Parasitic certifications? Part 2, The crapification of things

In last week's post, we looked at a broad and fundamental criticism from a reader named Scotlyn, indicting the whole system of global standardization and certification as (in essence) fraudulent and parasitic. Now I want to examine each of Scotlyn's points carefully, to see how far I agree with her. 

Please note that I actively encourage your participation too. Add your feedback in the Comments. Tell us what you think.

Scotlyn's first charge is that "the relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional," and that "it follows that the more standards, the less quality." Is this true?

There are two sides to this charge, which I want to treat separately: product standards, and management system standards. I will discuss product standards here, and management system standards next week.

Part of the difficulty in discussing product standards is that many of the most basic ones have become so ubiquitous in the industrialized world that they are almost invisible. I'm thinking of the kinds of basic safety standards for food or equipment that were unheard-of 150 years ago but that we take for granted today. Whatever else might be said for or against the modern meatpacking industry, for example (and it is not a specialty of mine), I'm pretty sure that practices are more sanitary than they were back when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. You can probably think of other examples on your own. And I assume that nobody will argue for abandoning the most basic safety standards, except perhaps as a rhetorical exercise. But as the number of product standards proliferates, we begin to see at least two problems. 

The first problem is that each standard imposes constraints on the design of a product, and requires some non-zero fraction of the designer's attention. The more standards there are, the more of the designer's attention has to go into meeting basic requirements, leaving less attention available to put towards the inherent quality of the design. The only way to counter this effect (to the extent that it can be countered at all) is to take longer designing the product. Once upon a time, maybe it took a month for a small team at WidgetCorp to design and test a really good widget. But after the introduction of a lot of Mandatory Widget-Industry Standards, it might take twice as long to design the very same widget. The designers now have to read all the standards, and confirm that their design meets them in theory; and then testers have to run tests for every single standard to make sure each one has been met. The end result might not be any different from what it would have been otherwise, although the team will know a lot more facts about the product than they would have without the standards, and they will have recorded all those facts in a huge stack of documents. But all this work takes time and effort, with the result that WidgetCorp now takes twice as long to bring a new widget to market, and charges twice as much for them to recoup the added development costs. And as a direct result of this hefty increase in time and cost, ....

The second problem is that a competing manufacturer (Fly-By-Night Widgets) will enter the market designing widgets that strictly comply with the standards, but that are in other respects as slapdash as possible. With this approach, Fly-By-Night brings out their widgets faster than WidgetCorp does, and sells them for cheaper. And we all know that — other things being equal — the market favors whichever competitor is faster and cheaper. After a while, Fly-By-Night drives WidgetCorp out of business, and the market is saturated with widgets that comply with standards but are otherwise worthless. This long-term process is what Scotlyn describes as the "crapification of things." (See also this Dilbert cartoon for a summary of the same observation.)

Is there a solution to this dynamic? At a theoretical level and in the general case, no, I don't think so.* I believe the best we can hope for is one or another pragmatic settlement.** By a "pragmatic settlement," what I mean is two things. 

• First, some companies will continue to make products which are so obviously superior that customers will willingly pay more for them. (I once audited a VP of Sales who said his department's whole job was to explain to potential customers why they should pay five times as much for one of this company's products as for a competitor's. Mostly they succeeded in doing so.) 
• Second, maybe we can come to some kind of agreement around a basic level of standards (for, e.g., health and safety) which clearly represent a bare minimum — maybe we can agree not to sell laudanum as a cure for a broken leg, for instance  — and then stop there. If it were clear that "meets standards" is not the same as "good enough," we might be able to hold back the threat of encroaching crapification, at least for a while.

Or perhaps this answer isn't good enough, in which case I invite your contributions. How would you address the conundrum? 

Next week I'll talk about management systems.

__________

* Or if there is a solution, it involves modifying some of the assumptions behind this description (for example, the principle of economic competition) in ways which are far beyond the scope of this blog and even farther beyond my competence as an author.

** For the distinction between solutions and settlements, see Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics, "Addendum: The Myth of the Solution."      

Parasitic certifications? Part 1, The challenge

Just about a week ago, I got a comment on one of these posts that (in a sense) I had been waiting for since I started the blog. The comment, by a reader named Scotlyn, was in response to my post asking whether the Russo-Ukrainian War might bring about the end of the global standardization and certification schema, but it raised issues that go far beyond even as broad a topic as the war. 

As for saying that I've been waiting since the start of this blog, you remember that right in my very first post I explained that my fundamental goal here is to encourage people to talk back to their Quality systems, forcing the Quality systems to justify themselves in ways that make sense. I said I wanted to discuss "what works and what doesn't work" – and I tried to make the point that if a Quality system can't justify itself in rational terms, then we should change it or get rid of it.

This is the challenge that Scotlyn takes up. She suggests point-blank, on the basis of personal experience, that formal Quality systems and formal certification add no value whatever, and are in fact parasitic on productive work. I don't  think I quite agree, but we have all heard people say these things before. If we can't discuss the question honestly and give a decent defense of the Quality business, we can't ask anyone to take us seriously.

Scotlyn's comment is fairly long, so for convenience I'm going to reproduce it here. Then in next week's post, I'll start to answer it. Meanwhile, if you have anything to add to the discussion on your own account, please feel free to comment as well. We can make this conversation as broad and general as it has to be.

So, to begin, Scotlyn wrote as follows:

I have a great personal interest in the theme of standards and certifications, since I worked for many years as compliance officer for a local fish processing company. That is to say, I was the person in the company that interfaced with the global standards and certification industry. By the time I left my job I was convinced of these things:

(1) that the relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional. Making the product is one domain that is stubbornly incommensurate with the quite separate domain of documenting, and monitoring compliance with product standards. (in almost exactly the same way as the Tao Te Ching states that the names we can give a thing are not the thing). The standards will never be the products, nor ever be able to satisfactorily describe them.

(2) that, because of (1), it follows that the more standards, the less quality. Standardisation is, in fact, an essential component of the “crapification of things”.

(3) that the relationship between certified standards and the actual economy is parasitic, in that the more jobs that are created to certify, to inspect, to manage, to comply, to produce documentation (including my own entirely non-productive job), the more that productive jobs (the making, transporting of goods, and the providing of services) are destroyed.

(4) that, because of (3), the global standards and certification industry will eventually eat production and the economy, and bring the whole thing to a collapse from too much top-heaviness, and too little bottom sturdiness. Out of which, small, light, and fast non-compliant producers and purveyors who can stay below the radar and out of the limelight, will emerge and begin to create whatever comes next.

I have to tell you that the prospect of a set back to the global certification industry would not cost me a hair’s worry. It contains enough of its own contradictions and unstable weight to collapse without help. Although, to be sure, those employed in its giant documentation fabricating enterprises will resist being made redundant. And it will make thunderous noise as it falls.

On the whole, I'd call that critique pretty thorough. Next week I will take up these points to discuss them. Stay tuned.

        

"Sage powers" and learning to listen

Last week I attended another great webinar. It was hosted by Angie Alexander, of Corporate Catalyst Consulting, and she was interviewing Jeff Griffiths of WorkForce Strategies International. Regular readers will remember that I wrote about Griffiths last fall: in this post where I described his webinar "People Before Process," and then in follow-on posts (here and here) where I picked up a later question that he and I discussed afterwards and worked my way through it.

This webinar was called "Getting Sh*t Done! – Optimizing Performance through Human Centric Sage Leadership."* Ms. Alexander's starting point is the recognition that our internal attitude towards our work has a huge impact on our outcomes. Maybe that doesn't sound controversial when I state it so broadly, since the general message dates at least to the time of Epictetus. But Alexander then developed the point in some detail by identifying ten "saboteurs" (ideas or attitudes that get in the way of our working well) and five "sage powers" that combat the saboteurs and allow us to work with calm, clarity, and happiness. These five sage powers are:

• empathy, an unconditional love of yourself and others
• exploration, based on a love of learning
• innovation, a creative willingness to think of all the possibilities
• navigation, a search for purpose and meaning that asks "What's really important?"
• activation, moving forward without all the distractions

During the subsequent conversation, Griffiths picked up each of these themes in turn and gave examples from his own career. To take just the very first one, he explained that without empathy it's easy to react to a difficult situation by feeling you are surrounded by idiots. But if you slow down, take a deep breath, and accept them unconditionally, then you can start to see where these people are coming from and they no longer look like idiots. Then you can work with them in a productive way. 

For my part, I spent the whole webinar thinking about the Quality business. I saw at least two places where the crossover is very strong.

One of these is in the area of problem-solving. You remember back in January I discussed the principle that "There is no such thing as human error." At the time I called this a "motivational slogan," and I emphasized how it is a useful approach if you want the cooperation (which you need) of people who were on the scene when an accident occurred. But this approach is just empathy in action, a willingness to see the events through the eyes of another person as a first step towards error-proofing the operation for the future. And after all, if your problem-solving exercise comes up with a solution that would work for you (if only you were the one on the scene) but that won't work for the people who actually do the job – in other words, if your solution lacks empathy for the people who have to implement it – then you really haven't solved anything and you can count on the problem to recur.

The other is in the area of auditing. One of the most dangerous temptations for an auditor is the desire to start telling your auditees how to do everything differently. In your mind it's simple: you know the management system standards, you've seen how those standards are implemented by hundreds of other companies, and these folks are simply doing it all wrong! And from the other side, pretty much every organization that goes through regular external audits has met one or more auditors who give into this temptation. I've talked before about how the line between auditing and consulting gets particularly fuzzy during internal audits; but during external audits it is important to keep it clear. And even in internal audits, you can't abuse your authority as an auditor just because the manager of this department stubbornly insists on doing things in a way that looks crazy to you.

For this reason, I have found it very useful when conducting audits to slow down, keep quiet, and listen. I'll ask how this or that part of the system works, and then just let the auditees talk. At first glance I might think they are doing it all wrong; I tell myself, "If I had designed their system, I would have done it differently." But it's their system, not mine. So if I wait and listen, after a while I can start to see the system through their eyes. I can start to see how the strange bits all hang together as a system. And I can see that my first objections were often based on my own failure to understand. At this point I may have some thoughts about how certain aspects can be improved – "Is there a risk because you aren't keeping minutes from this or that regular meeting?" – but I'm no longer going to ask them to redesign the whole thing from the beginning.

At its best, then, auditing deploys – or should deploy – all five of Alexander's "sage powers": empathy, to understand the client's system on its own terms; exploration and innovation, to look past the auditor's own preconceptions and see what the client is trying to do; navigation, to understand which topics really can put the client's system at risk; and activation, to proceed from there and find the nonconforming gaps (if any) which it will really add value for the client to fix. Of course if you find other nonconformities along the way you have to report them. But you provide the best service if you focus where it hurts.

It's not always easy, and at the end your list of findings may be shorter than it would have been doing it in a more directive way. But it's more helpful to work this way, which is the whole point. Besides, we're not paid by the finding.  😀        

__________

* Yes, the second word in the title really did have an asterisk instead of the vowel.     

Will this be the end of global certification?

Military situation as of 6 April 2022

Things happen fast in wartime.

On 24 February 2022 — that's six weeks ago today — Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which has been going on at greater or lesser intensity since 2014. More than forty nations reacted to this invasion by imposing a wide range of economic sanctions against Russia. The nations imposing these sanctions include the European Union and other nations in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan — which is to say that this list of nations includes many of the largest economies of the world. The hope was that these sanctions would hurt the Russian economy and encourage a quick end to the war.

The ISO, the IAF, and Grand Fenwick

What does any of this have to do with Quality? It has to do with standardization. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) sit at the center of a network of technical and organizational standards and certifications that enable global trade. The idea is that the ISO should write standards which should be applicable around the world, and then the IAF should accredit certification or registration bodies around the world to validate that organizations or their products meet these standards.

But the ISO and the IAF don't sit in the clouds. They are embodied as real organizations on earth. The ISO is coordinated by a central office in Geneva, Switzerland. The IAF is registered as a Delaware corporation in the United States. They interact with regional or national organizations across the globe, and the legal form that interaction takes is the form of commerce. In other words, when the ISO issues a standard to be used by the national standards board of some country, for example Grand Fenwick, then the Grand Fenwick Standards Board becomes a customer of the ISO. When the ISO accredits the Grand Fenwick Registration Board, giving them the right to certify companies in Grand Fenwick to international standards (like ISO 9001, for example), then the Grand Fenwick Registration Board becomes a customer of the IAF.

Sanctions, decertification, and the Russian response

But wait. The ISO secretariat functions as a Swiss company, and Switzerland has imposed economic sanctions against Russia. The IAF is legally an American company, and the United States has imposed economic sanctions against Russia. In principle this should mean that neither the ISO nor the IAF should have Russian customers any more. But all the Russian certification bodies that have been accredited under this scheme, and all the individual Russian companies holding certificates from those CB's, are ultimately customers of the ISO and the IAF. So in principle all those accreditations and certificates are ... what? Null and void?

You'd think so, although up till now ISO and IAF have avoided saying it. (See for example this statement where the IAF says how sad they are about the "situation" in Ukraine while insisting that they have a policy of "neutrality.") But where they have been silent, other players in the global certification scheme have stepped in. For example, three weeks ago the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) issued a statement as follows:

As of 18 March 2022, ANAB required our accredited CABs to immediately halt all ANAB-accreditation activity in the Russian Federation and Belarus and to immediately remove all references to ANAB and ANAB-accreditation symbols associated with Russian or Belarusian entities, sites, products, and systems. ANAB-accredited CABS have been notified directly.

Nor is ANAB the only one. A week earlier, the Dutch Accreditation Council Raad voor Accreditatie (RvA) issued a statement denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and followed it by suspending their accreditation of the CB Russian Register. 

Two days ago, Christopher Paris of Oxebridge International reported that Russia finally responded to these measures by calling them "politically motivated" and insisting that they could get along just fine without ANAB and RvA anyway. So there! And in the short term it's hard to imagine that they could have said anything else.

The optimistic view

What does the future hold? In principle I think there are two possibilities: call them the optimistic view and the pessimistic view.

The optimistic view is easy to describe. If events follow this path, then Russia and Ukraine will make peace very soon; and after some conferences and other measures, the world will fall back into the status quo ante bellum. From the perspective of the global certification scheme we'll be right back where we were a year ago, let's say, and there will be no long term impact. That, as I say, is the optimistic view, and in principle I guess it should be possible. I do not have the expertise to estimate its likelihood.

The pessimistic view

The pessimistic view takes a little longer to describe, and it can start in either of two ways. 

War and distrust

One possibility is that the war will last longer than we expect, or longer than we hope. Another is that after the war is over, the Russians will be left with a deep and abiding distrust of the nations who sanctioned them. Either way, the likelihood of restoring the status quo ante bellum with respect to global certification vanishes almost to nothing. 

If the war continues for a long time, Russian companies cannot be expected to function for years without some kind of certification scheme. Since presumably they will not have access to Western accreditation and certification bodies during all that time, they will establish and use domestic ones.

If the war ends with the Russians feeling deep distrust for the West, the same thing will happen. Doubtless the Western AB's and CB's will make overtures to Russian companies as soon as peace is declared, reminding them of the benefits of global certification and asking them to come back as customers once more. But if we assume the level of distrust that I imagine here, then we must also guess that the Russian response will be, "Why should we be your customers again? So that you can decertify us a second time, the next time you get mad at us? Why should we let ourselves be dependent on you again? What's in it for us?" And so, again, we should assume that Russian companies will work with Russian AB's and CB's, not Western ones.

Separate schemes

On the surface, this doesn't sound very different from what we have today. For simple reasons of convenience, most Russian companies are already certified by Russian CB's, of course. What is crucial, though, is that in the scenario I describe here, the Russian AB's and CB's would belong to their own accreditation scheme and not the "global" one.

In other words: up until the invasion six weeks ago, every international standard used in Russia could be traced back to the ISO; and every certification could be traced back — sometimes through many steps — to the IAF. Under the pessimistic scenario I describe here, that would stop. For whatever reason — either because of the exigencies of war, or because of an abiding distrust of the West (or both, of course) — the actors in the Russian economy would, in this view, make it a point of principle never again to depend on "foreign" institutions like the ISO and the IAF. So the apex of the Russian certification pyramids would be Russian entities, not Swiss or American ones. Instead of the ISO, standards would be issued by the Russian Federal Agency on Technical Regulating and Metrology, the entity now responsible for issuing the GOST-R standards. Instead of the IAF, accreditations would be traceable back to Rosakkreditatsiya, the Russian Federal Service for Accreditation. 

Instead of one global standardization scheme, we would have two.    

Divergent standards

It doesn't stop there. Today, the GOST-R standards are strictly aligned with their ISO counterparts. They are translated into the Russian language, but there is scrupulous attention paid to keeping the standards uniform worldwide.

But once the standards are fully owned by a Russian authority, once they are understood to be Russian standards and not Russian translations of international standards, ... where is the incentive to keep them aligned in the future? Everyone who has ever managed documents knows that unless all updates are centralized, different copies of documents that start out the same inevitably drift apart over time. And we don't have to assume any malicious intention on the part of any of the actors involved. One year the ISO will change a standard, and the GOST-R agency won't be able to get a copy of the changes. Another year, they'll review the changes and decide that in good conscience they disagree. Both times the ISO standard will change while the "corresponding" GOST-R standard won't. Then there will be a year in which the Russian agency decides they have to make some other kind of change to address an urgent issue facing local companies; but they may feel themselves under no obligation even to report that change to ISO, and in any event ISO might not take it up. 

One way or another, after a few years the existence of two parallel standardization schemes will result in the existence of two parallel and incompatible sets of standards. 

A world divided

What are the consequences of having two incompatible sets of standards in the world? Obviously it will make it harder — and, incrementally, ever harder still — to do business across the divide. Companies that use one set of standards will find it hard to work with companies that use the other set. At a product level, spare parts might not fit; and at an organizational or process level, expectations will not be uniform.

But won't this mostly affect Russian companies? If Russia pushes to have its own, independent standardization and certification scheme in the wake of the current war, won't that just make it harder for Russian companies to do business with the rest of the world? Won't it just isolate Russian companies inside their own internal market? Does anybody outside of Russia need to care?

There is a short-term answer, and a long-term answer.

In the short term — the very short term — yes, measures like this would isolate Russian companies, by making it harder for them to trade in world markets. But the story doesn't stop there.

Plenty of countries are still interested in doing business with Russia. And even if a country (like China, for example) chooses to maintain trade relations at a national level with both Russia and the West, each individual company inside China will have to decide for themselves which set of standards to use. If a company does business predominantly with the West, it will probably continue to align itself with the ISO product and management system standards. But if a company does business predominantly with Russia, we should expect it to align itself with the GOST-R standards instead.

And in the very long run, this division cannot help but to make the Western economies weaker, because we will no longer be able to do business worldwide. Any time you restrict a market, you weaken the players who are confined to that market.

Maybe it sounds funny that I use words like "confined" to describe the West, since back at the beginning of this post I pointed out that the nations which have sanctioned Russia represent some of the largest economies in the world. But they do not represent all the large economies in the world, nor the fastest-growing ones.

• Of the 10 countries with the largest GDP, only 2 did not sanction Russia. (China, India)
• Of the 20 countries with the largest GDP, 8 did not sanction Russia. (China, India, Russia itself, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia)
• Of the 50 countries with the largest GDP, at least 25 — that's half — did not sanction Russia. That list of 25 includes some of the fastest-growing economies in the world: China and India, but also Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and others. 

We in the West will not be "confined" or "isolated" by our standardization scheme today, nor tomorrow. But there is a possibility that things won't look so rosy in another twenty years, to say nothing of longer terms than that. As above, I do not have the expertise to estimate the likelihood of this scenario.

Conclusion

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not criticizing the sanctions. I think the invasion of Ukraine is appalling, and I don't for a minute expect the nations of the world to sit around doing nothing while it goes on.

My only point is that every time we act, there are unforeseen consequences that propagate out like ripples on a pond. Some of those consequences may affect the worldwide standardization and certification schemes that we have come to take for granted. At the very least, maybe we can avoid being taken by surprise. 

Photo by Koen Emmers on Unsplash