It is perhaps the case that I am fascinated by things that swing back and forth. Pendulums. Teeter totters. I remember loving the teeter totter on the playground in the town where I was born. We had great playgrounds in that little town. We moved away from there to the town where I grew up when I was 7.

On a teeter totter, you go as high as you can, and then come back down again. How high you can go depends on how your weight compares to the weight of the person on the other side. It also depends on the strength of their legs. Multivariate. I didn’t do the math in my head¹Then, but I knew which kid to get on the teeter totter with to have the best experience. And I remember loving doing two on each side, or one against two, to figure out the best way to go up fast and the best way to balance in the middle, or at an angle, or get stuck up high.

Of course, I didn’t recognize I had the best playgrounds in my birth town until we moved away. There were no swings or teeter totters on the playgrounds in the new place. Apparently, a few years before we moved there, a girl fell off the swing on the school playground and broke her arm. At least, that was the story I heard. 

I went to a conference last week about engineering standards. It was the first time I attended a conference or did any kind of professional development about the focus of my work these days. I came at the job from being an engineer and I work leading groups writing engineering standards. Other people’s paths were different, but no one studies standards development in school. I think²Or maybe I still don’t know enough about it. But I haven’t heard of anyone getting a degree in standards development practices..

As I sat at the conference, I started to twist the idea of standards in my mind on why we have them and what they are for. Other industries were presenting about different aspects of standards including how we make standards support the UN’s sustainable development goals and how we can use artificial intelligence to write standards. Dry stuff to some, but I couldn’t stop thinking about pendulums. And teeter totters. Fascinating.

Sometimes we have standards to keep things safe. Like making sure your equipment works the way it is supposed to work in every situation where it needs to work. Sometimes we have standards to make sure all things can talk the same language³Yes, machines already talk to each other for the greater good. And this was before chatGPT.. Sometimes we have standards to support an industry to make everyone in the industry accountable.

Engineering has a lot of standards. 

In my organization, I like to say our standards capture the design space for the industry. They include both goals: keep things safe and make the things talk to each other. 

Engineers really like to operate in the gray area of standards and push the boundaries. At least, I did. It isn’t that engineers want to be unsafe. However, getting as close as you can to the boundary means you might discover something new.

I remember when as a young engineer at my first company, I was given a problem on a project and my idea was to plop an optical isolator in the cabling to protect my box from interference. It would have worked, according to physics. It didn’t follow the standards that defined the best practices of operation and design because  I didn’t know about those standards.

I was embarrassed after my design was rejected. It made me cautious in what I would present as potential solutions. It made me hesitant of requirements I didn’t know about. I used to use the phrase Tribal Knowledge that some engineers knew⁴and I didn’t about what were the boundaries I could operate in. Where was my design space? They knew the design space. I didn’t.

Now, as I look back on it, I wonder if the reason I wasn’t indoctrinated with the tribal knowledge⁵perhaps by circumstance not design was that not knowing the standard led me to thinking outside the box. Thinking outside the box leads to new opportunities to innovate. Innovation leads to new market space to sell the next neat little gadget. My design would not have worked in the world created by engineers, but I wonder if it sparked another design that was just inside the boundaries of the standard. The rest of the team might not have considered an alternative if they hadn’t reviewed and rejected my design that wouldn’t fit inside the real design space.

I think about this in relation to aviation a lot. We have safe skies because we all agree the standards to keep the skies safe are rules. Boundaries. Operating outside of that is not allowed The standards decree any innovation needs to co-exist with the aviation pinky swear to know what we know and know what we don’t know and avoid the areas where outcomes are not certain. But just like a king’s decree, it is a choice for people to stay inside those boundaries.

And that is awesome for how we take to the skies for business, for leisure, for seeing loved ones, or maybe just for the love of travel.

Here is an observation that may shock you. If the designs of planes, trains, and automobiles had  been bound by the safety pinky swear⁶I think it relates to all travel, we would not have planes, trains, or automobiles. Because we never would have been able to see the design space if someone hadn’t stepped outside the known to find out what the boundaries are.

What I have observed is that standards work better, and are more robust, when the boundaries are set by physics. This doesn’t mean we don’t have other boundaries to set, but it is harder to get agreement on the other boundaries. It is hard to get all the engineers to limit themselves to a playground without teeter totters or swings⁷Even if there is a cool slide..

Maybe I like teeter totters, and swings, because they are exploring the bounds of physics within boundaries that I don’t know were used in their design. So, I feel like I am testing the limits to find out the unknown boundaries that give me that much more design space. I think I am getting to the edge of where my momentum can take me. 

But you know, I bet if I went and looked, there was a voluntary standard about how long a teeter totter could be. There is probably a rule about how big an arc a swing can make on a playground. A choice to follow a standard to keep the playground just safe enough, instead of rejecting teeter totters as though they were intrinsically unsafe.

Engineering is about choices. And consequences. And the joy of making something that works to change the world around us for the better⁸Or maybe just change the world, good or bad.. Standards can help me understand some of the consequences I might not see. 

It is more fun not knowing about those boundaries though, because the joy of learning the teeter totter, instead of learning it by reading a standard, makes the ride up and the graceful fall down, worth the ride.

PS – I am thinking of posting this on LinkedIn. Please let me know if changes you suggest before I take this huge leap of the swing of blogging.