What I Got Wrong — and What Still Worries Me — About ISO 9001:2026
Title borrowed from “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” written by Neil Diamond and recorded by The Monkees in 1967. It is a song about shared fault. That turns out to be the right structure for this essay.
When I wrote Part I, ISO 9001:2026 had not yet been published.
That was deliberate.
I did not want to wait for the final standard, read whatever ISO produced, and then quietly retrofit my concerns around the result. Anyone can win an argument after the fact. So I put five predictions on the record and promised to grade them honestly.
The sixth edition was published on September 16, 2026. It cancels and replaces ISO 9001:2015 and folds in the 2024 climate amendment.
I bought it the day it came out. I read it. Then I bought the redline against 2015 and read that too, because I wanted to know exactly what changed rather than what felt like it had changed.
That second step cost me some of my own argument.
It also handed me a better one.
First, The Miss
Let me start with the clean loss.
I predicted that ISO 9001:2026 might push companies toward treating the surrounding community as an interested party. My auditor had warned me that the conversation he was hearing appeared to be heading that direction, and that schools were one of the examples in circulation.
It did not happen.
There is no clause requiring the local school district, the neighborhood association or any community organization to enter a quality management system.
I was wrong.
I am glad I was wrong.
Now The Part Nobody Made Me Write
Three things I flagged in my first read of the new standard are not actually new. The redline caught me. I would rather correct myself here than have a quality manager correct me in the comments.
“Interested party” already meant “stakeholder.”
ISO 9001:2026 adds a terms-and-definitions clause listing twenty-three terms. Among them, interested party is paired with stakeholder, defined to include anyone who can affect, be affected by, or “perceive itself to be affected” by a decision or activity, with an example list running through customers, owners, providers, bankers, regulators, unions, partners and society, the last of which is said to include competitors and “opposing pressure groups.”
I read that and reached for my pen.
Then I checked. That definition is ISO 9000:2015, word for word. ISO 9000 has been the normative reference for ISO 9001 the entire time. Every one of those words has been binding on my quality system since 2015.
What changed is location, not scope. ISO moved the core definitions out of a companion vocabulary standard that most manufacturers never purchase and into the requirements document that every auditor reads.
That is still worth noticing. Language that sits in a document people actually open behaves differently than language buried in a cross-reference. But it is a visibility change, and I owe it to my own argument to say so plainly.
The workplace psychology language is eleven years old.
The note under the work-environment clause lists social factors, giving non-discriminatory and non-confrontational as examples, and psychological factors, giving stress reduction and burnout prevention as examples, alongside the physical factors any manufacturer would expect.
That list is carried over verbatim from 2015. It has been sitting in my quality manual’s governing standard through three surveillance cycles.
One sentence at the end of that note is new: some of those factors can be influenced by the organization’s quality culture and ethical behaviour. I will come back to that sentence, because it is the hinge that matters. But the list is not the story.
Sustainable development was already in the introduction.
The 2015 introduction said a quality management system provides a sound basis for sustainable development initiatives. The 2026 rewrite of that sentence keeps the phrase and reframes it around sustained success.
It is not an addition. I disliked it in 2015 without noticing it, and I dislike it now that I have noticed it, but I cannot present it as new.
So: one prediction missed outright, and three items I would have scored as hits turned out to be pre-existing language. That is a real portion of my case, gone.
What Actually Changed
Here is what the redline showed me that I had not seen on a straight read.
The clause on interested parties lost its anchor.
In the 2015 edition, the interested-parties clause did not simply tell you to identify interested parties. It opened by telling you why they counted — because of their effect, actual or potential, on the organization’s ability to consistently provide products and services meeting customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.
That opening is deleted.
The 2026 clause begins with four words: “The organization shall determine.”
This is the thing I have been arguing about for two essays, and it happened in the one place I did not look.
In 2015, the word relevant had a stated criterion sitting inside the requirement itself. Relevant meant relevant to conforming product. If an auditor pressed me on a party with no connection to the product, the clause answered him for me.
In 2026, the word stands alone. The explanation of what makes a party relevant now lives in Annex A, which is informative and adds no requirements.
My answer about the school district still works. The safeguard still exists. But the sentence that made the answer obviously correct has been removed from the requirement and relocated to the commentary.
The gaps become jurisdiction. That is what it looks like when it actually occurs.
In fairness, ISO added a gate while removing one.
The same clause gained a new third step: after determining which interested parties are relevant and what their relevant requirements are, the organization determines which of those requirements will be addressed through the quality management system.
That is a filter, and it favors the organization. It is discretionary and it is mine to exercise.
So ISO removed an objective anchor and added a subjective one. Whether that trade is a net loss depends entirely on who is reading the clause five years from now, under what commercial pressure, with what training material in hand.
Which is, more or less, my entire thesis.
Climate did not expand where I was watching. It expanded where I was not.
I graded climate expansion as a miss on my first pass. The requirement in the context clause is unchanged from the 2024 amendment — determine whether climate change is a relevant issue — and the note about interested parties having climate-related requirements is unchanged.
But Annex A now carries a new paragraph that was not in the 2015 annex. It explains that climate expectations can influence interested party requirements in areas such as regulatory compliance, customer requirements and organizational commitments, and that where relevant, those expectations become part of the context for planning and operating the system.
That is climate arriving through the interested-party channel.
It is informative text. No auditor can write a finding against Annex A. I want to be clear about that, because the distinction is the whole reason I read the redline instead of trusting my first impression.
But auditors read Annex A. Certification bodies build training from Annex A. Examples get repeated until they become expectations. Informative today is not a permanent category.
One more small thing. The note listing external context issues now names political and environmental issues alongside the legal, technological, competitive, market, cultural, social and economic issues that were already there.
Two words, in a note, no requirement attached.
By my own argument, naming is what creates the space.
The One That Landed
Here is the finding I would build the whole essay around if I had to pick one.
ISO created a terms-and-definitions clause for this edition specifically so that core concepts would live inside the requirements document. Twenty-three terms are defined. Organization. Top management. Process. Risk. Audit. Monitoring. Measurement. Conformity. Competence. Documented information.
ISO also introduced two brand-new concepts in this edition and attached them to requirements.
Neither one is defined.
Top management is now required to promote “quality culture and ethical behaviour.” People working under the organization’s control are now required to be aware of “the organizational quality culture and ethical behaviour.”
Quality culture, at least, has somewhere to go. The bibliography points to a separate ISO guidance document on organizational quality culture.
Ethical behaviour has nothing. No definition in Clause 3. No guidance standard in the bibliography. Annex A offers two sentences, both informative, both circular: ethical behaviour can support confidence in the organization’s ability to meet expectations, and ethical behaviour in decisions, actions and interactions can impact all aspects of quality.
That is the entire apparatus.
Now walk it onto the floor.
The awareness requirement does not apply to management. It applies to persons doing work under the organization’s control. Which means an auditor can stop a press operator on second shift and ask what this company’s ethical behaviour is, and the answer is auditable.
I have no idea what the correct answer is. Neither does the standard.
And I want to be precise about my objection, because there is a version of this I would support without hesitation. If ethical behaviour means an inspector does not falsify a report, management does not knowingly ship nonconforming product, nobody alters test results to make a part pass, sales does not promise what production cannot deliver, and no one buries a customer complaint — audit every bit of it. Those are ethical failures tied directly to product conformity, and any quality manager worth hiring already treats them as findings.
The problem is that the standard does not say that. It says ethical behaviour can impact all aspects of quality, which is a sentence with no edges.
A requirement with no definition is not a requirement. It is a space.
And Yet Much Of This Revision Is Very Good
I cannot write this as a victory lap, because a lot of the sixth edition is better than what it replaced.
Risks and opportunities are finally separated. Risk analysis is now anchored explicitly to the ability to consistently provide conforming products and services and enhance customer satisfaction, which is exactly the kind of risk-based thinking I wanted in 2015 and did not quite get. Opportunities get their own clause instead of riding along as an afterthought.
Management of change is strengthened. Organizational knowledge is improved. The process approach, the PDCA cycle, customer satisfaction, product conformity and continual improvement all remain where they belong, at the center.
Annex A has also become genuinely useful in a way the 2015 version was not. It now clarifies the difference between appropriate and applicable, and — this one is worth the purchase price to anyone who has ever argued with an auditor — the difference between consider, which means think about whether to include something, and take into account, which means think about it and include it.
Those are interpretive tools. I intend to use them.
This is still a quality standard. In several respects it is a better one.
That is precisely why the undefined language matters. A useless standard gets ignored. A good standard carrying vague concepts gets deployed across a million certified organizations in a hundred and eighty-nine countries.
The Ledger
I promised to grade myself.
Expanded interested-party obligations — partial hit. The definition did not change; it relocated. But the clause lost the product-conformity anchor that told everyone what relevant meant, and gained a discretionary filter in its place.
Community and school language — miss. It is not there. I said it might be. It is not.
Social or ecological concepts entering auditable territory — hit. Quality culture and ethical behaviour are requirements now. The workplace-factors language is old, but the sentence tying it to culture and ethics is new.
Climate expansion — partial hit. Not in the requirements. In Annex A, through the interested-party channel, plus two new words in a context note.
New auditable but undefined concepts — hit, and the one I cared about most. Ethical behaviour is a requirement, appears eight times in the document, and is defined nowhere in it.
Two hits, two partials, one clean miss.
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You
That is where the title earns its place.
Some of this was me reading too far down the road, and some of it was me mistaking old pavement for new construction. I have corrected both above.
Some of it was ISO laying road I do not think belongs in a quality standard.
The sixth edition did not become an ESG manual. It did not mandate community service. It did not put the school board in my stakeholder matrix. It did not turn climate into a management program.
Those things matter, and I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a stronger headline.
But the anchor came out of the interested-parties clause. Climate found the annex. Ethical behaviour arrived as a requirement with no definition, no guidance document and no boundary.
In Part I, I asked whether the letters on my certificate still meant what they meant when I earned my first one — whether this was still the International Organization for Standardization or something closer to a Globalist Standards Organization.
Based on the text: still the former.
Based on the direction: I am not putting the question away.
Now I Watch The Auditors
The written standard was only the first half of this experiment. The second half starts with the transition, which runs roughly three years from publication.
The text tells you what is permitted. Practice tells you what is expected. Those are different documents, and only one of them is published.
So I am watching for the guidance standard that explains how to apply these clauses. I am watching certification body training material. I am watching accreditation expectations. Most of all I am watching findings — mine and everyone else’s.
If ethical behaviour stays tied to falsified records, hidden defects and dishonest product claims, good. If quality culture means management building a place where people care about what they release, excellent — I have spent twenty years trying to build one.
If either concept becomes a door through which social expectations, community interests or the next fashionable issue enters the quality manual, we will know exactly how it happened.
The standard never had to mandate anything.
It only had to create a place where somebody could argue it belonged.
What I Am Doing About It
There is a fair criticism of everything I have written across these two essays, and it goes like this: ISO works through national standards bodies. American manufacturers can participate through the U.S. technical advisory group. You had a vote and you did not use it.
That criticism is correct, and it lands on me.
I have spent nearly thirty years inside ISO 9001 quality systems. I have installed them from scratch in two businesses and grown one I inherited. I have never once participated in the process that writes the document I live under.
I am fixing that. I am joining ASQ and pursuing a seat at the table where this standard gets built, and I now have two specific items to raise: the missing definition of ethical behaviour, and the deleted anchor in the interested-parties clause.
That is no longer a complaint on a blog. That is a comment with a docket number.
If you run a small manufacturing company and you have read this far, you are exactly the person who should be in that room. There are not many of us in it. Standards get written by whoever bothers to show up, and for three decades that has not included me.
ISO has been enormously good to my career. The process approach changed how I manage. Internal auditing works. Corrective action works. Risk-based thinking works. I want all of it.
What I do not want is a quality standard that slowly accumulates authority over subjects that cannot demonstrate a connection to quality.
The sixth edition did not cross every line I feared.
But the roads are there.
Now we find out who gets to drive on them.