ISO Studies

About ISO Studies

Standards are the least visible infrastructure we have, and the most load bearing. They are agreements, not laws, and that distinction explains almost everything about how they behave.

Begin with a bolt. Somebody in one country cuts a thread into a steel shank, and somebody in another country cuts a matching thread into a nut, and the two have never met, never spoken, never seen each other's workshop. Yet the nut turns onto the bolt and holds. That is not luck and it is not law. It is a standard: a written agreement that a particular thing will be done in a particular way, arrived at by the people who will have to live with it, and adopted because adopting it is easier than not. Strip away the committee rooms and the formal language and that is the whole of the idea. Everything else is machinery built to make the agreement stick.

The word carries baggage. To many people a standard sounds like a rule handed down, a hurdle placed in the path, a thing enforced by inspectors. That reading is understandable and mostly wrong. The overwhelming majority of published standards carry no force at all until somebody chooses to give them force, whether that is a purchaser writing them into a contract, a regulator citing them in legislation, or an industry adopting them because the alternative is chaos. Left alone, a standard is simply a description of an agreed way of doing something, sitting on a shelf, waiting to be useful. Its power is entirely borrowed from the people who reference it.

The single most persistent misunderstanding about standards is that somebody is making you follow them.

The committee is the characteristic institution of standardisation, and it works in a way that looks inefficient and is not.

Standardisation is the rare infrastructure whose success is measured entirely by how completely you forget it exists.

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