fact that there were a lot of competing visions within the Church. Many of the ministries were somewhat choked out because the Church-wide vision was not explicit enough.
What I have figured out is that I don’t need LC’s blessing to use my gifts! If I want to do something in ministry, there is no reason whatsoever that I can’t do it - it doesn’t have to be tied directly to the Church for it to be either important or effective. I can participate in the Church’s vision as a whole, and that does not detract from what I may be doing privately for the Kingdom as well. LC has a vision, and there are easy, predictable ways for me to be a part of that which don’t completely waste my time (think committee meetings - arghhhh!!!!!). And I can participate in my own areas and don’t need anyone else’s permission to do so. LC doesn’t have to do everything - having a narrow and focused vision makes it easier for everyone to make a contribution.
Jon
thanks Jon.
that’s very helpful man.
Jon,
I’m curious… how long have you been involved in life and what ministry are you leading outside the church at this point?
I totally appreciate you helping me try to understand how all this works. every church has good and bad aspects to it system.. I’m trying to educate myself on Life a bit without leaping to judgments or conclusions. this kind of input is really helpful.
mark
Mark -
I’ve been involved with LC for just about a year. I have several things that I do outside the Church, but the one you would probably be most interested in is what I call Seminary 2.0. The end goal (which is very far off in the distance) is to move seminaries back into the Church itself, and provide all content for all courses for free to anyone over the internet. Kind of like what RTS is doing on iTunes but much more comprehensive, and with an actual system built in. Check out seminary2.com for some basic stuff I have thrown in there.
If you want, send me an email at jonathan@bartlettpublishing.com and we’ll do lunch sometime. I kind of know you from my Asbury days (I knew your bro and sis better), and catching up would be fun.
Jon
As for the issue of Cost vs. Effectiveness, I’m not sure that is easily separated. I’m not sure I buy into the idea that more excellence produces less effectiveness. I think this is more of a leadership issue, than cost or excellence. The leader is the one who helps to drill into the members participation, responsibility and activity. Personally I believe that we have low participation in our churches across the board because we haven’t expected enough out of our people. In other words, they are living up to our expectations.As leaders we are responsible to create organization clarity, movement and to maintain the systems. So, back to my first statement: This is more of a leadership issue than a cost/excellence issue. At least for me.
[...] Read this post on the cost/excellence and then this one on cost/effectiveness. [...]