Meet the Twins

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

What twins is he talking about, you ask. The twins that are in the Criteria for Performance Excellence. The twins that have been the subject of recent discussion on our LinkedIn improvement thread. I am referring to the Baldrige Scoring Guidelines twins: ADLI and LeTCI. They are fraternal, non-identical twins, but like most twins are kindred spirits since their birth and closely linked in all they do. As most people around Baldrige know ADLI: approach, deployment, learning, and integration are the scoring dimensions for process-related items in the Criteria and LeTCI: levels, trends, comparisons, and integration are the scoring dimensions for results items. The maturity of an organization is determined by their maturity in each of these dimensions, on a Criteria item by item basis. The Scoring Guidelines, on pages 65 through 70 of the Criteria for Performance Excellence booklet, describe the maturity against each dimension at each increasing scoring range. You also notice that integration is in both process and results scoring dimensions. Integration is the primary tie that binds our twins to each other. A key piece of integration is whether the results we measure reflect results for our key organizational processes and if those results drive decision-making on strategy, need for innovation, and process improvements.

So, what does this all have to do with the improvement thread on LinkedIn? The comment that several people made is that examiners rely on the Scoring Guidelines for judging maturity, but Criteria users frequently rely solely on the Criteria requirements and do not take advantage of the Scoring Guidelines as a mechanism for both gauging improvement and maturity and for guidance in understanding how to reach that next level of maturity. Together the Criteria and the Scoring Guidelines form the full systems perspective for guiding and sustaining an organization. I liken the Criteria and Scoring Guidelines to the younger sibling and the older twins. The young sibling learns the criteria that are important to being part of the system (the family) and the older, wiser twins have learned how to succeed or fail in the family by growing and maturing to become increasingly valuable members of the family and sustain the family.

I hope this brief analogy helps organizations appreciate the richness of the combination of Criteria and Scoring Guidelines to guide progress and sustainability. This has been a rather different blog post than my usual. I would like to hear your reactions. And how does your organizational family measure up?

Comments

[Debbye Wallace]

Harry
This post was really eye opening for me. I never connected these dots from my role as an application writer in my organization and my role as an examiner. This analogy will help our organization better utilize the scoring guidelines.
Thank you
Debbye

[Bryan Zak]

Thank you for using the Twins analogy to share about ADLI and LeTCI that they are fraternal, non-identical twins but kindred spirits closely linked to all they do. Keep the analogies coming!

[Barry Johnson]

Romulus is the Scoring Guidlines.

[Harry Hertz]

Just for Barry,

I refuse to kill the Criteria. Romulus would not survive in this case without Remus.

Harry

[Seo Melbourne]

Very inspirational and full of creativity thanks for sharing..! Fantastic walk-through I appreciate this post.

[marketing solutions]

The subject is really attractive. Congratulations to the writer of the blog... Thanks for this insightful post.