It's the little things

One of the things that can make the whole ISO 9001 effort feel dispiriting is that the things we auditors ask for seem so small. The company is making fundamental breakthroughs in neural networks or quantum computing, and we ask for training records. Or the company has just perfected the self-driving car, and we ask for meeting minutes. When some company – maybe next year – finally releases the transporter technology from Star Trek, we'll ask for signed attendance lists from all the design reviews. And so on. It can feel like there is a disproportion between the (perhaps) heroic work being done and the (often) mundane work products that we have to check in an audit. And of course that disproportion contributes to the spread of more jokes and cartoons about ISO 9001.

The point is, all these things matter, or they can. It's not always easy to see why. But sometimes you just can't miss it.

Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, there was a company that set some very aggressive goals one year and missed them all by miles. At the end of the year there was a big Town Hall meeting of the whole company to go over the results, and the Big Boss explained how poorly they'd performed. One of the senior employees asked, "How are we changing the targets next year, to make them achievable?"

The Big Boss replied, "We're not changing anything. The targets we missed this year are the ones we'll try to hit next year."

The employee pushed back, asking, "If you do the same thing as before and expect different results, isn't that supposed to be the definition of insanity?"

The Big Boss smiled and said, "But we're not going to do the same things. Next year we are going to keep meeting minutes." 

Then he explained what had gone wrong. All year long the Senior Management Team held meetings to review the company's strategy, and everyone left the meetings thinking that everyone else was responsible for doing the work to get there. So nobody in senior management did anything useful all year, and – since nobody was steering – the company drove into a tree.

The whole difference between success and failure came down to meeting minutes. For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost.

That's why we ask about these little things. Yes, the whole point of the QMS is to get us what we want. Yes, the first question to ask about any artifact should be whether we need it in the Real World, even in the absence of ISO 9001. But often we do. Often it's the little things that make the difference.