Using the EFQM Model & RADAR for Self-Assessment

Many people will be familiar with the story of Snow White and the Evil Queen.

Every day the Evil Queen would look in the magic mirror, which always told the truth, and say….

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

And every day the magic mirror would respond by saying “Thou, O Queen, art the fairest in the land.”

Until the day came when the magic mirror told the Evil Queen she was no longer the fairest of them all.

The fairest was now Snow White.

So why are we telling you this story? In week 1 we introduced you to the ideas of ecosystems and megatrends. Snow White is a new player, a disruptor in the Evil Queen’s ecosystem. The story of the Evil Queen and Snow White can be seen as a metaphor for the world we live in today. There will always be another challenge(r) appearing on the horizon.

To become and remain truly outstanding, an organisation needs to be able to look at itself in the mirror. It should always celebrate its strengths, but it also needs to be honest enough with itself to acknowledge its opportunities for improvement.

In the previous weeks of this course, you were introduced to the EFQM Model and its associated RADAR logic. Using the EFQM Model and RADAR together as a diagnostic tool can help any organisation move ever closer to becoming outstanding.

This process of looking at oneself in the mirror, what EFQM calls Self-Assessment, is a key ingredient in any organisation’s strategy development process. The self-assessment process gives any organisation a more effective way to identify and respond to opportunities and threats.

Self-assessment is a very effective way for an organisation to look in the mirror to see what it does, how it does it, the results it gets and the degree of confidence it has that these results will be sustained in the future.

Using this process, an organisation has the potential to produce a comprehensive picture of its overall fitness at any given moment in time. This snapshot provides valuable feedback on the current performance results, and on the effectiveness and efficiency of the organisation’s current approaches across all its activities. It can help to focus improvement where it matters most.

This week you will discover how self-assessment is an important tool for organisations when determining their future strategic direction. We will explain the generic process and provide a simple, practical example of one technique for undertaking self-assessment. We will also provide a brief overview of two, more rigorous, approaches to self-assessment that can be found on EFQM’s AssessBase digital platform.