W10 | Strategy Unsimplified: ISO 9001 & Strategy (Contd.)

Date: 2026-03-09
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Last week, I wrote about the common misconception surrounding the purpose of a formal management system and the importance of a sincere commitment from top management in making such systems meaningful.

One of the fundamental components of a Quality Management System such as ISO 9001 is the use of SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures). Before implementing them, managers must first understand what a procedure truly means—essentially a rule that defines how work should be performed.

In one organization where I served as head, the official start time was 8:00 a.m. However, it was commonly assumed that managers could arrive anytime up to 8:30 a.m., which often stretched further to 8:45 a.m. If punctuality was considered a discipline, it had to apply uniformly to everyone. I therefore implemented a clear rule: all employees, including managers, were required to arrive before 8:00 a.m. Given that the activity was routine and is common to all employees, an SOP was made that all employees must be in office before 8am as part of the attendance policy.

This is a simple example of a procedure—a rule that must be followed consistently as part of daily operations. Procedures can only exist where activities are repetitive and predictable. When work varies significantly each time, standard procedures become difficult to establish.

An SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) therefore aims to maintain consistency by ensuring that established rules are followed. In this sense, change is not the primary objective. However, organizations must also strive for efficiency and improvement. This is where incremental improvements come into play—reflecting a more incrementalistic approach to organizational development.

In highly bureaucratic environments, even incremental improvements may be resisted. Yet organizations committed to operational excellence recognize that small, continuous improvements are essential for long-term progress.

When a set of rules or procedures is developed to control routine internal activities, they are referred to as SOPs. However, when rules are designed to guide the organization’s interaction with its external environment, they evolve into what we call business strategy.

For now, we will continue exploring SOPs and their role in internal organizational systems, before returning to strategy in a later discussion. We will dissect SOPs further in the coming weeks.

#StrategyUnsimplified
 #Kaizen
 #OperationalExcellence
 #ContinuousImprovement
 #LeanThinking
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