"How can we save the polar bears?"

A month ago—almost two, now that I check—I wrote about Kyle Chambers of Texas Quality Assurance, and how he and I came away with totally different understandings when we read the ISO 9001 Auditing Practices Group Guidance on: Auditing Climate Change issues in ISO 9001. Kyle summarized his perspective in a podcast with Caleb Adcock. It's a good podcast, and I suggest you go listen to it if you haven't yet.

My earlier post explained why Kyle and I read the document so differently, but in the course of the podcast he and Caleb raised a number of other topics they didn't have time to explore. For example, at about 19:28 they ask,

"What about the company who says 'We have only 100 employees, so how can we save the polar bears?'"

This is a really good question, and it gets to the heart of ISO 9001's new requirement about climate change. 

What does the requirement say?

The first important point is to recognize that the climate change requirement comes in clause 4.1, so it relates to determining the context of your organization. It never says you have to take this or that concrete action to address climate effects. The full text of the requirement is simply: "The organization shall determine whether climate change is a relevant issue."

To be clear, there is a lot hidden behind that simple statement. If you decide that climate change is a relevant issue for your organization, then ISO 9001 asks you to do something about it. If you say it's relevant and then take no action, you'll have a lot of explaining to do in your next audit.

On the other hand, that requirement is also common sense. The key word is "relevant." If an issue is relevant to your business, that's not the same as saying it's important. "Relevant" means that the issue affects how you do business in some way, that you have to make a change (positive or negative). 

For example, let's say that you sell hot dogs off the pier, and suddenly you learn that a rogue asteroid is going to destroy the Earth in 30 minutes. That asteroid is obviously important. But there is probably nothing you can do to stop it, so there's no point in making any changes to your business in the next half hour. The asteroid is important but not relevant. 

Therefore, if you decide that climate change is a relevant issue for your organization, that means that you have already determined you need to take some kind of action. If you need to take action, you'll do it with or without ISO 9001. So do what you have to do. Then document it for the auditor, and you should be fine. On the other hand, if climate change makes literally no difference to how you conduct business, then that means climate change is not relevant for your organization. That doesn't mean that you are denying climate change.* It's just a technical evaluation about how you do your work. 

What's a small company to DO? 

Fine, but what is a small company to do? How can a small company save the polar bears?

Well, mostly you probably can't. (If you know a small company that makes VOOM or other magical compounds, they might be an exception.) But the key is to go back and think about whether there's anything else you might have to change.

Here's an example:

I know a small company in the Pacific Northwest. They are in an urban area, but all around them are forests. And every summer, for as long as anyone can remember, they've had forest fires. Forest fires generate smoke, so the air quality turns bad. And the company has a few key employees who suffer from impaired breathing for one reason or another. So whenever there's a forest fire, a few employees call in saying they can't come to work.

Things have been like this as long as anyone can remember, and the company has always planned their employee allocations on the assumption that the bad air from forest fires will last three or four days each summer. But in the last couple of years—no one has exactly kept track of the dates, but it seems like a recent development—forest fire season each summer has stretched from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. As a result, the company has had to rethink all their summer staffing, to account for the longer stretches when certain people are unavailable.

Is this the result of climate change? Probably. At least it might be. But honestly, who cares? What is unquestionable is that the worsening air quality is a documented fact, and that it has forced the company to make changes in their staffing plans. This particular company is not certified to ISO 9001. But if they were, I would advise them to document these staffing changes as their response to the requirement that they determine whether climate change is a relevant issue for them.

If you are a small company, think what this example might mean for you. All your details will be different, of course. But look for any points where you find you have to change how you work, in order to account for changes outside you. Those are the points most likely to be relevant. Then do what you have to do.

Most of the time it should be that simple.

__________

* It is not my purpose here to take any position in the public and political debates about climate change itself, because the Quality business has intelligent people on both sides of that divide. My only point at the moment is that arguing whether climate change is real is a totally different question from arguing whether it is formally relevant to this or that specific business.