From April 10 through July 3, 2025, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) had the opportunity to vote on a draft update to the global standard ISO 9000 “Quality management—Fundamentals and vocabulary.” ISO 9000 is the companion document to the more widely known ISO 9001. It contains definitions for many technical terms and describes in brief essays the conceptual structure underlying quality management.

The most recently published edition, the one currently valid, dates from 2015; even if the proposed updates are approved without any argument, the official ISO publication schedule means they won’t come into effect until 2026—fully 11 years after the version that’s in force today. 

Right now, in the middle of the voting and review cycle, there’s still a chance that some of the updates won’t be approved, or that something new could be added. But the current draft gives us a good idea of what’s likely coming.

What’s changing? A little bit of everything. ISO 9000 includes definitions for technical terms, and a lot of technical terms have been added. It includes explanations of fundamental quality concepts, and a lot of concepts have been added. To be clear, the basics are the same as they’ve always been: Nobody has to relearn the quality business from scratch. But the scope or reach of the standard is a lot wider than it was before.

Finally, there are editorial changes. Many passages have been rewritten—possibly to make them clearer—even when the meaning stays the same. And some of the material has been rearranged.  

New terminology

The new draft standard adds definitions for 86 new technical terms. A few of these relate to traditional quality topics, terms like complainant, form, good practice, result, and work instruction. I don’t know why these terms weren’t already included in earlier editions of ISO 9000, but I assume it must have been an oversight. Then there are terms related to ancillary disciplines like project management (project life cycle, project phase), or to tools that have become popular enough to be more or less standard (change matrix, dashboard). 

But 45 of the new terms—that’s more than half—relate to government and voting. These terms aren’t used anywhere else in the document, so they haven’t been introduced as part of the conceptual infrastructure. They seem to come from ISO/TS 54001:2019 “Quality management systems: Particular requirements for the application of ISO 9001:2015 for electoral organizations at all levels of government.” They include terms like electoral body, outsourced electoral process, ballot proposal, electoral service development plan, and so on. The most likely explanation is that the committee wants to pull all technical terms for all applications of quality management into one large pool where they can be kept consistent with each other, rather than letting them hide in application-specific documents where they can be scattered and hard to find. But this is speculation on my part.

Rearranging the principles and concepts

Among the principles and the concepts, there has been both rearrangement and addition.

To begin, whole sections have been rearranged. The 2015 edition broke up clause 2 as follows:
1. General
2. Fundamental concepts
3. Quality management principles
4. Developing the QMS using fundamental concepts and principles

The new draft standard swaps the position of concepts and principles, and then splits concepts into “fundamental” and “additional” as follows:
1. General
2. Quality management principles
3. Fundamental quality management concepts
4. Additional concepts relevant to quality management
5. Developing the QMS using fundamental concepts and principles

The list of quality management principles didn’t change (though the paragraph numbering changed from 2.3.x to 2.2.x). These are still the same seven principles they were before: customer focus, leadership, engagement of people, process approach, improvement, evidence-based decision making, and relationship management.    

The description of these principles is basically unchanged except for some minor points of wording. As I mentioned above, nobody has to relearn the quality business from scratch. 

New concepts 

But among the concepts (both “fundamental” and “additional”) there are a lot of additions. Here are the new concepts that have been added:
• Quality management
• Quality assurance
• Quality control
• Quality planning
• Process management
• Risk-based thinking
• Organizational quality culture
• Continual improvement
• Integrated management system
• Circular economy
• Emerging technologies
• Innovation
• Change management
• Customer experience
• Knowledge management
• Information management
• People aspects
• Business continuity

It’s a lot.

Some of these concepts—quality management, quality assurance, quality control, and quality planning are obvious examples—have been current in the profession for a long time. My only question is why they were never included before. The same is true of process management and integrated management system. The 2015 edition of ISO 9001 introduced the concept of risk-based thinking without a definition, so it’s only fair that we give it a definition with this update. And I’ve sat through enough debates about whether improvement should be continual or continuous that I welcome the formal definition of that term as well. 

But some of these other concepts puzzle me. Circular economy? Emerging technologies? Innovation? Business continuity? I don’t deny that they’re interesting and important. But I question whether they’re related to quality.

Why did the committee include these concepts? I think they want to encourage businesses to look past tomorrow to take account of the issues that lurk in the shadows of the wider world. Emerging technologies affect all of us, like it or not. Innovation has become a fact of life in the marketplace. And the more we can adopt the perspective of a circular economy, the less strain we’ll put on our resource base, our supply chains, and our natural environment. These topics are important to think about, and the actions stemming from them are valuable things to do.

My concern is that, strictly speaking, they don’t relate to quality. Quality is about satisfying the needs and expectations of customers and other interested parties. And although it’s important to understand the effect that our actions will have on the natural environment or on future generations, it’s hard to say whether the environment or future generations count as “interested parties.” If we try to do too much, I fear we may lose focus on the job at hand.

On the other hand, if we have to address these topics in some way, this document is the best place to do it, precisely because it’s explanatory and not directive. ISO 9000 never tells you what to do; that’s ISO 9001’s job. ISO 9000 just tells you what things mean, words and concepts. So if you really don’t care what circular economy means, you can skip that part and no harm done. No auditor is going to quiz you about it later. In that sense, adding these new concepts does no harm, and it may set the stage for future discussions when there are new standards written that address these topics directly.

It will be months before we know the final list of approved changes. But these are the ones that have been published now. If you have strong opinions about them, now is the time to contact your national standards organization (ANSI for the United States) to let them know what you think.