The Case against ISO 9000 (2nd ed)
The Case against ISO 9000 (2nd ed)
John SeddonVanguard Education£18.45
Keywords: ISO 9000, Quality, United Kingdom
Since 1979 British organisations have been persuaded to register to ISO 9000(originally known as BS 5750). ISO 9000 is a quality management standard;registration to it being a formal recognition that an organisation is managed in a quality manner. However, John Seddon contends that this has been a mistake of monumental proportions – rather than improving the quality and competitive position of firms, ISO 9000 has made matters worse. He suggests that the approach is over-bureaucratic and that award of the standard is simply recognition of an effective bureaucracy.
In a study, he undertook in 1993, he found that less than 15 per cent of the people who responded claimed their organisations had achieved all of the benefits attributed to ISO 9000 in the literature of its promoters. In subsequent visits, he claims to have found evidence of things put in place to comply with the Standard which were making matters worse. Further research suggests to him that the limit on learning and flexibility inherent in ISO 9000 predictably causes people to do things which at best sub-optimise their organisation's performance and at worst make it considerably worse. As an example, contract review – the clause dictating how to deal with customers– leads to precisely that, a contractual attitude to customers; the last thing you need in a marketplace driven by customer choice and the need for a value-creating response. Successful quality methods, he contends, spring from a perspective which is diametrically opposed to the thinking in ISO 9000.
