Trish's Blog

The framework that gets filed under “soft” is built from the exact behaviour the ISO standards already require.

I called my framework Weird Wisdom. In a room full of executives, budgets and risk registers, you can guess how that lands. For some people the name alone files it under fluff before I have finished the sentence.

I understand the reaction. A lot of what gets sold as culture work has earned it. But the belief underneath the reaction, that Weird Wisdom is the soft, optional part of running an organisation, is wrong.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. You can take ISO’s.

The standards already ask for the “soft” stuff

Most organisations of any size run against a handful of ISO standards, whether or not they hold the certificate. ISO 9001 for quality. ISO 31000 for risk. ISO 56001 for innovation. ISO 30415 for diversity and inclusion. These are not fluffy documents. They are audited, certified, and reported to boards. They are the closest thing business has to an agreed global definition of good management.

Read them closely and you find something interesting. They describe outcomes, not behaviour. They tell you where to arrive, not how to get people to carry you there.

• A standard can require continual improvement. It cannot make a team willing to admit what is not working.
• A standard can require risk-based thinking. It cannot make a manager willing to act before the picture is complete.
• A standard can require you to value diversity of thought. It cannot make a room listen to the person who disagrees.

Each of those is a behaviour. And behaviour is exactly the thing people wave away as fluff.

There is a clause for leadership. In every single standard.

Here is the part most people miss.

Since 2012, every ISO management-system standard has been written to the same skeleton. ISO calls it the Harmonized Structure. It gives each standard the same ten clauses, in the same order, with the same core requirements.

Two of those clauses are identical everywhere:

• Clause 5 is Leadership.
• Clause 10 is Improvement.

And the whole structure rests on risk-based thinking.

That is the same whether the standard governs energy, food, healthcare, information security or quality. The “soft” material, leadership and improvement, is not a footnote to the standards. It is load-bearing. Auditors are directed to spend real time on leadership engagement, not treat it as a formality to be ticked and moved past.

So when someone calls Weird Wisdom fluff, they are calling Clause 5 fluff. The auditor walking through the door next quarter does not agree.

What Weird Wisdom maps to

Weird Wisdom is my name for five behaviours that let people do the human work the standards assume. None of them are inspirational posters. Each one lines up with something a standard already asks of you.

• Being comfortable with the Unknowns. This is not the same as being comfortable with uncertainty. The Unknown is the thing you do not yet know. Uncertainty is how that thing makes you feel. Build comfort with the first and the second settles on its own. This is the human capability sitting behind risk-based thinking in every standard.
• Failure as growth. Continual improvement, the requirement in ISO 9001 and every standard built on it, is impossible in an organisation where people hide what went wrong. Treating failure as information rather than fault is the behaviour that makes the clause real.
• Harmony in contradictions. Governance is holding competing demands at once: quality, cost, risk and people. The standards ask leaders to balance them. This is the capability that lets a leader hold them together rather than trade one off under pressure.
• Questioning the norms. Improvement means asking whether the accepted way is the right way. An organisation that cannot question itself cannot improve, no matter what its policy states.
• Exploring the unconventional. Innovation management (ISO 56001) is a whole system for pursuing the new. A system does not generate a new idea. People do, when they are allowed to move off the template.

Notice what is happening here. These are not additions to the standards. They are the human half of requirements that already exist.

Why “fluff” is an expensive belief

Treating behaviour as the soft option carries a real cost, and it tends to show up in the same three places.

• You invest in the paperwork and starve the behaviour. Then you wonder why the certificate on the wall changed nothing about how the place runs.
• Your best people stop contributing. They watch leadership say one thing and reward another, and they gradually stop offering the ideas your innovation process was built to capture.
• Your audits repeat. The same findings surface year after year, because a finding is a symptom, and the cause underneath it is almost always cultural.

The standards were never the problem. The behaviour they assume was never built.

The point

Weird Wisdom is not an alternative to the standards your organisation reports against. It is the human half of them.

Comfort with the Unknown behind risk-based thinking. Failure as growth behind continual improvement. The questioning of norms behind every requirement to improve rather than hold still.

A standard can require a capable, adaptable, diverse workforce. It cannot make that workforce think differently together in the moment a decision is being made. That is a behaviour, not a clause. It is also the whole game, because it is the reason two organisations holding the same certification can perform nothing alike.

So the next time someone at your table calls Weird Wisdom fluff, you have a straight answer ready.

It is in Clause 5. It is in Clause 10. It is on the audit. And it is the difference between a standard your organisation meets on paper and one it lives.