Baldrige Excellence Framework (Business/Nonprofit/Government)
Now Available: 2026 Revision
America’s Leading Quality and Excellence Framework
For almost 40 years, the Baldrige Excellence Framework® has empowered organizations to accomplish their missions, improve results, and become more competitive. The Framework enables organizations to identify strengths, uncover gaps, and improve performance in a way that aligns with their mission and environment.
The Baldrige Excellence Framework includes
- New Baldrige Maturity Pathways
- Framework Category Questions
- Core Values and Concepts
- Evaluation Dimensions and Scoring Rubrics
Core Values and Concepts
The Baldrige core values and concepts are integrated into six categories of questions for building systematic processes, yielding an organization’s performance results.
Beginning with a systems perspective, the core values are integrated into the Baldrige Excellence Framework, which is organized into six categories that represent the essential components of organizational performance: Leadership, Strategy, Customers, Organizational Intelligence, Workforce, and Operations.
These categories are built around questions that address both processes and results, and the responses to these questions are viewed through a Maturity Pathway and associated rubrics to support learning and continuous improvement.
By asking questions, the Baldrige Excellence Framework remains nonprescriptive, enabling each organization to apply the core values at their own pace and in a manner that best suits their own organizational culture and beliefs. Performance results are integrated throughout these categories to evaluate outcomes, inform decisions, and guide improvement.
These core values and six categories operate as an integrated system. Leadership sets direction and values; strategy translates direction into action; customers define value; organizational intelligence supports fact-based decision-making; the workforce enables execution and learning; and operations deliver products and services.
Joins Us for the Upcoming Framework Webinar
September 2, 2026 | 1 p.m. EST
The Baldrige Foundation will be hosting a Zoom webinar on September 2, 2026, at 1p.m. EST to walk through the major changes and provide an overview of the maturity pathways.
Resources
Baldrige Key Terms
Baldrige Improvement Tools
Foundations for a Successful Business
