ISO Studies / What A Standard Actually Is

The Difference Between Describing And Certifying

Some standards say what good looks like. Others create a formal claim that somebody has done it.

There is a family resemblance between all standards, but they do not all do the same job. A large group simply describes: here is a thread form, here is a paper size, here is how a colour is measured, here is a vocabulary so that two engineers arguing about a component are at least arguing about the same component. These documents are reference material. They settle a definition and then get out of the way. Nobody claims conformity with a vocabulary. They just use it, and the argument that would otherwise have consumed an afternoon never happens, which is the entire return on the effort of writing it.

A second group specifies something a product must satisfy: dimensions, tolerances, performance under test, safety behaviour. Here conformity is a meaningful claim, and it can be checked by measuring the thing, which is why this family of documents pairs so naturally with laboratories. A third group describes how an organisation should arrange its work rather than what its output must measure, and this is where matters become interesting, because the subject is a set of practices rather than an object, and practices resist measurement in a way that a diameter does not.

Layered on top of all three is the question of whether anybody formally attests to conformity, and that layer is genuinely separate from the standard itself. The document does not certify anything. It sits there. Certification is an additional apparatus, with its own bodies, its own accreditation arrangements and its own economics, which attaches to some standards and not to others. Confusing the two leads people to believe that a standard is a badge. It is not. It is a description that a badge may or may not be built on top of.