ISO Studies / What A Standard Actually Is

An Agreement, Not An Order From Above

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

The defining feature of a standard is that it is voluntary. Nothing happens if you ignore it. There is no penalty written into the document, no enforcement body waiting, no consequence beyond the ordinary commercial consequence of building something that does not fit with what everybody else has built. This surprises people, because standards are so often encountered in contexts where they have been made mandatory by somebody else. A building code may adopt one. A tender may demand one. A customer may insist. But in each of those cases the compulsion comes from the code, the tender or the customer. The standard supplied only the words.

This separation matters more than it seems. It explains why standards can be written by the people who will follow them without that being an obvious conflict of interest. If a document has no coercive power of its own, then the parties writing it are not writing their own law. They are writing down what they collectively think good practice looks like, in the knowledge that some of them will adopt it and some will not. The document has to earn its adoption. That is a discipline of its own, and a stricter one than most people assume, because a specification that is unreasonable simply gets ignored.

It also explains the tone. Read almost any standard and you will find language that is careful about distinguishing what is required of somebody claiming conformity from what is merely recommended or permitted. That distinction is doing a great deal of quiet work. It marks the boundary between the parts of the agreement that are load bearing and the parts that are advice. Writers of standards agonise over which category a given sentence belongs in, because putting a good idea in the required column can shut out organisations that do things differently for perfectly sound reasons.