Why organisations don’t use excellence to improve

Business Excellence (BE) has proven to be the most effective means of growing any organisation faster than any other organisational improvement methodology.

In Excellence: the world‘s best kept secret blueprint for success I reported that excellent companies grow more than twice as fast as ISO 9001 certified companies. Sadly just a few thousand organisations globally have achieved the highest levels of excellence in the past 30 years that excellent frameworks have been in existence.

​So why is it that so many organisations are not involved with excellence?

Over the past 25 years many leaders have explained why their organisations do not use business excellence to improve. The three main reasons leaders give are;
 
1. Business excellence is unknown to the organisation. Often the key decisionmakers are unaware that business excellence frameworks exist, or what can be achieved if they employed excellence in their organisation.
 
2. Excellence is for large companies that win awards. There is a perception that business excellence is for Excellence Awards programmes.  While this is why business excellence was created in the first place, there are many more organisations using the business excellence framework to improve than there are involved in awards. Excellence can be applied to any type of organisation in any industry. I have worked with solo operators who have never applied for an Excellence Award and yet are operating at world class levels of performance. Because of their small size where implementation is easy, many of these solo operators have achieved extraordinary growth over very short periods of time.
 
3. It takes too long. Business excellence is not a quick fix. Like any meaningful organisational change, it involves challenging the culture and beliefs of people. While a few early wins may be visible just 12 months after the start of implementation, growth needs to be measured over a 5 to 10-year period.
 
The reality is that most organisations operate at less than their true potential simply because they do not know what they don't know. There are gaps in their systems and processes that they are unaware of. It is these unknown gaps that are holding them back – these are their barriers to growth and advancement.
 
You can uncover these barriers, and shed light on areas you did not realise were important by assessing your organisation against the business excellence framework.  

Why not see if you have any significant gaps in your organisation? It may turn out to be the best improvement initiative you have undertaken, and set you up for growth in 2019.