EFQM Ambassadors

As a member of the EFQM Faculty of Trainers I regularly have the pleasure to train a group of people who have applied to become EFQM Assessors. Again I had this pleasure last week, when I worked together with my fellow faculty member Chris Hakes.

Being an assessor is a demanding task and it requires a specific set of skills and competencies to be successful. That is why the EFQM Assessor Training (EAT) is a pass or fail training. Prior to the training participants are asked to analyse a case study. Completion of this case study exercise is a pre-requisite for taking the training. The ‘open registry’ trainings are delivered in Brussels at the EFQM premises. The training takes three days and people who pass are qualified to participate in an international EFQM Excellence Award Assessment. 

The assessor training is an intense event. During the open EAT you will normally work together with a diverse group of people who you have not met before, as you would during an assessment. The training group last week was again wonderfully diverse. People came from all over Europe and from various types of organisations to receive their training in Brussels.

During the training we go through the steps in the assessment process supported by the completion of several practical individual and team exercises. Participants are explained how to use the EFQM Model and RADAR in the context of executing an effective assessment of an organisation.

Ultimately Chris and myself have again been able to deliver new additions to the EFQM pool of assessors. The participants left the training content. Now they understand more about the EFQM Model and the benefits of applying it, not only for assessment purposes, but also as a tool for management for running and improving their business.

But apart from that I feel the EAT might also have turned them into new EFQM Ambassadors, as it turned me into one several years ago!

PBE

In 2006 when the deployment of the EFQM Excellence Model had been on the way for some time in Philips a new training course was developed. Although in-house assessor training had been provided to many managers throughout Philips over the years, the company identified that specifically RADAR-thinking provided the biggest added value to its managers in their day-to-day working environment. This resulted in the development of a training to teach managers in Philips to use this tool directly on processes. The training consisted of two courses. The first course was called the Philips Business Excellence Course 1 Introduction, a half a day introduction into Excellence, the Concept and the Model. The second course was the Philips Business Excellence Course 2 Calibration, a full day workshop to practice to apply RADAR directly on processes with help of a few case study assignments. The aim was to ‘quickly’ provide Philips managers with an easy and practical tool to help them to look at and review the processes in their own organisation in a structured way.

Specifically Philips Research has been providing these training courses to its managers for these many years. However as the EFQM Excellence Model was updated last year, so were the PBE-training materials in need of an update. On request of Philips Research I updated the training materials and provided the first ‘EFQM Model 2010 proof’ PBE-training courses to a group of managers from Philips Research at the beginning of this month. It was an inspiring and successful training as the participants concluded that RADAR is a practical tool to review their business processes and identify areas for improvement. One participant commented that he had wished he had known about this tool already years ago! I am very happy that the workshop was a success and I am already looking forward to providing the next PBE-training courses!

Chaordic

I attended two wonderful conferences. Towards the end of October I attended the annual conference of Bbest near Brussels with the sustainability of our future on the agenda. Earlier last month I was a delegate at the EFQM Forum on Creativity & Innovation The Art of Management. This year’s Forum was set in the beautiful Basque city of Bilbao home of the amazing Guggenheim Museum as the superb expression of creativity.

Throughout the Forum there was one question that occupied my mind at that time, and after still… A young Canadian speaker called Lotfi El-Ghandouri posed the question. He explained to us that you need chaos and not order to be able to be creative. He spoke about the concept of “chaordic”. And after some more explanations he asked us “How much chaos and how much order do you need to be creative?”

Later in the month I attended the Bbest Taking Responsibility for a Sustainable Future conference. You are maybe interested to learn that Bbest is the primary partner of the EFQM in Belgium and The Netherlands. It is licensed to promote and deliver the EFQM products and services in these countries. 

During the Bbest conference some exiting announcements were made. Firstly the translation in Dutch of EFQM 2010 Model has been completed and is now available. A group of Flemish and Dutch EFQM Model experts volunteered to create a new translation that would meet the needs of both Flemish and Dutch organisations interested in Excellence. Bbest also announced the Benelux Excellence Award. It will be presented for the first time in October 2011. It will be given to the organisation(s) with the best performance as assessed according to the EFQM Model. Organisations that have received a 4-star or 5-star Recognition for Excellence (R4E) from Bbest in the 12 months previous are automatically eligible for the Benelux Excellence Award.

The main part of the conference was obviously made up of companies sharing their strategies and approaches on sustainability. Although many good and relevant issues and options were discussed throughout the conference, I still had the unsettling feeling that despite these great examples we will not live in a sustainable future in anytime soon. We really need to be creative and implement global solutions to our sustainability challenges and quickly too.

Maybe we should be more brave and try it in a chaordic way?