Results dominate management — yet they are often misunderstood.
Metrics, targets, and comparisons are widely regarded as the foundation for steering and evaluation.
And yet, in practice, a fundamental problem persists:
Results are often viewed in isolation.
At the core lies a simple pattern:
Action → Result → Evaluation.
It assumes clear, linear cause-and-effect relationships.
However, in complex organisations, this assumption no longer holds.
Organisations do not operate in a linear way. They are networked, socio-technical systems in which results emerge from multiple, interacting dynamics.
Many traditional management models respond by separating “enablers” and “results”. While this may seem plausible, it leads directly to the core problem.
Results are viewed in isolation — and lose their meaning.
This is exactly the breaking point — and exactly where the Excellence Framework Europe (EFE) takes a different approach.
The EFE deliberately avoids defining separate results criteria. This is not because results are unimportant, but because they emerge everywhere.
Results become visible in an organisation’s orientation, strategy, collaboration, value creation, and development. To understand results, we need to look precisely there.
And this is where the real misunderstanding lies:
Results are not just what we measure at the end. Rather, they show how well our system actually works.
This fundamentally shifts the focus:
from isolated metrics to the deliberate design of organisational capabilities and impact relationships.
The traditional separation of enablers and results suggests linearity. It assumes cause-and-effect relationships that follow a simple pattern.
But organisations do not work that way.
Cause-and-effect relationships do exist — but in complex, networked systems they are layered, delayed, and interdependent.
In the EFE, therefore, results are not a separate category.
They are an integral part of all organisational capabilities.
In other words:
Results are not assessed in isolation; rather, they are interpreted within the system from which they emerge.
In the next article, we show how the Excellence Framework Europe (EFE) fundamentally rethinks results along an impact chain — from deployed resources through delivered outputs and created benefits to sustainable impacts.
Expert and author
Dr. Felix Horner
Chairman of the Board of Trustees
ESPRIX Excellence Suisse
Email: felix.horner@esprix.ch
Website: ESPRIX Excellence Suisse