'Nuther New Review

In an effort to make some headway, I dove in head first this evening with John Seddon's article in The Observer from 2000, "The 'quality' you can't feel," and his 2000 book, The Case Against ISO 9000. Here's the review:

As noted in Echard & Berge (2008), John Seddon is not a proponent of ISO 9000. However, in his referenced article in The Observer (2000b) he summarizes many of the charges he lays against ISO 9000 in his book The Case Against ISO 9000 (2000a). He traces the rise to popularity of what he calls “the Standard,” laying the blame squarely at the feet of the British Standards Institute, when in 1979 they invoked an approach used by the military and by power generators as British Standard (BS) 5750. To meet this new standard, organizations were required “to specify how they worked, write that down and prove it to an inspector” (2000b, p. 1). Seddon identifies it as a management standard, not a product standard, being more concerned with how a thing was made, not what was made. He questions whether the problems that had been happening (bombs going off in factories, failures in power generators) were solved or merely controlled. Seddon alludes to similar problems in the US Navy’s early nuclear program and Chief of Staff Admiral Hyman Rickover’s concern about its management. He claims Rickover’s “diagnosis was that decision-making had become separated from work…” and “…that the ‘inspection and control’ movement was a central part of the problem” (2000b, p. 1). Seddon sees 1979 as the watershed year for quality institutions (BSI Group, the developer and publisher of BS 5750, issued their first certification of a quality management system in 1978) (http://www.tarmacbuildingproducts.co.uk/pdf/Tarmac%20Topfloor%20ISO%209001-2008%20Certificate.pdf). What he calls “market-place coercion – ‘you comply or we won’t buy’…” led to the standard’s rapid adoption until 1987 when “the British Government persuaded the International Standards Organisation [sic] to adopt it as an international standard.” In this manner, Seddon traces the genesis of ISO 9000.

In his book, Seddon identifies ten arguments against ISO 9000:

1. ISO 9000 encourages organizations [sic] to act in ways which make things worse for their customers
2. Quality by inspection is not quality
3. ISO 9000 starts from the flawed presumption that work is best controlled by specifying and controlling procedures
4. The typical method of implementation is bound to cause sub-optimisation [sic] of performance
5. The Standard relies too much on people’s and, in particular, assessors’ interpretation of quality
6. When people are subjected to external controls, they will be inclined to pay attention only to those things which are affected by the controls
7. ISO 9000 has discouraged managers from learning about the theory of a system and the theory of variation
8. ISO 9000 has failed to foster good customer-supplier relations
9. Coercion does not foster learning
10. As an intervention, ISO 9000 has not encouraged managers to think differently

To Seddon, the issue revolves around the definition of quality. As a student of W. Edwards Deming, he identifies quality as reduction in variation in the product. Seddon does not see this as a natural consequence of controlling the process. Rather, he sees this “command and control” approach as stifling to real excellence in the workplace, demoralizing to the workforce, and debilitating in its penchant for documentation.

In terms of research, Seddon shares the results of his own surveys (conducted in 1993) and those of Manchester Business School (1995) and Surrey University. All were inconclusive, though the Manchester Business School research purported to “prove” that ISO 9000 works without any data that would show how or why it works. Ambiguity over results aside, ISO 9000, according to Seddon, is not generally popular among those who actually do the work, the employees.

Continuing on, Seddon next relates several statements commonly used in defense of ISO 9000:

1. ISO 9000 is a minimum standard or a “first step” on the quality journey
2. ISO 9000 is no more than basic good management practice
3. There is no choice, it is a requirement for doing business
4. It is important for defensive reasons
5. It must be good, 200,000 companies can’t be wrong
6. It is being improved

Clearly, Seddon’s British sarcasm sometimes gets the best of him.

References:

Echard, R.D & Berge, Z.L. (2008). Quality management builds solid etraining. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 9(3), Article 1.

Seddon, J. (2000a). The case against ISO 9000. Dublin, Ireland: Oak Tree Press.

Seddon, J. (2000b). The 'quality' you can't feel. The Observer. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2000/nov/19/workandcareers.madeleinebunting.