The ongoing debate about the planetary status of Pluto is a really great example of how the standards-making process really works. Like most debates, everyone involved is supposed to be rational, thinking adults. The most rational, thinking people on earth: scientists.

The debate is to keep Pluto classified as a planet or not. And, to be honest, I can’t think of a single good reason why we should or should not change the planet. On one hand, logically it looks like it probably shouldn’t be a planet, as the criteria used to classify it as one is no longer unique and is causing some inconsistencies. On the other hand, this would contradict everything that most adults have been taught, probably causing an uproar among some key constituency of some political party (personally, I am waiting for someone to ask, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?“)

This planetary debate is highly charged, personal, emotional, contradictory at times, and ended with a solution that defies logic and mollifies more than it satisfies. Of course, this reminds me of the times I have been sitting in a room trying to decide on standard ways to do or classify things. For the most part, this has been as a technologist (around data, ETL and architecture), but also as a member of a business and as a leader in a non-profit organization.

There are several lessons I have learned about setting (and breaking) standards over the years. While I wrote about this in an earlier article about standardization and conformity, I thought I would try to distill things down into a few truths about standards. Here they are:

1. Standards are good if they save time, effort, money, or increase safety or happiness. Any other reason is just a justification for the exercise of power.
2. Standards are set by people, not by logic, reason, money, or faith. Anyone who says differently is in denial or trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
3. If there is more than one standard way of doing things, there is no standard way of doing things.
4. Standard is not inherently better than non-standard. However, things may be more comfortable for some people to understand if they believe there is a standard.
5. Not making the decision to have a standard is still an active decision on standardization, with very real personal, organizational, and financial implications.
6. Standards are not good if they don’t work for the people who have to follow them every day. Over the long term, people won’t follow standards that don’t work for them.
7. Mistakes will be made and good standards will take this into consideration.
8. Someone will find an exception and want to to it differently, usually for a good reason. Handling this creatively and gracefully will be your greatest challenge.

At some point, every organization gets to a point where they can see if they just did things in a standard way. Normally, this is just after everything has completely changed or gone to hell, a group has burned themselves out one too many times, or the ball has been dropped in a large, preventable, but hard to predict way. This is a very interesting time, but also very dangerous one. There is momentum for change, but just doing things differently isn’t the same as doing things better.

Just remember, take your time and think about things carefully.  It will all work itself out.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 1:21 pm and is filed under ETL, Information Architecture, People, Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.