[Translation] Standards: excellence vs. mediocrity

Original from 4/24/2011: Gestão 2.0

The text below is a translation of the excellent article Standards: excellence vs mediocrity, written by Jason Yip, a Thoughtworks consultant I had the pleasure of meeting in person last year.

Before the translated text, a short introduction. Plenty of concepts we treat as foundational in the Western world carry a radically different meaning in the Eastern world. One of the hardest to carry across is precisely “standard.”

In the Western world, a “standard” is a common denominator: static, rigid, hard to change, the status quo. In the Eastern world, “standard” means “the best.” If tomorrow another “best” shows up, that becomes the new standard. It isn’t something unreachable that we admire from below, knowing we’ll hardly get there, like a “record.”

Imagine a world where the “record” is the “standard.” I wrote about this in another article, Standards, Commodities, and Innovations, and it’s worth the read. Here’s the translation of Jason’s article:

A few years ago, I went on a Lean study tour in Japan. As expected, we did a plant visit at Toyota. Unexpectedly, this visit was hosted by the plant manager who also accompanied us on the standard guided tour. At one point, we were looking at a demonstration area of fundamental skills training – developing the basic skills necessary to be a productive member on the assembly line. Most of this was about hand-eye coordination and motor skills. For example, there’s an exercise where you take a thin rope and wrap it around a set of pegs following a known clockwise or counter-clockwise sequence. I’ve sketched an example of what this might look like:

I was able to do the exercise in 8 seconds. We then watched a video showing the plant champion doing it in 4 seconds. We asked the plant manager what the standard was, expecting the answer to be something like 5 - 6 seconds. His answer? 4 seconds, of course. If someone is able to do 5 - 6 seconds, they’d train them to achieve 4 but slower than that, and they’d probably find the candidate something else to do.

Our basic assumption was that “standard” is supposed to be something easy enough that everyone can do it. Sometimes that “standard” comes with an expectation of training but many times it ends up being about lowest common denominator in order to achieve consistency. Obviously, we can’t achieve consistency if our standards can only be achieved by a subset of people. The consequence of this mindset is that “standards” inevitably pull the organisation toward mediocrity.

The Toyota assumption was that the best should be the standard. There is still an expectation that people can do it (with training) and an expectation of consistency but it’s a standard of excellence rather than lowest common denominator. This creates a much higher expectation of performance and challenge. The consequence of this mindset is that “standards” inevitably pull the organisation toward excellence, especially as people’s capabilities continue to develop over time.

In one case, standards are an anchor; in the other case, standards are an engine.

Is this any different in our world of information technology and software development? I don’t think so. Think about the last standard you encountered (e.g., coding standard, design standard, etc.). Was it designed as an anchor or as an engine? And what would it be like if every standard was designed to be an engine?