Medal versus Mettle

"Let's be honest-- 'standards' are cubbyholes for the fearsome."

I wrote that when approached recently about how I felt concerning ISO standards proposed for market research (e.g., ISO 20252).

What nonsense. In our frenzied run towards government-controlled lives, we are really becoming sheeple.

In market research there is always a trade-off between doing good quality research versus the speed of doing research at all. These things drive marketing efforts, which are always based on creativity... theoretically, unbounded and unbridled. ISO standards will not help deliver better "quality" research. We're always out to deliver a product to the buyer seeking their objective, NOT to comply with a bureaucrat whose purpose is to rubber-stamp an application.

That is how market research firms work. We should not shift focus just to navigate some false gamut of check boxes so we can gather ISO approvals like a collection of scout badges.

It's a sad western proclivity to look to the medal before the mettle. We turn off our brains to value by looking to the chintz. In the same way that schools eliminate all kinds of benefit for the students by insisting an instructor have a teaching certificate, we limit-- not increase-- veracity and value with false "standards."

In so doing we thereby ensure mediocrity propagates when we exclude the wild-eyed creative someone who didn't know the plodding rote of "the system."

Cheers
Lee