In today’s bulletin, Charlie discusses his recent ISO meeting in Berlin and provides an insider’s view of how international ISO standards are developed, reviewed, and published.
I have been in Berlin this week at DIN, the German standards agency, as part of an ISO meeting, and I thought I would share what we did and how ISO standards are developed. I first became involved in standards through my wife, Kim, as she disappeared off every so often to Sydney, Norway, and London, to attend ISO meetings. My first experience was when she went to a meeting in Bangkok and I came along and attended a number of Working Group 2 sessions, where the ISO 22301 group of standards on business continuity were being revised. Since then, I became part of Working Group 9, which looks at crisis management. From 2019 to 2022, I worked with a whole load of international experts on ISO 22361 ‘Crisis Management Guidelines’, which was subsequently published in 2022. Since 2022, the group has been in abeyance, and this was the first face-to-face meeting to decide which standards we want to start working on.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organisations. Founded on the 23rd February 1947, the organisation ‘promotes worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial standards. For the UK, BSI is the recognised standards body, and each major nation has its own standards body.
The way the process works is that a national standards body decides which standards they would like to write, the proposal goes through a series of gates of approval, and then the standard starts to be written. The base document is written by a group of experts or there may be a standard already in place which needs to be revised. Every standard should be revised and updated every 5 years. Once the base document is written, each national standards body reviews it with its group of experts, then sends its proposed changes to the international expert group. The international experts then go through all the amendments and decide whether to agree to them or not. This can be a very long and laborious process, writing a document in a committee is difficult; people from different backgrounds can have different views on the subject, not all experts’ standards of English are brilliant, and people come with different ideas and agendas. In ISO 22361, we had over 1000 amendments to agree or disagree. It is, I suspect, similar to the United Nations, but with a little less impact if the experts get it wrong! Each standard undergoes 2-3 rounds of review by experts and national committees before publication. Between iterations, the documents are reviewed by ISO’s technical writers and must also be voted on by national committees. The process can be quite gruelling, but consensus is very important. As ISOs are translated into many different languages, there were, at various times, fierce debates over whether to use a particular word, and further debates over whether the chosen word would translate meaningfully into different languages, or whether it didn’t work and the debate had to start again from the beginning.
What I found from all the meetings I have attended was the high calibre of people who were there. Lots of people self-proclaim, especially on LinkedIn, that they are global experts or thought leaders, but the people around the table really were global experts and you learn very quickly to listen to them and have respect for their knowledge and wisdom. Aside from their expertise, they had a real art to expressing arguments very concisely, listening to and understanding other people’s views and methodologies, and pushing their own ideas. There were strong arguments and positions taken, but all of them were volunteers with a desire to put something back into the industry they work in, so there was compromise.
Our meeting was only for a day, but we agreed to start working on a number of crisis management work items, so watch out for these being published and made available in 3-4 years!
