There are a bunch of words
that get thrown around a lot in the Quality community; words like “continual”
or “continuing” or “improvement” or
“risk”. But I would argue that the most significant
word in the Quality arena is the word “Standard”.
In the Quality arena
“Standards” is a powerful word. It
describes a document that indicates either “the right and thoughtful thing to
do” or “the only and absolute thing to do”.
A standard has a higher value than “guidance” which is something you can
take or leave. The general public
understands this; David Letterman used to say “Traffic signals in New York are just
rough guidelines” or there was the pirate in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean
who said “the code of the brethren is more what you'd call guidelines than
actual rules”. Think of standards as
similar to, but more righteous than regulations or laws and certainly more
dignified than “rules”, which can be arbitrary, and more real than guidelines, which all too often are not much more than a punchline.
The word “standard” must be
viewed as special and be safeguarded from abuse.
Standards deserve that
special prominence because there are specifics about how standards must be properly
designed and properly constructed.
Simply put, a standard is a respected document of requirement, not
because of its content but more so because how those words were selected for
proper use.
The ultimate source of
standards is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) which
points to a process of both objectivity and consensus. ISO as the premier standards
development body has established the importance of standards development
objectivity. ISO does not decide what
standards it is going to write. Instead member
bodies have to make a solid proposal which is circulated through member
committees to get approved.
ISO committees that are
given approval to develop the standard are made of individuals from a variety
of jurisdictions, each with their own vested opinions. To get through this process a document has to
achieve agreement from at least two thirds of committee members with less than
25 percent of votes cast to the negative.
That is called committee consensus.
But that alone does not
assure the path to publication. After committee
consensus, the document has to be circulated broadly throughout the world to
interested parties to get a broad sense of opinion. All issues and differences raised through
this process have to be addressed. Only
after the process has been repeated several times, to ensure as broad an
agreement as possible, a document can be
published and referred to as a “standard”.
And importantly, in order to
ensure that any error that slip by are addressed and to ensure that the
standard remains relevant to the times, it must be revisited every 5 years.
If a document does not
succeed in going through this arduous process, often the result of differing
opinions, it can still be published, but the term “standard” cannot be
used. The meaning of the term “standard”
is, as it must be, protected from abuse or trivialization.
There are solid reasons for
this arduous process. First off, when a
small group of people decides to get together and write something, there is always
a great risk for bias and for exclusion.
Not asking for broad opinion almost guarantees that none will be
found. The product generated, whatever
its intent and purpose, is tainted because of the lack of broad
consideration.
Tainted standards are not the
product solely of small organizations who strive a little too hard. They all too often finds itself in the
products of large “august” national bodies, who should know better. They result because of the innate arrogance
of august bodies. “We must be right
because we are so damn important”.
This last while, I have been
dealing with one such organization with a disturbing track record. An organization that makes up rules without working through objectivity or wide consensus, but who stills calls its products "standards". An organization who wraps itself in a cocoon
of self-import of its own making, either oblivious or indifferent to the flaws
in their own “standards”. I can’t go
into specific detail here for obvious reason, but the battle ground is now set.
So let me just end (for now)
with the following thought, if an organization is not prepared to put its work
through a process of objectivity and the scrutiny of consensus through
transparency, then it is just a bunch of guys and women hanging out making up
its own rules. Hardly august, and hardly
dignified; more about pretense and self-serving rules than actually writing standards.
Just another herd of
Pirates.
