There are echoes of Deming throughout ISO 9001, but we really need to invest the time and effort to understand the underpinning management philosophy before we dive in and run the risk of making a fool of ourselves through clumsy interpretation. Let’s start with “management commitment”. What exactly does the standard require, and why? The “signed policy statement” for example is frequently heralded as “a visible sign of management commitment” and there are many who can get themselves all hot and bothered on the subject. But what would Deming say?

Well let’s consider what he had to say about the role of management in general. It was his firm view that, if nothing else, management should seek to find ways of making life easier for the workforce, to provide resources and to remove the barriers to good work in a very practical and active way. Now let’s be grown up just for a moment.

Does a policy statement, signed or unsigned, really have much of a bearing on the quality of day to day work? Is it a reliable sign of commitment under any circumstances? Is it feasible that an uncommitted MD could muster a signature on a bit of paper? Is the signature even required by ISO 9001? I can’t help but think that this would be something Deming would find hard to get excited about. If anything he may even have viewed the whole idea of a visible policy statement as a counter-productive instrument, a smokescreen – he was after all dead against work place slogans. He did, of course, have very strong views on management commitment in general, but never a man to beat around the bush, he is more likely to have brushed these cosmetic distractions to one side and gone straight for the jugular. This is how he summarised the role of leaders in “Out of Crisis”:

“The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not to find failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure, to help people do a better job and with less effort”

If Deming was an ISO 9001 assessor he would have asked the tough questions. “So tell me, what have you done lately to help your workers? Have you put your money where your mouth is? Do you have a clue what it’s like out there or even how you could help your workers?” Signed policy statement or not, that’s the line of enquiry that is really going to get the uncommitted management team squirming. Problem is, it’s a tough path to go down. So do we focus on the trivia of a signature because it’s such a soft target?
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