Parasitic certifications? Part 2, The crapification of things

In last week's post, we looked at a broad and fundamental criticism from a reader named Scotlyn, indicting the whole system of global standardization and certification as (in essence) fraudulent and parasitic. Now I want to examine each of Scotlyn's points carefully, to see how far I agree with her. 

Please note that I actively encourage your participation too. Add your feedback in the Comments. Tell us what you think.

Scotlyn's first charge is that "the relationship between certified standards and actual quality is fictional," and that "it follows that the more standards, the less quality." Is this true?

There are two sides to this charge, which I want to treat separately: product standards, and management system standards. I will discuss product standards here, and management system standards next week.

Part of the difficulty in discussing product standards is that many of the most basic ones have become so ubiquitous in the industrialized world that they are almost invisible. I'm thinking of the kinds of basic safety standards for food or equipment that were unheard-of 150 years ago but that we take for granted today. Whatever else might be said for or against the modern meatpacking industry, for example (and it is not a specialty of mine), I'm pretty sure that practices are more sanitary than they were back when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle. You can probably think of other examples on your own. And I assume that nobody will argue for abandoning the most basic safety standards, except perhaps as a rhetorical exercise. But as the number of product standards proliferates, we begin to see at least two problems. 

The first problem is that each standard imposes constraints on the design of a product, and requires some non-zero fraction of the designer's attention. The more standards there are, the more of the designer's attention has to go into meeting basic requirements, leaving less attention available to put towards the inherent quality of the design. The only way to counter this effect (to the extent that it can be countered at all) is to take longer designing the product. Once upon a time, maybe it took a month for a small team at WidgetCorp to design and test a really good widget. But after the introduction of a lot of Mandatory Widget-Industry Standards, it might take twice as long to design the very same widget. The designers now have to read all the standards, and confirm that their design meets them in theory; and then testers have to run tests for every single standard to make sure each one has been met. The end result might not be any different from what it would have been otherwise, although the team will know a lot more facts about the product than they would have without the standards, and they will have recorded all those facts in a huge stack of documents. But all this work takes time and effort, with the result that WidgetCorp now takes twice as long to bring a new widget to market, and charges twice as much for them to recoup the added development costs. And as a direct result of this hefty increase in time and cost, ....

The second problem is that a competing manufacturer (Fly-By-Night Widgets) will enter the market designing widgets that strictly comply with the standards, but that are in other respects as slapdash as possible. With this approach, Fly-By-Night brings out their widgets faster than WidgetCorp does, and sells them for cheaper. And we all know that — other things being equal — the market favors whichever competitor is faster and cheaper. After a while, Fly-By-Night drives WidgetCorp out of business, and the market is saturated with widgets that comply with standards but are otherwise worthless. This long-term process is what Scotlyn describes as the "crapification of things." (See also this Dilbert cartoon for a summary of the same observation.)

Is there a solution to this dynamic? At a theoretical level and in the general case, no, I don't think so.* I believe the best we can hope for is one or another pragmatic settlement.** By a "pragmatic settlement," what I mean is two things. 

• First, some companies will continue to make products which are so obviously superior that customers will willingly pay more for them. (I once audited a VP of Sales who said his department's whole job was to explain to potential customers why they should pay five times as much for one of this company's products as for a competitor's. Mostly they succeeded in doing so.) 
• Second, maybe we can come to some kind of agreement around a basic level of standards (for, e.g., health and safety) which clearly represent a bare minimum — maybe we can agree not to sell laudanum as a cure for a broken leg, for instance  — and then stop there. If it were clear that "meets standards" is not the same as "good enough," we might be able to hold back the threat of encroaching crapification, at least for a while.

Or perhaps this answer isn't good enough, in which case I invite your contributions. How would you address the conundrum? 

Next week I'll talk about management systems.

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* Or if there is a solution, it involves modifying some of the assumptions behind this description (for example, the principle of economic competition) in ways which are far beyond the scope of this blog and even farther beyond my competence as an author.

** For the distinction between solutions and settlements, see Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics, "Addendum: The Myth of the Solution."