Chatter in an ISO Process

I have been in, or encountered, a number of organizations which had (or were working on) ISO-900x quality registrations. While I am fully aware of the intent of the ISO requirements, in the cases I have seen, the effect seems to fall well short of the goal.

On the surface, the types of processes mandated by ISO 9001 seem quite reasonable. They require knowing what your processes are, having documentation for them, and having systems that address problems to root cause.

The requirements are not a lot different from what I mentioned a couple of posts ago in Chatter as Signal. The example of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear propulsion operations would certainly meet the criteria (and then some).

So the question is:
What is fundamentally different about an organization with a “paper only” ISO certification that struggles with chaos every day vs. one which is truly process driven (whether they have an ISO certification or not)?

Chatter as noise.
Chatter as signal.

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