I’m tightening the tension on the third string of the koto, a 48-string behemoth that defies every conventional rule of acoustics, while Hiroshi T. watches me with a look that sits somewhere between pity and profound boredom. We are in a room that smells of antiseptic and dying lilies, a space where the air is heavy with the finality of things. The hospice is quiet, save for the 38-decibel hum of a specialized HVAC system that someone, somewhere, decided was the industry standard for patient comfort.
I’ve spent the last 28 minutes mentally rehearsing a conversation I’ll never actually have with my former project manager, a man who worshipped at the altar of ‘best practices’ until his soul turned into a Gantt chart. In this imaginary dialogue, I’m explaining to him why the ISO standards he quoted like scripture are actually just the fossilized remains of someone else’s 1958 panic attack. I’m winning the argument, of course. In my head, I’m brilliant. In reality, I’m just a man struggling with a tuning peg in a room where time feels like it’s being measured in heartbeats rather than billable hours.
The Rhetorical Bomb
Why do we say it? ‘It’s industry standard.’ It is the ultimate conversation killer. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a smoke bomb thrown into a room of inquisitive minds. When someone invokes the standard, they aren’t citing evidence; they are appealing to a tradition they likely don’t understand. It’s an intellectual laziness so sophisticated that we’ve built entire multi-billion dollar certifications around it. We’ve turned the ‘way things are done’ into a cargo cult, building wooden airplanes on dirt runways and wondering why the gods of innovation aren’t landing.
The Roman Chariot Standard
Take the railroad gauge, for instance. Most of the world runs on a standard of 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Why? Because that’s how they built them in England, and the English expatriates built the US railroads. Why did the English build them that way? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railway tramways, and that’s the gauge they used. Why did they use that gauge? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. And why did the wagons have that particular odd spacing? Because if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long-distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts. And who built those roads? The Imperial Romans.
Imperial Rome (C. 100 AD)
Wagon Ruts Determined Initial Spacing
Today: Maglev Train
Still using the Roman gauge, governing tomorrow’s tech.
So, the industry standard for our most advanced high-speed rail systems is effectively determined by the width of a Roman war chariot. We are literally tethered to the backside of a horse that died 2008 years ago. This is the ‘Industry Standard’ in its purest form: a decision made by someone who has been dead for two millennia, governing the technology of tomorrow, simply because nobody had the courage to ask if a Roman horse was the right metric for a maglev train.
The Bureaucracy’s Shield
Hiroshi T. doesn’t care about Roman horses. He plays music for people who are about to leave the world of standards behind. He tells me that the hardest part of his job isn’t the music itself, but the 108 different regulations he has to bypass just to bring a custom-built instrument into a sterile environment. The hospital has standards for everything: the fire-retardant rating of the wood, the decibel ceiling of the performance, even the specific type of polish used on the strings. These standards exist to prevent catastrophe, yet they often prevent the very thing the patient needs-a moment of genuine, un-standardized humanity.
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We’ve reached a point where ‘Standard’ is synonymous with ‘Safe for the Bureaucracy.’ If you follow the standard and you fail, you can point to the manual and say, ‘I did what I was told.’
We’ve reached a point where ‘Standard’ is synonymous with ‘Safe for the Bureaucracy.’ If you follow the standard and you fail, you can point to the manual and say, ‘I did what I was told.’ You are protected by the collective failure of the industry. But if you deviate, if you try something that actually makes sense for the specific 158 variables in front of you, and you fail? Then it’s your fault. You are an outlier. You are ‘non-compliant.’ Most people would rather be standardly mediocre than exceptionally risky.
The Cost of Ritual Compliance
I remember a project where we were installing high-pressure fluid systems. The ‘standard’ called for rigid piping that required 28 separate welds in a cramped space. It was a nightmare of potential leak points. When I suggested using a flexible solution, something like a Wenda Metal Hose to absorb the vibration and reduce the weld count, I was told it wasn’t the ‘standard methodology’ for that specific facility. We spent $888 extra on labor just to adhere to a standard that actually increased the long-term risk of structural failure. We performed the ritual. We built the wooden plane. We waited for the results that never came.
Outsourcing Judgment
This is the intellectual rot of the ‘best practice.’ It assumes that the context in which the practice was ‘best’ is identical to the context you are currently standing in. It ignores the 18 nuances that make your situation unique. It’s a way of outsourcing your judgment to a committee that met in a mid-range hotel ballroom in 1998.
Increased potential failure points
Reduced structural risk
Standardizing the Spirit
There’s a specific kind of violence in the phrase ‘it’s industry standard’ when applied to creative or emotional work. Hiroshi T. once told me about a ‘Standardized Spiritual Assessment’ he saw in a hospice manual. It was an 8-step process to determine the ‘level of existential distress’ in a patient. He laughed until he nearly cried. You cannot standardize the way a person faces the void. You cannot create a ‘best practice’ for saying goodbye. Yet, we try. We try because the alternative-actually being present, actually using our intuition, actually taking responsibility for a bespoke decision-is terrifying.
I’ve made mistakes because of this. I once spent 188 hours designing a user interface that followed every ‘standard’ of the era. It had the right padding, the right hex codes, the right ‘standard’ navigation patterns. It was technically perfect. And it was completely unusable for the actual humans who needed it, because those humans didn’t fit the ‘standard’ persona developed by a marketing team three years prior. I chose the safety of the manual over the reality of the user. It’s a mistake I still rehearse in my head at 3:38 AM.
The Lowest Denominator
We need to start asking which industry, and which version of the standard, we are actually talking about. Often, ‘Industry Standard’ is just code for ‘the cheapest way we can do this without getting sued.’ It’s the lowest common denominator disguised as excellence. In the world of high-performance engineering or deep emotional labor, the lowest common denominator is a death sentence for quality.
If you look at the 1008 most successful innovations of the last century, almost none of them were ‘standard’ at their inception. They were deviations. They were the result of someone looking at the Roman chariot ruts and saying, ‘Maybe we should build the road wider.’ They were the result of someone like Hiroshi T. realizing that a 48-string koto has a resonance that a standard 13-string version can never touch, even if the 13-string version is ‘compliant’ with the museum’s standards.
The Bespoke Solution
I’m finally finishing the tuning. The koto is ready. Hiroshi T. begins to play, and for a moment, the 38-decibel hum of the HVAC system disappears. The music isn’t standard. It’s dissonant, then sweet, then jarringly loud. It’s exactly what the room needs. It’s a bespoke solution for a unique moment of human experience.
We need to start using the standard as a shield and start using it as a baseline. A standard should be the floor, not the ceiling. It should be the place we start from when we don’t know any better, not the place we settle into because we are afraid to climb. The next time someone tells you that a decision is being made because it’s ‘industry standard,’ ask them why that standard exists. Ask them if the horse that determined the gauge is still alive, or if we are just following the smell of a ghost.
I’ll probably never have that conversation with my old boss. He’s likely busy implementing some new ISO 9008 protocol in a windowless office somewhere. But as I listen to the non-standard vibrations of Hiroshi’s instrument, I realize that the only standard that actually matters is the one we hold ourselves to when nobody is looking and there is no manual to hide behind. We are responsible for the paths we choose, even if those paths don’t fit into the pre-existing ruts of the Roman road.
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The cost of compliance is often the loss of the soul.
The air in the hospice shifts. The music ends. The 38-decibel hum returns, filling the vacuum left by the art. I pack up my tools, my hands still vibrating from the tension of the strings. I’ve spent the day fighting the ‘standard’ and for the first time in 48 hours, I feel like I’ve actually done something real. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t documented. It wouldn’t pass a 558-point audit. But it was right. And in a world obsessed with being ‘standard,’ being right is the most radical thing you can be.
The Radical Path
The Floor
Standard as Baseline
The Ceiling
Standard as Limit
The Right Path
Bespoke Excellence