Leadership, culture, data: one underlying shift
As an auditor, I now assess your quality work in three areas: leadership, culture, and data. Leadership is about direction, priorities, and behavior. Culture has to show up as ownership and action across the organization, well beyond the quality department. And data has to show that it all works, rather than merely record that it happened.
All three point to the same shift: quality becomes a leadership responsibility. That takes more commitment from the top, and you'll feel it in your culture and in how you use data. It's no longer something one person or one department carries alone.
It also changes what an audit looks like for me in practice. I'm moving from checking orders, manuals, and procedures line by line to understanding the business and suggesting improvements. From inspector to sounding board. And the companies I audit are moving with me. Authoritarian leadership is on its way out, and more companies are now open about where the cracks are, instead of hiding them until I've left.
Pitfall 1: Writing culture into a procedure
To me, this is the most obvious pitfall. Companies often meet the requirement for a visible culture and ethical behavior with yet another document: a description of how they "promote a quality culture," filed in the same folder as everything else.
But you can't document culture with a procedure alone. What I look for is how you actually use data day to day, what leadership does in practice, and whether words and actions match across the company.
Pitfall 2: Data that documents but doesn't drive
This one is harder to spot, because it looks like progress. You have data, but you still use it mainly to document that something happened, rather than to drive the company forward.
I often point to a truck dealership I know as the counterexample. At that dealership, a truck reports on its own when it needs service. The system orders the parts, and only once they're in stock does it notify the trucking company that the truck is due in for service in three weeks. Nobody talked to anyone along the way. The data did all the talking, so there wasn't a folder in sight. The catch is that errors can now creep into the data itself, for example into master data.
Supplier management is moving the same way. Price used to be the deciding factor. Today, the most mature companies also weigh quality and delivery time, and spread their risk across several suppliers, because the lowest price often turns out to be expensive once you factor in the cost of poor quality.
This is also where my questions as an auditor change. I no longer ask to see your procedures. I ask how you actually use data to run the business.
Pitfall 3: Quality stays with QA
The last pitfall is the one I've most often seen hold companies back. The system is built for and run by QA alone, while the rest of the organization watches from the sidelines.
After all, quality has never been made in the quality department. QA still needs to ensure structure, compliance, follow-up, and reporting. But accountability for priorities, actions, and results belongs with leadership and the process owners. That's where a company moves from having a system to having a culture. And that's exactly the shift ISO 9001:2026 now holds you accountable for.
Show management the money
Fixing the three pitfalls takes resources, and getting them approved isn't always easy. That's where we quality people sometimes fall short: showing management the money.
Your lever is the cost of poor quality, the kind that never shows up on an invoice but sits below the surface. Complaints, scrapped parts, machine downtime, late deliveries. And the one I find most striking: lower morale among production staff who watch the same error happen again and again while nothing changes. Without those numbers, it's hard to get leadership to make quality a priority. With them, quality work stops being a cost to keep in check and becomes a place to find money.
The whole business owns quality
QA is still the backbone of the system. But whether ISO 9001:2026 changes anything for you depends on the rest of the organization taking part in what the standard now tests. Does your culture show in behavior? Do you use data to run the business? Can leadership, not just QA, answer for it? In the end, the question is whether the system actually drives and improves the business, not just whether it can pass an audit.
Eli Sandlykke is Lead Auditor for Valcert på ISO 9001, 14001, and 45001. With more than 25 years of experience at companies such as LEGO, Siemens, and Danfoss, he has in-depth knowledge of building, running, and auditing management systems.