ISO Studies / What A Standard Actually Is

Why Coordination Beats Correctness Nearly Every Time

Standards exist to make many independent choices line up, which is a different goal from making each choice optimal.

Consider the shape of the problem a standard is trying to solve. A great many parties, none of whom control the others, each need to make a decision. The decisions must be compatible or nothing works. No party can wait for the others, because waiting is expensive, and no party can dictate, because none has the authority. Absent some mechanism, everybody guesses, the guesses diverge, and the result is a landscape of things that nearly fit. The mechanism that solves this is a shared document that everybody can point at and say: that one, we are all doing that one.

Once you see the problem this way, several puzzling features of standards stop being puzzling. Why is the process so slow? Because the value comes from breadth of agreement, and breadth takes time. Why is the outcome so often a compromise rather than the best available engineering? Because the objective function was never the best engineering. It was the widest workable agreement. Why do obviously superior alternatives fail to displace incumbents? Because the incumbent carries the accumulated weight of everything already built to it, and that weight is the entire point.

None of this means quality is irrelevant. A standard that specifies something unsafe, unworkable or absurdly expensive will fail, and fail fast, because adoption is voluntary and practitioners are not fools. But quality operates as a constraint rather than as the goal. The document has to be good enough that competent people can follow it without embarrassment. Beyond that threshold, the returns come from getting more parties to sign up, not from further refinement. Committees that forget this produce beautiful documents that nobody uses, admired by their authors and ignored by the industry they were written for. The experienced hands can usually tell when a discussion has crossed from settling a real problem into polishing a preference.