I found a great article on Swerve. It made me think a little bit about how we often understand “excellence” and “effectiveness” as a destination or product rather than a byproduct of how we’re doing what we do and how we measure ourselves by what we see around us.

For example, I have a friend who’s a drummer at another church.  All of their worship leaders are not only worship leaders at the church but are also professional recording artists.  When he auditioned (yes – auditioned) to be on their worship team, there were several other drummers who couldn’t keep up.

But here’s the deal – nearly anywhere besides Nashville, these other drummers would have been a shoe-in as a church drummer.  Even at many other churches in Nashville. That’s a “relative baseline” that is very high.

What’s most important

In terms of excellence and effectiveness, we need to understand what is most important for us to do.  We must take stock of where our “relative  baseline” has been set.  And we also need to understand how to find our “sweet spot” in terms of excellence and effectiveness.

Otherwise we can reach a point where we’ve committed so many resources that we’re not longer actually effective.  We can invest disproportionate resources for small incremental changes in excellence that are no longer relevant to what is most important.

How good is good enough?

If I gave you $100,000, could you make your house or apartment excellent? I imagine that with some careful investments in furniture, paint, etc you could probably do it. If I then gave you another $500,000, could you make it more excellent? How about $5 million? You get the point.

via Worth Revisiting: Excellence/Effectiveness – LifeChurch.tv : swerve.

What do you think?

How much does excellence cost?
How much should it cost?
How good is good enough?

Let me know what you think.