Peer review: Scott Steedman
Director of Standards,
British Standards Institution
Chris Fenton makes a strong case for the better use of standards to strengthen capacity for innovation in the rail sector.
BSI, as the UK National Standards Body, is responsible for supporting UK industry interests in the development and maintenance of all national, European and international standards published directly by BSI or on behalf of the European and international standards organisations.
We work in close partnership with RSSB in the development of the rail and rail-related standards produced by those organisations. Another key part of our role is to increase the awareness and understanding of standards and (in this context) how they are used to accelerate innovation across business and industry.
As a measure of scale, BSI manages around 7,000 live standards projects across the breadth of business and industry. Around 95% of our work is on European and international standards. We publish around 2,500 documents every year but we also withdraw around 1,000 standards that are no longer required by the market or which would be in conflict with new European or international standards. Maintaining a coherent set of standards for business and industry is a substantial task, but vital to underpin the competiveness of the UK economy.
Over the decades, the perception of standards as specification and even as quasi-regulation has grown, particularly in the UK. This is unfortunate, as economic studies consistently demonstrate the importance of standards in delivering innovation and productivity growth. In essence, standards are simply a consensus of ‘what good looks like’, created by experts and other stakeholders to serve a purpose. That purpose or outcome is too often overlooked, and the real value of standards as an enabler of change is lost.
At BSI, we see standards as an undervalued and underused resource to support business and industry to deliver performance improvement in a rapidly changing global marketplace. We recognise three categories of consensus standards: standards that define technical matters, related to better products; standards that describe management systems, related to better processes; and standards that set out business principles, related to business potential.
Every corporate strategy should incorporate a statement on how the organisation will use standards to address these three dimensions. It should recognise the importance of a coherent and consistent approach to the use of this knowledge in delivering its products and services in an innovative environment - with good governance, strong leadership and a motivated and well-trained workforce. Rail is a multi-disciplinary environment where businesses operate within a tough regulatory framework. Safety, quality and cost-effectiveness is uppermost in the minds of the public and government. Creating a landscape that can stimulate innovation in such an environment is particularly challenging. Voluntary standards, developed and maintained with full stakeholder engagement and open public consultation, provide one means to build trust and confidence in new approaches, whether these are addressing technical, management or behavioural challenges. To see standards simply as an obligation to satisfy safety or quality requirements is to overlook their potential as a tool for the whole community.
Over the past few years, there has been growing interest in whether the consensus building process that underpins the making of our industry standards could also be used to agree ‘what good looks like’ in the area of organisational values and principles. Human resource experts describe the gap between the commitment that people make to their organisation because they have to meet their targets, and the effort that they could put in if they were delivering their full potential, as ‘discretionary performance’. This is the difference between what an organisation is achieving and what it could achieve, if it adopted better guidance on the vital elements of good governance, leadership, motivation, innovation and risk management.
Today, BSI sees a new generation of standards emerging and unlocking the potential of business and industry to move to a new, higher level of performance. The new generation of business standards is aimed at driving performance at an enterprise level, highly relevant to the delivery of a safe, reliable rail system.
It is time to see standards for what they are, and what they were created to be – positive drivers of change.
