Slowness Is Not A Defect In The Machinery

Everybody complains that standards take too long, and everybody is right, and it is still the correct design.

The complaint is universal and sincere. A technology moves quickly, the committee moves slowly, and by the time the document appears the world has shifted underneath it. Practitioners grind their teeth. Companies with a product to sell find the pace maddening. Nobody in the process defends the delay with enthusiasm, and there is real effort in most quarters to move faster where moving faster is possible: shorter deliverable types for fast moving fields, electronic balloting, parallel drafting, working practices borrowed from software development. The complaint has been heard and acted on repeatedly, and the pace remains, by the standards of anything else in technical life, glacial. That persistence is a clue that something structural is going on rather than mere institutional sluggishness.

And yet the slowness is doing something. A standard produced quickly is a standard produced without hearing from everybody who will have to use it, and a standard that has not heard from everybody will be disputed. A disputed standard is a weak standard, because adoption is voluntary and the disputing parties simply carry on doing what they were doing. The result is not one standard but two, which is worse than none, because now there is a genuine incompatibility with two documents claiming to resolve it. The time spent working through objections is time spent buying breadth of adoption, and breadth of adoption is the entire product.

There is a useful way to hold both truths at once. Speed is genuinely valuable and the delay genuinely costs something real, in wasted engineering and duplicated effort and markets that fragment while everybody waits. But the cure for slowness is not to stop listening. It is to listen more efficiently, which is a much harder problem, and one the standards world has been working at for a long time with mixed results. Anybody who proposes to fix the pace by cutting the consultation has misunderstood which part is the product.