The questions in the Organizational Profile of the Baldrige Criteria ask you to describe your organization’s characteristics and competitive environment. This includes the key requirements of three groups: employees, customers, and your supply chain. It also asks about key strategic challenges and advantages that relate to creating a sustainable organization.

The strategic planning category picks up this thread by asking how you determine your core competencies and strategic challenges and advantages. It also asks how your strategy development process identifies potential blind spots and your ability to execute the plan.

Some organizations use simple priority quadrant diagrams to help identify blind spots and assess capabilities. Here’s an example that matches organizational capabilities to customer requirements.

The diagram may be simple but the data, information, and analysis behind it is not. First, you need a profound knowledge of who your customers are and what they require. You can read articles about this here and here. If you assume you know what these requirements are, the decisions you base on your assumptions can lead you in the wrong direction.

Second, you need a profound knowledge of what your organization’s capabilities are. Again, if you assume you know what they are without doing a reality check, your assumptions can lead you astray.

Once you know what your customers require and how well your organization can meet those requirements, you can complete the priority quadrants. You can also use this process with employee and supply chain requirements. You can use it with any key work process since each process has customers. You can change the horizontal access to evaluate organizational performance, core competencies, competitor performance, or other factors.

The benefit of completing policy quadrants is not just in the visibility they give to what you do well and what you need to do better, but also the demand they make to use accurate and reliable information in the process.

It’s a simple tool with profound implications.

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