The Case Against ISO9000: How to Create Real Quality in Your Organisation [Paperback]

It's symptoms are depression, lack of energy, a feeling of helplessness and futility. It gives rise to mood swings and forces people to take part in pointless activity. Originating in the UK in the mid '70's the virus has now spread to 143 countries world-wide. The vector for infection is not a mosquito. It is Government Standards Agencies. It afflicts whole organisations. It is ISO 9000.

John Seddon does not go so far as to make this analogy, but his book 'The Case Against ISO 9000' (Oak Tree Press) is comprehensive in it's demolition of one of the most extensively used management tools. It is a renewed demolition, timed to coincide with the major update to ISO 9000 due to be published in November and entitled 'ISO 9000:2000'.

This book is the second edition. The first appeared in 1997, entitled 'In Pursuit of Quality; The Case Against ISO 9000'. Seddon is clearly passionate about the subject of quality and is uncompromising. For him, there is only one acceptable approach to quality, only one that can really deliver the holy grail of increased performance - and it is not ISO 9000.

Seddon starts his demolition with a review of the origins. He attributes it's conception to a need to stop bombs going off in the factories during WW2. The answer lay in the control of work through procedures and inspection - in Seddon's words 'Say what you do - do as you say - check you are doing it.' While the bombs stopped going off in the wrong places it did not help to ensure they went off in the right places. It is this freezing of performance which is at the heart of Seddon's criticisms. From these beginnings in the bomb factories grew the movement to regulate work through contract specification, documented procedure and inspection, otherwise known as quality assurance.

According to Seddon, ISO 9000 and quality assurance have nothing to do with quality. ISO 9000 cannot succeed because it is founded on the wrong philosophy of management. This philosophy sees command and control as the primary role of managers, emphasising an archaic view of the all-seeing, all-knowing boss. With the emphasis on control, improvement is ignored. For Seddon, improvement is the essence of quality, founded on solid Deming principles. The role of the manager is to understand the system that delivers for customers, and to engage staff in working to improve it.

ISO 9000 destroys the focus on meeting what Seddon calls 'purpose'. Purpose is what matters to customers. Through it's obsession with contract and procedural compliance ISO 9000 ensures that the written documents become the whole purpose of the organisation, documents that serve only to satisfy an external inspector.

To prove his point Seddon relies heavily on case studies of companies that have registered to ISO 9000, and these are the most fascinating aspect of the book. Seddon claims that none can clearly demonstrate any improvement in performance. All would appear to have taken on a burden of documentary and procedural compliance that far outweighs any marginal benefit to the organisation in terms of greater consistency of output. Perhaps the most damning indictment of the standard is that all that hard won consistency cannot guarantee the customer will actually like the product or service.

With the impending publication of the new ISO 9000:2000 standard, Seddon has updated his original attack. He makes short shrift of the latest ISO 9000 review process itself. He claims it was fundamentally flawed. The review failed to properly assess whether or not the standard had achieved anything worthwhile for the registered organisations. Ultimately the review was more intent on serving the vested interests of the army of assessors, consultants, standards agencies and their committees that now populate the growing ISO 9000 industry.

He acknowledges some changes for the better, notably that the new standard is not as prescriptive as the old. It at least permits you to take a 'systems view' of the organisation, to work on improvement. However, despite these changes, Seddon still maintains that the standard is misleading and ultimately pointless. Were it not for the main method of growth in registration - coercion - Seddon has no doubt that the standard would no longer be in widespread use.

A good read - informative and challenging. You need to get used to Seddon's vocabulary of quality but it is well worth the investment. This is not just an 'anti-establishment' polemic, but a reasoned argument that should make even the most enthusiastic ISO 9000 supporter search uneasily for real evidence to justify the continued propagation of the virus.