The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: Implications and Uses for Healthcare Organizations

Abstract

Whatever your line of business, chances are the rate of change you are experiencing is outrunning your organization's ability to keep up. This environment challenges business leaders to redesign their enterprises using revolutionary change strategies. Evolutionary change processes that were successful in the past are ineffective in the competitive global marketplace. However, several viewpoints for organizational redesign exist. For example, noted author Peter Senge believes in the importance of creating a learning organization. He argues that an “organization doesn't start out great, it learns to be great. Learning organizations are those where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective organization is set free, and where people are continually learning to learn together.”l Senge describes those organizations that will excel in the future as those that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in the organization. In times of rapid change, employees' ability to analyze work processes and to improve them can be the difference between organizational success and failure. Many organizations accept this theory but have difficulty determining how to create a learning organization through empowering and energizing the work force.