A few years ago, some of the large European organisations that had used the EFQM Excellence model for a number of years to systematically drive improvement wanted to find ways to integrate Business Excellence with their strategy so that it moved from being a “project” or “program” to becoming just a part of how they did business.
Ideas suggested ranged from having incentive bonuses for improving assessment scores to systems of ongoing training. In my mind it was clear. The best – if not only – way to successfully achieve the objective was simply to focus on the organization’s results. The way people influence an organization’s results is by acting on the things that enable them (“enablers” in EFQM terminology), one of the central concepts of business excellence.
Once your people realize that the optimal way to manage and improve results is by working on the enablers (the 7 BEX Excellence Framework criteria to the left of results), business excellence becomes integrated with how you do business. To integrate it with strategy formulation, you only need to ensure that the output of Excellence Assessment – the list of strengths and prioritized areas for improvement – is available as an input for strategy formulation.
