What if ISO had to explain their changes?

Last week, Al Smith posted a suggestion to the ISO 9001 community in LinkedIn as follows:

When a change to ISO 9001 is under consideration, should it require a clear and understandable documented statement of the actual value the change will provide to the user and the QMS performance? Should it also be a requirement that this documented statement be made public [and easily accessible] and also be a required item before approval can be considered?

Would not this aid in [eliminating] the risk of change just for the sake of change?

It's a really good idea; and the longer I thought about it, the more use-cases I came up with. In the first place, of course, it would help the process of rolling out changes to the standard, exactly as Smith described. It seems like there should be less risk of frivolous changes in case each change had to be justified in public. And when a change is made, it should cause correspondingly less trouble to persuade the international community of its necessity. Surely both of these consequences are wins.

But let's take it farther. Suppose we extend the requirement for public justification to cover not only changes but the full clauses themselves, so that requirements for document control or corrective action would have to be accompanied by boxed text explaining why they are a good idea.* In some cases it would be pretty easy: anyone who has ever tried to do business without a functioning system for document control or corrective action will know why immediately. Other clauses might require more words, especially if they introduce new concepts like "risk-based thinking" or "context of the organization." But the availability of explanations or examples would make it a lot easier for companies to implement ISO 9001 (or any other management system standard) because they would have a much better idea than they do today what each requirement is for.

This also means that companies could see right away when requirements don't apply. After all, it is simply not true that every clause applies to every organization. The standard may require that such-and-such a function has to be handled in a certain way; but if your organization simply doesn't have that function or anything like it, those clauses don't apply to you. Anyone who is truly familiar with the standard understands this implicitly. The problem is that many organizations who seek to implement ISO 9001 and to be certified to it aren't familiar with the standard. So they end up implementing procedures that they don't need, to protect against failure modes that will never happen because those failure modes pertain to functions that these organizations don't have. This is pure waste.

In some cases, maybe an organization like this will hire a Quality Manager or a Quality Consultant who can tell them they are wasting their time. If he can get them to back off from the unnecessary measures, maybe he can justify some of his salary in the form of cost savings. But (as things stand today) there is always the risk that the company will be assigned an external auditor who doesn't understand the point either, and who writes them up for failing to do something they don't need to do. In that case the Quality Manager or Consultant has a chance to justify a little more of his salary by rejecting the findings, and either educating the auditor or appealing over his head.**

But think how much simpler life would be if all companies understood what the requirements of the standard are there for, and when they apply! All of the added complication, the arcane specialization, and the clerical disputations over transcendental principle could be eliminated. It might put people like me out of a job, but not for long. We're all clever, and we'd find somewhere else to add value. But it would simplify the entire Quality enterprise enormously.

We can always dream.

Of course in the real world it sometimes happens that reforms have unintended consequences. I can imagine a reform like this one going wrong if the people tasked to write all that explanatory text just write for each other, and not for the outside world. Then we'd get "explanations" full of shorthand and unreferenced acronyms, and that wouldn't help anyone. So I guess this idea is not a panacea after all, at any rate not unless we figure out how to put some guardrails around its implementation.

Too bad. I kind of liked it.   

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* This is not exactly a new suggestion. Writing in the 4th century BCE, Plato recommended that legislation should always be preceded by an explanatory introduction to say what problem the law was supposed to solve, and to encourage people to follow it. See, in particular, the discussion of "preludes" in his Laws, Book 4, starting around 721B and continuing for several pages. 

** Strictly speaking it is also possible that the company might hire an unethical Consultant who knows perfectly well that they don't need to address this or that clause, but who develops a system that addresses it anyway in order to secure more billable hours of work. I don't like to think about this possibility, so I won't discuss it any further. I hope it is vanishingly rare. But there is nothing today which actually prevents it.