Adequate

How often do you settle for "adequate?"  Not great, not bad, just "adequate."

There's a restaurant very close to Perimeter Church that I wish I wanted to go to all the time.  It is close by, big tables, pretty good service, and sometimes they even have wireless.  But, the food is only "ok."  It's not bad...just nothing to get excited about.

As we've been working on our new Intranet plan, Scott Logan challenged me with "let's not settle for adequate."  That's a great idea! But...what does it mean?

We've been working hard to use SharePoint.  After all, it's the obvious "easy" answer.  And...we've been tremendously underwhelmed.  Talking to others, they've had a similar experience.  SharePoint works, it can do all kinds of things, but it's not easy, and frankly, it's somewhat ugly!  So..with a lot of work, we could have, yup, an "adequate" solution.  Let's not settle for adequate.

We  have a media archiving solution that is, um, adequate.  We have an internal workflow  system that's...adequate.  We have a purchasing process that's..ok, you guess.  How may other "adequate" systems do we have?  Why don't we have excellent?  Perhaps three reasons: 1) We don't know of excellent solutions.  2) If they existed, they'd probably be very expensive. 3) Most of the time, we wouldn't know excellent if it hit us in the face!

What do you have that's "adequate?"  What would it take to get to excellent?

Comments

[Bryan Johnson]

People can create ideas, change processes, and adapt to new environments much more quickly than we can reconfigure our electronic systems to keep up.

I find that today's "adequate" systems were yesterday's "oh my gosh, this is so much better than what we had before" systems. Quite often the biggest reason for them being adequate today is that we outgrew them but didn't replace them, or we didn't have/spend the time to keep them in line with our current needs and processes.

[kevin]

I'm more concerned with the word "settle" then with the word adequate.

I like adequate. My car is adequate. My house is adequate.

I like to do an excellent job using adequate tools. I rarely buy top of the line stuff. The big exception might be my iPhone and my recent Jawbone II headset.

Now, the word settle implies that you stopped too soon or you gave up. I sometimes shoot for adequate and make it! I sometimes decide on adequate in one area so I can turn my attention to another.

Sometimes the excellent solution implemented means only an adequate job in terms of cost and time to delivery.

Settling implies you are stuck at adequate and I sometimes think adequate is the starting point. It is the end of phase 1.

[Tony Dye]

==> Bryan: good point, and that's certainly part of the situation. I'm a bit more concerned about when we *start* with adequate. I do that too often. Maybe I'm just lazy :-(

[Tony Dye]

==Kevin: Ah, that hits the thought much better than what I said. Yes, adequate can be good for some things. (I have an adequate car -- don't need more!) Thanks for the great clarification!