I have had experience in building a Learning Organization with the ISO
9000 standards as the underlying model. Both messages below stirred the
need to respond. Later in this post, I compare the twenty elements of the
standard to the elements of organizational learning and knowledge
management. If you want to skip the background, evangelism, and such,
scroll on, MacDuff.... [NB: this posting is derived from a work in
progress, I would appreciate offline feedback as well as dialogue.]
Gray Southon <gsouthon@ozemail.com.au> writes:
> Is ISO 9000 the answer to the learning organisation?
> The information that I have recevied about it is that it might be good for
> making bad companies better and satisfying bureaucracies, but it leads to
> preoccupation with paperwork, is costly, and possibly inhibits
> innovation.
The notion of "preoccupation with paperwork" is not inherent in the
standards, but in the non-systems approach to it's application. William
Buxton's succinct description below tells the enlightened view. As for
making "bad" companies better, the standard, when applied to achieve
registration status (as opposed to being applied to improve systems,
performance, and understanding) doesn't make anything better. Is is, in
fact, the registration of your system which is expensive, not the creation
and use of it. As for inhibiting innovation, if we prescribed the five
disciplines as the basis for international registration and acceptance of
an organization, and then rushed to become innovative, skimming the
surface of the disciplines and writing bad procedures to let everyone know
we do this stuff..... BUT!!! read on....
William Buxton <wbuxton@hns.com>responds:
> My take on ISO 9000 is that it's very compatible with LO. Its basic
> approach is: say what you're going to do, do it, and be able to prove that
> you did. Looks very much like establishing good conditions for an
> organization to learn from what works and what doesn't--to adapt, in other
> words.
>
> Sure, the best of ideas can be puffed up and dumbed down by Dilbert's
> pointy-haired managers, and ISO 9000 is certainly not idiot proof. But it
> beats a lot of other strategies, methinks.
This is a good example of the thinking person's approach to applying a
model to the organization. The ISO standards come in two basic flavors:
models and guidelines. The models contain the prescribed elements of a
system. The guidelines suggest content and implementation details. The
more important standards for this discussion are really the guidelines, in
particular, ISO 9004, which discusses how to use the models to attain
organizational excellence (caveat: 9004 is very general, as are all of the
standards. You won't learn HOW to get anywhere, but will read some
interesting suggestions).
The basic document for an innovative organization would be ISO 9001, which
covers design, development, production, installation and servicing. (NOTE:
the standards were developed initially for industrial quality systems,
you'll have to replace the "hard" associations with words like production,
installation, and servicing with the correlates in your organizational
focus).
There are twenty elements in ISO 9001. They can be seen as feedback loops
in the management system. The language which makes them worthy of the
LO's consideration is the same language which creates the nightmare paper
systems. Each of the elements require "documented procedures" and the
maintenance of "records". Many assessors and managers see this as meaning
page after page of poorly written sentences with multi-level, indented
numbering systems which end up looking like:
1
1.1
1.1.1
1.1.1.1
1.1.1.2
1.1.1.2.1
1.1.1.2.1.1
A documented procedure can actually be a colorful and innovative document.
It doesn't needs "shalls" and "heretofor"s to be a documented procedure,
it just needs to describe and explain the element it is designed to
control (read control here as positive and/or negative feedback gathering
and dissemination and please don't get hung up on the psychological notion
of control freak and the like).
As we all know here from systems dynamics, there are two levels of
description in a system. The conceptual (policy) level of the process can
be described with links and loops. The explicit/operational (procedural)
level can be described with stocks and flows. The ISO models require both
policy and procedure documentation, so for each of the twenty elements, we
have to say WHAT do (Level I documentation, usually referred to as the
Policy Manual), and then, at the operational level we have to say HOW we
do it (Level II documentation, usually referred to as Procedures). In
order to prove to the 2nd (customer) or 3rd (registrar) party assessor
that we have indeed done what we say we done in the way we say we do it,
there is a need for Level III documentation which comes in the form of
records, data, and work instructions. These last actually provide the
feedback to the procedural level. The values given by these records then
determine the need for corrective or preventive action (adjustment,
repair, or redesign of the system).
The elements to which the multilevel systems approach applies and their
LO/KM correlates are:
4.1 Management Responsibility (Shared Vision, Values)
4.2 Quality System (Systems Thinking)
4.3 Contract Review (Knowledge Transfer)
4.4 Design Control (Mental Models and Team Learning, Learning History,
Explicit Knowledge)
4.5 Document and Data Control (Knowledge-Base/Intelligent Information
System)
4.6 Purchasing (Knowledge-Base/Knowledge Transfer)
4.7 Control of Customer-Supplied Product (Explicity Knowledge Base)
4.8 Product Identification and Traceability (Tacit Knowledge Base/Learning
History)
4.9 Process Control (ALL LO and KM elements with an emphasis on Tacit
Knowledge and modeling and simulation)
4.10 Inspection and Testing (Systems Thinking: metrics for feedback)
4.11 Control of Inspection, Measuring, and Test Equipment (more Systems
Thinking: making sure the metrics are measurable)
4.12 Inspection and Test Status (Explicit Knowledge Transfer)
4.13 Control of Nonconforming Product (Suspending Mental Models)
4.14 Corrective and Preventive Action (Action Learning, Team Learning, and
Learning History)
4.15 Handling, Storage, Packaging, Preservation, and Delivery (haven't
thought much about this, but it could relate to the way we treat people and
ideas in dialogue)
4.16 Control of Quality Records (Pure Knowledge Management at all levels,
the collate and analyze portion of it goes back into 4.14)
4.17 Internal Quality Audits (Reviewing the Knowledge Base)
4.18 Training (Personal Mastery, Mental Models, 3600 Feedback, Needs
Assessment, Future Search)
4.19 Servicing (I'm still not far along on this one, but it fits somewhere)
4.20 Statistical Techniques (from Deming's "theory of variation" a key in
understanding causality in systems dynamics)
This just scratches the surface. (or as Harry Belafonte used to say:
"it's as clear as mud, but it covers the ground")
peace...
-- jzavacki@wolff.com John Zavacki The Wolff Group 800-282-1218 http://www.wolff.com/Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>