From Quality Management System to Quality Culture
A Practical Reading of ISO 9001:2026 Through ISO 9000:2026 and ISO 10010:2022
When Every Document Is in Place — Yet Quality Still Fails
An organization may have an approved quality policy.
Documented procedures.
Objectives and performance indicators.
Internal audit programmes.
Training records.
Nonconformity reports and corrective actions.
It may even hold a valid ISO 9001 certification.
And yet, one question remains far more revealing:
What happens when an employee discovers a real problem?
Do they report it immediately?
Or do they first ask themselves:
What will happen to me if I do?
What happens when a quality professional identifies a nonconforming product while the shipment is already late and the customer is waiting?
What happens when the data reveals a problem that management would rather not hear about?
And what happens when meeting the production target conflicts with meeting quality requirements?
At that point, the real test is no longer:
What does the procedure say?
It becomes:
How do people actually behave?
The distance between the documented system and actual organizational behaviour is one of the most important places where quality culture becomes visible.
ISO 9001:2026 — A Small Change in Words, or a Larger Change in Thinking?
One of the important developments in the sixth edition of ISO 9001 is the explicit appearance of Quality Culture and Ethical Behaviour within requirements related to leadership and awareness.
Under Clause 5.1.1 — Leadership and Commitment, top management is expected, as part of its leadership responsibilities, to promote quality culture and ethical behaviour.
The subject does not stop with leadership.
Clause 7.3 — Awareness also brings quality culture and ethical behaviour into what persons doing work under the organization's control need to be aware of.
The accompanying guidance further connects quality culture and ethical behaviour with shared values, attitudes and practices within the organization.
So this is not simply about adding two new terms to the ISO 9001 vocabulary.
It raises a deeper question:
Does everyday behaviour within the organization support the quality management system it has designed — or quietly work against it?
Quality Culture Did Not Suddenly Appear in 2026
It would be misleading to suggest that ISO discovered quality culture for the first time with ISO 9001:2026.
The subject has been developing for some time.
In 2022, ISO published ISO 10010:2022 — Quality management — Guidance to understand, evaluate and improve organizational quality culture.
ISO 10010 provides guidance for understanding, evaluating, developing and improving organizational quality culture in support of sustained success.
It places particular emphasis on people engagement and leadership, and it includes examples of tools that organizations can use for self-assessment to determine the maturity of their quality culture and identify opportunities for improvement.
It is guidance applicable across organizations of different sizes, sectors and levels of maturity.
ISO 10010 was therefore not created to give organizations another certificate to display.
It addresses a more difficult question:
What culture is the quality management system operating within?
ISO 9000:2026 Brings the Concept into the Fundamentals of Quality Management
The picture becomes even clearer when we consider ISO 9000:2026.
The new edition addresses Organizational Quality Culture as part of the fundamental concepts of quality management and connects it with organizational values, beliefs, history, attitudes and observable behaviours.
Importantly, ISO 9000:2026 also explains how organizational quality culture can influence the actions people choose in alignment with expected values and behaviours.
This brings us to an important distinction:
Quality culture is not simply what an organization says about quality.
To a significant extent, quality culture is revealed by what people actually do when they have to make a choice.
When the Procedure Says One Thing — and the Culture Says Another
Imagine an employee discovers a nonconforming product shortly before shipment.
The procedure is clear:
Stop the process. Isolate the product. Report the nonconformity.
But the employee also knows that stopping the process will delay delivery.
They know the production manager is under pressure to achieve the monthly target.
And they remember what happened the last time someone stopped production because of a quality concern.
What happens next?
The formal system says:
Report the Nonconformity.
But an unwritten culture may be saying:
Don't create problems.
Which one will be stronger at the moment of decision?
The procedure?
Or the culture?
This is what makes quality culture a core quality-management issue rather than a soft organizational concept.
Ethical Behaviour: Why Is It More Explicit in ISO 9001:2026?
The connection between Quality Culture and Ethical Behaviour deserves particular attention.
Some of the most serious quality failures do not necessarily occur because procedures are missing.
The procedure may exist.
Responsibilities may be clearly assigned.
People may have been trained.
Records may be available.
The problem can begin when someone decides to:
hide a nonconformity;
ignore an unfavourable test result;
present selective performance information;
downplay the seriousness of a customer complaint;
release a product under delivery pressure;
pressure a quality professional to approve a decision that is not supported by evidence;
or avoid reporting a known problem because of fear of the consequences.
In these situations, the problem is not necessarily:
We don't have a procedure.
It may be:
We have a procedure, but our organizational behaviour defeats it.
That is a fundamentally different problem.
Leadership Is Where Culture Begins
It is therefore significant that the promotion of quality culture and ethical behaviour appears under Clause 5.1.1 — Leadership and Commitment.
Culture is not built through slogans.
People learn the real culture of an organization through repeated leadership decisions.
What does leadership reward?
What does it challenge?
What does it tolerate?
How does it respond to bad news?
What happens when quality conflicts with cost?
What happens when delivery pressure conflicts with conformity?
Does management genuinely want to know the truth?
Or does it mainly want to hear good news?
An organization may display the words:
Quality First.
But if rewards are based almost entirely on production volume, and the person who stops a process because of a quality problem is treated as the cause of delay, another message is being communicated.
And the message communicated through repeated decisions is usually stronger than the message written on the wall.
Real Culture Becomes Visible Under Pressure
It is relatively easy to support quality when doing so carries little cost.
The real test comes when the decision has consequences.
A major customer is waiting.
A shipment must leave today.
The production target has not been achieved.
Rework will be expensive.
Stopping the line will affect performance results.
A senior manager has made the wrong decision.
This is where culture becomes visible.
One of the most useful questions we can therefore ask about an organization is:
What happens to quality when the organization is under pressure?
Values that disappear under pressure may be declared values.
They have not necessarily become embedded culture.
Quality Culture Does Not Belong to the Quality Department
There is another trap worth avoiding.
Quality culture is not a new project for the Quality Manager.
If quality culture becomes nothing more than:
a new procedure,
a new form,
a new survey,
a new PowerPoint presentation,
and another annual awareness session,
while the way decisions are made remains unchanged,
very little has actually changed.
Quality culture extends into production, sales, procurement, human resources, maintenance, design, service delivery and top management.
In fact, some of the decisions with the greatest influence on quality culture may be made far away from the quality department.
When HR designs an incentive system that rewards quantity while ignoring quality, that influences quality culture.
When procurement repeatedly selects the lowest-cost supplier despite a history of quality problems, that influences quality culture.
When management knowingly tolerates a workaround because it helps achieve the target, that sends a cultural message stronger than many training sessions.
ISO 10010:2022 — From Concept to Evaluation and Improvement
This is where ISO 10010 becomes particularly valuable.
The standard does not treat quality culture as an abstract idea that organizations can only discuss.
It provides guidance for understanding, evaluating, developing and improving organizational quality culture.
It connects this work with quality-management fundamentals and principles, with particular emphasis on People Engagement and Leadership.
ISO also indicates that ISO 10010 includes examples of tools that can support self-assessment of organizational quality culture, helping organizations determine maturity and identify opportunities for improvement.
That distinction matters.
The useful question is not simply:
Do we have a quality culture — yes or no?
Culture is not an ON/OFF switch.
A more mature question is:
What is the maturity of our quality culture, where are the gaps, and how can we improve it?
How Do We Recognize an Organization's Culture?
I would not begin by asking for a "quality culture document."
I would begin by looking for patterns of behaviour.
How are mistakes handled?
Do people first look for the cause — or for someone to blame?
Can an employee challenge an unsafe or nonconforming decision?
Does bad news reach top management without being filtered or softened?
Is a nonconformity treated as an opportunity to learn, or as a problem that must be closed quickly?
Are problems acknowledged early, or only after the customer discovers them?
Can the quality function take a position that conflicts with operational pressure?
Does the organization learn from recurring problems?
Is there a visible gap between what management says and what employees experience?
Questions like these begin to reveal the culture that actually operates inside the system.
But Can We Audit Culture?
This is perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion for auditors.
Culture is not a document.
And an auditor should not become an organizational psychologist issuing conclusions such as:
“I feel this organization has a good quality culture.”
That is not objective audit evidence.
Perhaps the better question is therefore not:
Can we audit culture?
But:
How can we audit whether the claimed culture is consistently reflected in the way the quality management system actually operates?
That changes the discussion significantly.
Do Not Look for One Piece of Evidence — Triangulate
An auditor can compare several relatively independent sources of evidence:
What leadership says.
What employees say.
What records show.
What performance indicators reveal.
What complaints and nonconformities tell us.
What actually happens during observation of operations.
Any one source may not be sufficient on its own.
But when several different sources begin pointing in the same direction, a stronger picture emerges.
This is where Evidence Triangulation becomes an increasingly important auditing skill.
Three Systems May Exist Inside One Organization
During an audit, I find it useful to think in terms of three different systems.
1. The Documented System
What policies, procedures and instructions say should happen.
2. The Reported System
What management and employees say happens.
3. The Practiced System
What actually happens when operations are observed and evidence is followed.
The closer these three systems are to one another, the greater our confidence that the documented system has become part of actual organizational practice.
The wider the gap between them, the more reason we have to investigate.
This is precisely where an auditor can begin to see quality culture without turning culture into a subjective judgement.
Example: “We Encourage People to Report Problems”
Management may tell an auditor:
“We have an open-door policy and encourage everyone to report problems.”
Good.
But the audit should not necessarily stop there.
The auditor can interview employees:
What would you do if you identified a problem?
Has that happened before?
What happened after you reported it?
The auditor can review relevant nonconformities, quality alerts or near-miss information.
They can identify cases where employees stopped a process, challenged a decision or rejected a product.
They can then examine how management responded.
If the management narrative, employee experience, records and observed behaviour are consistent, confidence increases.
But if management says:
“Report problems.”
while employees say:
“We prefer to solve it quietly.”
there is something worth following.
Ethical Behaviour Does Not Turn the Auditor into an Ethics Investigator
This distinction is essential.
The presence of Ethical Behaviour in ISO 9001:2026 does not mean the auditor is responsible for making absolute moral judgements about individuals.
Auditing remains based on Audit Criteria and Objective Evidence.
Behaviour becomes relevant to the audit when it affects the ability of the quality management system to achieve its intended results, meet applicable requirements, or maintain customer satisfaction.
The question is not:
Are these good people?
The question is:
Does organizational behaviour support the effectiveness of the quality management system — or undermine it?
That is a very different question.
This Also Changes How We Think About Evidence
For years, some audits have easily become a sequence of requests:
Show me the procedure.
Show me the record.
Show me the training.
Show me the KPI.
Quality culture adds another question:
Show me that it works in practice.
A training record on reporting nonconformities proves that training took place.
It does not necessarily prove that employees feel able to report problems.
A quality policy proves that the policy exists.
It does not prove that management decisions remain consistent with it under pressure.
A customer complaint process proves that a mechanism exists.
It does not prove that the organization genuinely listens to information it would rather not hear.
Quality Culture and the Environment for the Operation of Processes
ISO 9001:2026 provides another useful connection.
Under Clause 7.1.4 — Environment for the Operation of Processes, the standard addresses the environment necessary for operating processes, including relevant social, psychological and other factors.
The text also connects some of these considerations with organizational quality culture and ethical behaviour.
This broadens the discussion.
Quality culture is not an idea floating above the management system.
It can influence the environment in which people actually perform processes.
How do people communicate?
How do they respond to pressure?
How are mistakes handled?
Does the environment support transparency?
Can someone say:
“This is not conforming.”
even when saying it is inconvenient?
Awareness Alone Is Not Enough
Clause 7.3 is important.
But we should be careful not to reduce it to a Training Attendance Sheet.
An employee may attend a complete awareness session on quality culture and ethical behaviour.
They may sign the attendance record.
They may answer every test question correctly.
Then they return to a workplace that punishes the very behaviour the training encouraged.
What happens?
Culture will defeat training.
True awareness therefore cannot be evaluated only through what people know.
It should also be reflected in their ability to connect that knowledge with their behaviour, decisions and contribution to the effectiveness of the system.
One of the Most Revealing Questions: What Does the Organization Actually Reward?
If you want to understand an organization's culture, look at what it rewards.
If you tell employees:
Quality is our highest priority.
but reward them only for the number of units produced, do not be surprised when quantity becomes the real priority.
If you tell managers:
Report problems early.
but evaluate them based on having a low number of reported problems without distinguishing between fewer problems and less reporting, you may have created a dangerous incentive.
And if you declare:
Customer First
while rewarding sales for closing deals regardless of the organization's real ability to meet requirements, there is a conflict between declared culture and the incentive system.
Quality culture is therefore not only about values.
It is also about:
What the organization rewards, tolerates, challenges and learns from.
Who Is Responsible for Quality Culture?
The easy answer is:
Everyone.
But that is not the complete answer.
Everyone participates in culture, but leadership has a disproportionate influence on how culture is shaped.
That helps explain why the subject matters so much within Clause 5.1.1.
An individual employee can behave well inside a weak culture.
But it is difficult to sustain strong organizational behaviour over time if daily leadership decisions consistently reward the opposite.
Leadership does not build culture only through what it says.
Leadership builds culture through repeated decisions.
How Should an Organization Begin Without Creating Another Documentation Project?
I would not recommend that the first response to ISO 9001:2026 be:
“We need a Quality Culture Procedure.”
In fact, that may be exactly the wrong starting point.
Begin instead with questions:
What behaviours do we want to support quality?
What current behaviours work against it?
Can people report problems?
How do we respond to honest mistakes?
How do we respond to deliberate concealment?
Are incentives aligned with quality objectives?
Are leadership decisions consistent with the stated quality policy?
How do we learn from complaints and nonconformities?
Do audit results lead to real organizational learning?
What happens when quality conflicts with time or cost?
Then use an appropriate approach to assess maturity and identify gaps.
This is where ISO 10010:2022 becomes particularly valuable: it provides a framework for evaluation, development and improvement, including examples of self-assessment tools.
From Culture Awareness to Culture Evidence
One of the emerging challenges for auditors may be moving from:
Has the organization talked about quality culture?
to:
What evidence indicates that this culture actually operates?
The auditor does not need a single “culture metric.”
The auditor needs to look for consistency.
Leadership → Decisions → Behaviour → Evidence → Results
If leadership says quality is a priority, we should be able to see that reflected in decisions.
If transparency is presented as a value, we should be able to see how bad news is handled.
If employees are said to be able to report concerns without fear, practical evidence should support that claim.
And if the organization says it learns from mistakes, that learning should be traceable into actual changes within the management system.
Can Quality Without Ethical Behaviour Be Sustained?
An organization may achieve good results for some time despite a weak culture.
Inspection may work.
Controls may detect defects.
Audits may identify problems.
Management may correct individual cases.
But the deeper question is not:
Can we detect errors?
It is:
Have we created an environment in which problems are less likely to be concealed and more likely to be identified, reported and learned from early?
That is where ethical behaviour becomes connected to the sustained effectiveness of the quality management system rather than remaining a separate topic.
What Does This Mean for Auditors?
I believe ISO 9001:2026 raises the level of competence expected from auditors.
Knowledge of the standard remains essential.
But knowledge of clauses alone will not be enough.
Auditors will increasingly need:
effective interviewing;
observation;
intelligent sampling;
the ability to follow audit trails across processes;
comparison of statements with evidence;
recognition of contradictions;
and the ability to connect decisions with outcomes.
Above all:
Evidence Triangulation.
A strong auditor will not ask only:
“Do you have evidence?”
but also:
“Do the different sources of evidence tell the same story?”
The Real Challenge for Organizations
It will be very easy to respond to ISO 9001:2026 in the traditional way:
Revise the quality policy.
Add a sentence about Quality Culture.
Update the awareness programme.
Add a question to the internal audit checklist.
Declare the transition complete.
But if that is all we do, we may achieve a Document Transition without achieving a Management System Transition.
The real transition begins when we ask:
What needs to change in the way we lead, make decisions, respond to mistakes, reward people, and deal with uncomfortable information?
ISO 9001:2026 Makes ISO 10010 More Relevant Than Ever
In my view, this is one of the important consequences of the new edition.
ISO 10010:2022 has existed for several years.
But it now becomes particularly relevant for organizations that want to go beyond formal conformity.
ISO 9001:2026 brings quality culture and ethical behaviour explicitly into the quality management system requirements.
ISO 9000:2026 provides the conceptual and vocabulary foundation for understanding Organizational Quality Culture.
And ISO 10010:2022 helps organizations move from discussing culture to understanding, evaluating, developing and improving it.
The relationship between the three is therefore complementary:
ISO 9001:2026 — What is required
ISO 9000:2026 — What the concepts mean
ISO 10010:2022 — How organizational quality culture can be understood, evaluated and improved
In the End, Quality Is What We Do When the Decision Becomes Difficult
We can write an excellent quality policy.
We can develop detailed procedures.
We can invest in advanced information systems.
We can train employees.
We can conduct audits.
We can measure dozens of indicators.
But eventually there will be a moment when the answer is not sitting inside a form.
A person will have to decide:
Do I tell the whole truth?
Do I report the mistake?
Do I stop the process?
Do I refuse to release the product?
Do I admit that the previous decision did not work?
Do I place the customer's requirements ahead of the number?
That is where the real test appears.
A quality management system can tell people what they are expected to do.
Culture can strongly influence what they actually do.
That is why I do not see the explicit attention to Quality Culture and Ethical Behaviour in ISO 9001:2026 as merely a change in terminology.
It invites us back to one of the most fundamental questions at the heart of any quality management system:
Does the system we have built exist only in our documents — or has it become part of the way we think, decide and behave?
And perhaps one of the most important questions for organizations and auditors during the transition to ISO 9001:2026 is this:
If no auditor were in the room, would the organization still make the same decision?
If the answer is yes, then we are no longer talking only about a quality management system.
We are moving closer to a genuine quality culture.
About the Author
Ahmed Rashidy Abdo focuses on management-system development, audit effectiveness and auditor competence, with particular interest in translating international-standard requirements into organizational practices that can be evidenced, evaluated and continually improved.
References
ISO 9001:2026 — Quality management systems — Requirements. Sixth edition, 2026.
ISO 9000:2026 — Quality management — Fundamentals and vocabulary. Fifth edition, 2026.
ISO 10010:2022 — Quality management — Guidance to understand, evaluate and improve organizational quality culture — International Organization for Standardization.
