Are you fed up with our politicians? Do you feel they don’t have any morals or goals, or that they do not listen to their constituents’ suggestions for improvement? Do you feel sometimes they don’t know what they are doing? Well, let’s take a wild ride and imagine how the average politician would stand against an ISO 9001 audit.
Quality Policy
Imagine the average politician’s quality policy. It would say something about “continually striving to meet or exceed customer satisfaction” as all quality policies do. So how do we audit that?
A good auditor may ask “How do you measure customer satisfaction, can you show me evidence of that?” Ha! Gotcha! All the politician could show is probably third party polls, and most would probably show a less than desirable approval rating. In which case, the good auditor would ask “Since you got a less than desirable rating, what have you done about it?” Ha! Gotcha! Now what would the average politician say? “Well I supported the Affordable Care Act.” Or he may mention that the banks were rescued in order to avoid a complete collapse.
That’s right, most politicians will not be able to show any measurement of customer satisfaction nor any direct impact of their officeon the satisfaction of their constituents.
Corrective and Preventive Action
Now imagine the good auditor asks the politician whether there are any corrective/preventive actions in place. Ha! Gotcha! More than likely, the politician will say he listens to his constituents’ requests and that he is diligently trying to follow up. Then the auditor will say “show me the evidence of the corrective action, then.” Ha! Gotcha! There is probably no concrete evidence that a problem was solved, because, in politics, constituents’ problems are never solved and prevented from happening again; in fact, only pseudo-problems that politicians want to correct get corrected.
Nonconformances
Now think about our good quality auditor asking the politician “can you show me what your service nonconformances are?” What response do you think he/she will get? “What are nonconformances? There are none around here, we are just advocating for the people. We never say the wrong things, and we always read what we are supposed to. We never get speeding tickets, we never get DWIs, and we always file our taxes. In fact, we never forget all the properties we have, because we have great selective memory!”
So the quality auditor will say “show me the trends then.” Gotcha! Oh boy, I don’t want to be there, but somebody will be getting a major finding!
Continual Improvement
By this time in the audit, I’m sure tensions are as high as the Empire State Building. But our good quality auditor cannot leave without ascertaining just how continual improvement is achieved at the politician’s bureau. So he poses the question, “Please, could you tell me what initiatives are in place to ensure that your office continually improves its processes and personnel?” Unfortunately, this time around, the politician is the one who cries, “Gotcha!”
“But of course,” says the politician “Last year we went to Vegas, and we had many conferences that were motivational and highly productive, and the year before, we were in Hawaii at another wonderful gathering for smart people like me, so are you happy now, Mr. Auditor?”
But our good auditor will not let us down, so he ponders and, after thinking a bit, he inquires “Well, then could you show me evidence of training effectiveness please?”
If Only They Could be Audited
If politicians could be audited, maybe even once a year, like any organization certified to ISO is, and be held to the same principles as those organizations, and be required to demonstrate commitment to their quality policy, goals, and to prove continual improvement, wouldn’t that be nice! Every year, they would get probably lots of major nonconformities and be asked to shape up or risk losing their certificate. Better yet, wouldn’t it be nice if certification results were available to everyone? Furthermore, everyone would have opportunities to submit corrective actions to our politicians. Then, too, politicians would actually be measured by how well they performed in an audit and how many findings they had. Finally, we could truly measure our politicians by an international standard that helps organizations become better, rather than listening to their self propaganda.
Good quality practices could be applied to elected officials, just the same as to corporations. We, the constituents, would stand to win more than anybody if there were a true way to measure our politicians.
