Trish's Blog

“We ran the change management program.”
“Everyone completed the training.”
“The policies are there for anyone to read.”

All true. None of it tells you whether anything is different in the meeting where nobody said the thing they were thinking.

A program delivered is not a behaviour adopted. A training record is proof of attendance.

Every certified organisation can produce the folder. Policies signed. Minutes filed. Risk register current. Findings closed on time. Then something happens the folder did not predict, and when you trace it back, somebody knew. Usually several somebodies. It never reached a document.

Why the distance exists?
ISO standards are written to be auditable. That is their strength and the source of the problem. An auditor cannot observe judgement. An auditor cannot sit inside the conversation where a supervisor decides whether to raise something.

Top management shall demonstrate leadership and commitment. How do you evidence that? A signature. An agenda item. A minute recording the review happened on the date it was due. Every document is genuine. Not one of them tells you how the room thought.

Build for the evidence long enough and you run two systems. The one in the manual, and the one people use to get the work done. Most employees can describe both. Only one ever meets an auditor.

The board sits furthest from the behaviour and receives the most summarised version of it. Directors carry personal obligations and discharge them using assurance built from paperwork. Green on the dashboard. No view of the thinking underneath.

Where the five principles sit.

The five Weird Wisdom® principles are not an alternative to your management system. They are the behavioural layer it assumes exists and cannot require.

Being Comfortable with the Unknowns. Risk clauses depend on people naming what is not yet known. Documentation rewards certainty, so Unknowns get filtered out of the register before anyone sees them.

Failure as Growth. If reporting a failure costs the person who reports it, your incident data is fiction and your board is reading a novel.

Harmony in Contradictions. Throughput against thoroughness. Cost against quality. The manual behaves as though these tensions do not exist. Staff resolve them privately, dozens of times a day, and the resolution never appears in a record.

Question the Norms. Internal audit asks whether the process was followed. It rarely asks whether the process is still right.

Explore the Unconventional. Standards are the boundaries of the field, not obstacles. Inside them there is room to meet a requirement differently and better.

The load your system was never built to carry.

Your management system is not wrong. It is carrying a load it was never built to carry alone. It can describe what should happen. It cannot make people think well when the instructions run out.