When half a loaf is worse than none

You work in a small office that's part of a big organization, and the experts at Headquarters just issued a new regulation. Everyone has to comply. You don't have the budget to implement the whole thing, but you could do half of it with no trouble. Should you do that half, just to show good faith? Isn't half a loaf better than none? 

Not so fast. It all depends.

Of course sometimes that's the right thing to do. Implement Part One now, and make a plan to implement Part Two next year when you can afford it. Communicate with the people at Headquarters so everyone understands the situation, and make incremental progress.

But evaluate every situation on its own. Sometimes implementing half a loaf will undermine you, and you would do better to wait till you can do the whole thing at once.

I was in exactly this situation once, years ago. I was working for a small, entrepreneurial startup that had just been acquired by a global company. The global company had a lot of systems and regulations that we had to learn in a hurry.

One bundle of regulations addressed security. Every office and every plant worldwide—except ours—issued employee badges. Those badges let you into the building at your site. If there were restricted areas at your site, your badge could be fine-tuned to let you into exactly the areas you were allowed to access. If you went to work in a new location, your badge could be reprogrammed to open the doors at the new location instead. It was a complex, interconnected system.

We had none of that.

And right away, visitors started to comment. 

"What, no badges? How can you work for Big Company without badges?" 

"Gosh, the next time I need a new printer I'll just fly out here and take one from your office since your security is so lax."

"Does Headquarters know that you guys don't have badges?"

Someone in my department decided we should do something right away. She started scheduling appointments for everyone in our office to have a picture taken, and ordered a box of badge blanks. She was halfway through taking all the pictures before I had a chance to sit down with her and ask what she was thinking.

"Well everyone keeps saying we need badges. I figured I could make badges, and then our guests would be happy."

"But badges are just part of the picture," I reminded her. "What about the electronic keys and the huge IT infrastructure that links us into the rest of Big Company worldwide? Where is the budget for that going to come from, and who is going to implement it?"

"I thought we could do that later."

That was the key. She figured half a loaf is better than none, and in a different case she might have been right. But in this specific case, it didn't work, and couldn't possibly work.

I told her, "Think a minute. Suppose it is the day after you issue badges to everyone, and explain they are mandatory. How are you going to enforce them?"

"What?"

"Say that Frank forgets his badge at home. But he can still get into the building, right? Because the badge isn't an electronic key, so it isn't hooked into the security system. Did you think we were going to hire guards to stand at the door and stop people without badges?"

"No."

"That's right. There's no budget for that. Only then what happens is that everyone realizes the rule about wearing badges has no teeth. They can openly ignore it, with no consequences. And then the next time we have to implement a new rule from Big Company, it'll be twice as hard."

"So what do you want me to do? Should I run around the building every day to check that people have their badges on?"

"No. What I want is for us to wait and do nothing until we can afford to implement the whole package all at once."

That's what we did, and it took a couple of years until the electronic entry system became a high enough priority for our management to pay for it. In the meantime, Big Company understood that we were non-compliant with that specific set of security requirements, and treated the situation as a known risk to be managed. Mostly it didn't take a lot of attention, and we all went about our business just fine. When the day finally came, we did everything at once; we were fully integrated into Big Company's IT infrastructure; and, yes, we got our badges.

Every case is different. There is no substitute for thinking through all the details to understand what happens if you take this option or that one. But sometimes it is simpler just to be noncompliant—fully above-board, so that you are known to be non-compliant—than to get tangled in the complexities of trying to do something halfway.

           

Quality methods for the win!

I've often argued that Quality methods are just as useful in real life as they are in the workplace, but this month's issue of Quality Progress is running a story that makes the point better than I ever could. Jared Watson, a senior quality engineering specialist at L3Harris Technologies, published an article about how he used systematic quality improvement methodologies to win big on the game show "Jeopardy!" 

You can read the full article online. But to summarize, Watson won his first rounds (in June 2023) with only "a month of preparation and a lifetime of enthusiastic—if amateur—curiosity." But then he was invited to compete in the Tournament of Champions, and he realized that his preparation would have to reach a whole new level. So he analyzed his gaps as clearly as possible, and made a plan to address them.

The first step was honesty. In my original run, I’d lost thousands of dollars on geography clues, including two Daily Doubles, and geography is the most frequently tested “Jeopardy!” category. If I didn’t confront that weakness, it would beat me again.

Next came help. Improvement accelerates when we invite others into the process. In my case, I had a sleeping trivia giant in my house ...: my wife, Jasmin. What began as a simple request for a few flash cards turned into more than 10,000 handcrafted study prompts .... Her support became the backbone of my preparation.

But tools and support only matter if you put in the work. Early on, I tried to master new material in a single sitting by drilling the same cards until I was frustrated. It didn’t work. What did work was steady, sustainable repetition: reviewing each card no more than twice a day, trusting that consistency—not perfection—would lock in the knowledge over time. And it did....

This lesson is one our field knows well: Quality improves through honest assessment, smart use of resources and disciplined, incremental effort. Whether on the “Jeopardy!” stage or in our organizations, consistent practice beats the illusion of overnight mastery every time. 

With this solid preparation, Watson posted a perfect performance during the quarterfinals, answering 21 for 21 and all three Daily Doubles. Later he was eliminated in the semifinals, but the power of the method to get him that far was absolutely clear. As Watson himself concluded, "That’s what quality looks like in practice: A commitment to the process, not just the final score."

Congratulations!

           

Where to buy ISO standards

Now that the International Organization for Standardization has released ISO 9001:2026, the latest edition of the world's most famous quality management systems standard, you may be wondering where you can buy a copy? Fortunately there are lots of options. Never let it be said that the Internet passed up a chance to sell a popular item.

Of course, you may already have a well-established channel for getting copies of standards. Maybe the Certification Body that you always work with has already arranged for you to get a copy of the new standard. If you work for a large company, there may be a central office responsible for distributing standards to whoever needs them. Certainly back when I worked for global companies, that was my experience. Even though my own office might be small or easily ignored in the big picture, I could always contact somebody at headquarters who sent me whatever I needed.

On the other hand, maybe you have no access to such an office, and have to buy your own copy. Where do you turn? There are many choices.

The most obvious choice is to buy directly from ISO themselves. They have a website, from which you can derive a lot of useful information about the standardization process, and about ISO's plans for the future. The website also has a store, where you can search any of the products that ISO publishes and buy them directly. In many ways this is the most obvious option, and for some people it will surely be the simplest.  

But ISO works through national standards bodies to develop standards, and by the same token sells their products through the national standards bodies as well. So in the United States, for example, you can buy ISO standards through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Strictly speaking, the standards you buy from ANSI are ANSI standards, but we are still talking about documents with the same words and requirements. ANSI has just adopted the ISO text intact to constitute the equivalent American document. You can find the ANSI website here, and the online webstore here.

Naturally, ANSI isn't the only national standards body that works with ISO. There are many others, and you can buy from any of them that you can reach. With the Internet, it is often easy to reach organizations that are geographically distant. So, for example, you might want to patronize the British Standards Institution, another venerable collaborator with the ISO. Like the other organizations we've mentioned, BSI has a well-established web presence here. And you can buy their standards (including ISO standards that BSI republishes as British national standards) by navigating to this page here.  

Strictly speaking, there is no law that limits the sale of ISO standards to national standards bodies. There are other organizations engaged with the standardization process as well, and some of them are authorized vendors in addition to their other roles. One of the most obvious, at least from where I sit, is ASQ, the American Society for Quality. ASQ works with ANSI to contribute to writing the ISO standards, so it is only natural that ASQ should be an authorized vendor for the final products. You can find ASQ's main home page here, and the online store for publications is here.  

At this point you may have checked several of these online stores, and have discovered that buying your own copy of one of the popular ISO standards can be kind of ... expensive. The prices differ slightly from one site to the next. but if you want a copy of a popular standard like ISO 9001:2026 or ISO 14001:2026, it seems like you can easily pay between two- and three-hundred dollars, or even more. per standard. Is that really the best anyone can offer? Doesn't anyone out there offer a discount?

Right now, yes, there does seem to be an option for budget-conscious customers. Things change fast on the Internet, so I don't know if these offers will still be valid by the time you read this post. But let me recommend that you visit the website of Eesti Standardimis ja Akrediteerimiskeskus, the Estonian Centre for Standardisation and Accreditation. They offer standards in Estonian and in English. They are authorized vendors just like any other national standards body. But as of this writing, their prices on the popular standards seem to run about 10-20% of what everyone else is charging. If you need to pick up a copy of some international standard soon, but can't afford to spend hundreds for it (dollars, euros, pounds ... the unit hardly matters)—check the online webstore in Estonia to see if they have what you need.

Thanks to Chris Paris for his post in LinkedIn that let me know about the prices in Estonia!

P.S.: You might also check this post, to see whether the standard you want is available for free. The terms and conditions are a little awkward, but under the right circumstances it might be just what you need.