{"id":34177,"date":"2026-07-30T10:12:46","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T14:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/?p=34177"},"modified":"2026-07-30T11:48:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T15:48:57","slug":"as-nations-surrender-common-sense-iso-90012026-gets-approved-for-final-publication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/as-nations-surrender-common-sense-iso-90012026-gets-approved-for-final-publication\/","title":{"rendered":"As Nations Surrender Common Sense, ISO 9001:2026 Gets Approved for Final Publication"},"content":{"rendered":"

Behind the scenes, Sam Somerville and her gang of dimwitted windowlickers at TC 176 were dead set on getting 100% approval of the FDIS version of ISO 9001:2026, so they could say it was approved “unanimously<\/em>.” Dutiful soldiers like Jose Dominguez were put on the job of lobbying national standards bodies to get them to approve the draft.<\/p>\n

They came close. Somerville announced<\/a> on LinkedIn that the draft — largely seen as the worst edition of ISO 9001 ever made — miraculously landed a 99% approval and is set for publication, as predetermined a year ago, for September of this year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

How is this possible? The draft was flooded with negative comments and calls for TC 176 to reverse course. A lot of ink was spilled on the internet trying to get Somerville to see reason. So just how did they manage a 99% international approval?<\/p>\n

First, we need to see the actual votes. ISO has a habit of playing fast and loose with facts, and they are likely not counting abstentions. Those matter. (Once I get the actual vote breakdown, we will see if I am right.)<\/p>\n

But the real problem remains with the low quality of “professionals<\/em>” that now comprise the various ISO member standards bodies, like BSI, ANSI, Standards Australia, and all of their international counterparts. Overrun by private consultants, and driven by each organization’s own lust for sales (most of these resell ISO standards, so stand to make a lot of money once ISO 9001 is published), these bodies do not even pretend to represent the needs of their respective nations or what is best for the quality management profession. They are incompetent and greedy, another symptom of decaying late stage capitalist economies.<\/p>\n

Add in lowered educational standards, increased reliance on AI, and the attention deficit disorder pandemic brought on by screen addition, and you have a recipe for incompetence across every national standards body anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n

The fix was always in. Nations initially rejected the call to update ISO 9001, forcing ISO to take drastic measures. They held six different rounds of voting (formal and informal) as they lobbied national bodies to change their votes. ISO demanded that national bodies purge their national committees of “unfriendly<\/em>” delegates who opposed the update (and nations did so, allowing a private publishing company to override their national sovereignty.) They threw out thousands of comments and complaints without action, claiming they were “officially dispositioned<\/em>.” They skipped mandatory editing and translation steps to get the DIS and FDIS drafts through the pipeline faster. They set attack dogs like Devindra Chattergoon loose on social media to attack critics. They ignored the entire set of World Trade Organization TBT regulations on the development of consensus standards.<\/p>\n

If there was a cheat to be used in order to get ISO 9001 published, ISO found it and used it.<\/p>\n

To be clear: ISO 9001:2015 set quality management system standards back to the pre-industrial revolution, with the removal of preventive action and the breaking of the PDCA\u00a0 and process approach models. Not only did Somerville and her crayon eaters not<\/strong> <\/em>fix those problems, they layered in more<\/strong> <\/em>unnecessary consultant-speak in order to sell their consulting services, without any care for their countries, their profession, or their clients.<\/p>\n

ISO 9001:2026 is a disaster.<\/p>\n

But now it’s an officially-approved<\/strong> <\/em>disaster, and Somerville gets to take her much-anticipated victory lap.<\/p>\n

Enjoy it while you can, Sam. Nigel Croft thought he did a great thing with “risk-based thinking<\/em>” in ISO 9001:2015 and subsequently had to leave the ISO world entirely and hide, trying to take his name off the thing entirely. The name “Sam Somerville<\/em>” will go down in the profession’s history as an incompetent, bumbling turncoat.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ISO 9001:2026 will be published in September, as planned.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[268,14,8277,8288],"class_list":["post-34177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-fdis","tag-iso-9001","tag-iso-90012026","tag-sam-somerville","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34177"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34182,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34177\/revisions\/34182"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}