To succeed in today’s global, competitive, uncertain environment, organizations must accept complexity. Handling complexity requires agility and the ability to execute with a sufficient degree of simplicity. A key focus of the current Criteria revisions is to help organizations achieve that simplicity in execution. Following are some highlights of the revisions:

•    Each group of questions now has a subhead that summarizes the content. With the outline formed by the category and item titles, titles for the areas to address, and these subheads, Criteria users now have a simple guide to performance excellence.

•    We have strengthened the line of sight from strategic challenges and advantages to core competencies, to strategy, and then to work systems and work processes.

•    Strategy development in our global marketplace will increasingly require some degree of intelligent risk taking, which is introduced as a new consideration in 2011. (On intelligent risk taking, see “Are You Lighting Fires or Getting Burned?“ in Insights on the Road to Performance Excellence, December 2010.)

Customer engagement has continued to receive increasing attention as organizations compete in the global marketplace and in competitive local markets. The Criteria now have an increased focus on this concept:

•    We have reorganized the flow of logic in the customer focus category to address this concept better.

•    We have placed the responsibility for a customer-focused culture in the senior leadership item.

•    The concept of listening and learning from and about the customer through the use of social media has been added to questions on how your organization listens to customers.

The most significant changes in the Criteria items and the booklet are as follows:

•    The number of areas to address has been reduced from 41 to 40, and the number of Criteria items has been reduced from 18 to 17, plus 2 in the Preface: Organizational  Profile.

•    The question that appeared in numerous items about keeping systems current with changing business needs and directions has been removed from the Criteria. This topic should be covered in strategic planning and is a sign of organizational maturity, which is reflected in the scoring guidelines as a function of learning and integration.

•    Item P.1, Organizational Description, no longer asks about managing supplier and partner relationships. Supply-chain management is now addressed in item 6.2.

•    Item P.2, Organizational Situation, includes societal responsibility as a factor to consider in your strategic challenges and advantages.

•    Item 1.1, Senior Leadership, includes a focus on creating a workforce culture that fosters customer engagement as a leadership responsibility.

•    Item 1.2, Governance and Societal Responsibilities, asks how senior leader performance evaluations are used in determining executive compensation.

•    This category has an enhanced focus on organizational agility to address a changing strategic environment.

•    Item 2.1, Strategy Development, asks how your strategic planning process considers projections of your and your competitors’ future performance. The item also asks about your ability to adapt to sudden shifts in your market conditions.

•    Item 2.2, now Strategy Implementation, specifically asks about the relationship of your action plans to your strategic objectives.

•    This category has been redesigned to enhance the flow of logic and incorporate the use of social media as a mechanism for listening to customers. (On the use of social media, see “Has Social Media Changed Your Organization?” in Insights on the Road to Performance Excellence, January 2011.)

•    Item 3.1, now Voice of the Customer, asks how you listen to current and potential customers and how you determine customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and engagement.

•    Item 3.2, now Customer Engagement, asks about your product offerings, customer support, customer segmentation, and use of customer data. These are important to building customer relationships, which is addressed in the second part of the item.

•    Item 4.1, Measurement, Analysis, and Improvement of Organizational Performance, now includes voice-of-the-customer data as a key component of organizational performance measurement. Use of customer data was previously addressed as a stand-alone factor in category 3. Performance improvement questions now ask about best-practice sharing and about the use of performance review findings and comparative data to project future performance.

•    This category has been reconfigured and simplified to enhance the flow of logic.

•    Item 5.1, now Workforce Environment, includes preparing for periods of workforce growth as part of managing workforce capacity and capability.

•    Item 5.2, now Workforce Engagement, includes customer focus as an element of workforce and leader development.

•    This category has been renamed to focus on the operations that produce and support the delivery of your product offerings.

•    Item 6.1, Work Systems, has been simplified to focus exclusively on work systems, including controlling their costs.

•    Item 6.2, Work Processes, specifically asks about the relationship of your work processes to your work systems. The item also asks about your supply-chain management processes.

•    This category has been aligned with the changes in categories 1–6 to encourage the measurement of important and appropriate results and also has been reduced from six items to five.

•    Item 7.1, now Product and Process Outcomes, results from the combination of former items dealing with product outcomes and process outcomes.

•    Item 7.3, now Workforce-Focused Outcomes, has been realigned to follow the flow of logic in category 5.

•    Item 7.4, now Leadership and Governance Outcomes, more explicitly details leadership responsibilities for delivering key results.

•    Item 7.5, now Financial and Market Outcomes, is now the last item, the “bottom line” for many organizations.

Several words in the Glossary of Key Terms have had slightly updated definitions. There has been a particular effort to clarify the definition of performance projections.

The results scoring guidelines have been modified to align better with the item format and organizational maturity by addressing the basic, overall, and multiple requirements of results items. Also, performance projection expectations are now included only in the 90–100% scoring range.