Every day in many ways people try to influence our thinking. Here are five brief examples of how people try to get us to comply with their wishes through the arguments that they make. Critical thought about these statements can help avoid poor decisions. This is an Appeal to Indirect Consequences. There is a big jump between not getting certified…
“Say what you do and do what you say.” This was a popular line from almost everyone’s ISO 9000 presentations in the 1990’s. Unfortunately people are smart and many interpreted that saying as an opportunity to describe their management systems in terms that were easy to show that they did what they said even though what they did was totally…
Two separate events over the past couple of weeks caused me concern. First someone told me that we must consider auditing conformity as being equally important to the consideration of effectiveness since both were required. The statement caused me to pause. True I thought, the standards are full of requirements for conformity. This statement reminded me of the other event,…
In my job as a trainer of Quality Auditors, one of the things that I run into regularly is a misunderstanding of the requirement for auditors to have an evidence-based approach. Evidence is one of those terms that everyone automatically assumes that they understand, but when it comes to determining what is evidence they often run into problems. The problem…