A Room Full Of People Who Disagree, And A Clock

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

A standard usually begins because somebody notices the absence of one. A recurring dispute between suppliers and buyers, a safety problem that keeps surfacing, a market where every participant has invented a slightly different solution and everybody is losing money on the incompatibility. Somebody proposes that a document should exist. If enough interested parties agree that it should, a group is convened, and the composition of that group is drawn from the parties with a stake: manufacturers, users, testing laboratories, researchers, sometimes regulators and consumer representatives. Rivals sit alongside one another, which sounds unworkable and is not, because the thing they are agreeing on is usually beneath the level at which they compete.

What happens next is not what an outsider expects. There is very little of the drama of committee work as popularly imagined. Mostly there is drafting, and circulation, and comment, and redrafting. Somebody produces a working text. Everybody attacks it, in writing, clause by clause. Every comment must be dealt with, which does not mean accepted, but does mean addressed. The text goes round again. It goes round several times. Positions that seemed irreconcilable in the first round quietly dissolve in the third, because somebody found wording that both parties could live with, which is the real skill of the trade.

Underneath this is a bet: that a document produced by the people who will have to follow it will be a document they can actually follow. Nobody in the room is guessing about whether a tolerance is achievable, because somebody in the room makes the part. Nobody is guessing about whether a test is repeatable, because somebody in the room runs the laboratory. This is why standards work is done by practitioners rather than by professional drafters, and it is also why standards work is so demanding of the practitioners who do it.