Who Sets the Standard?
What do the design of high-visibility public safety vests, the distance between two railroad tracks, and the protocols that allow for file transfers between devices have in common? Each is determined by a technical standard set through a process coordinated by a private, nonprofit organization called the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Technical standards are behind most of the products Americans interact with in everyday life, underpinning public safety, consumer protection, interoperability, and innovation.
On this episode, host Megan Nicholson is joined by president and CEO of ANSI and former director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Laurie Locascio. Locascio explains the importance of standards for innovation and competitiveness, and describes how the US approach to standards development depends on the participation of people with all kinds of expertise. She also shares how more researchers can find their way into setting “the invisible infrastructure of modern life.”
Resources
- Read ANSI’s United States Standards Strategy 2025 and review their courses and webinars about the American national standard designation.
- Check out the US government’s 2023 National Standards Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technology, which has not been adopted by the Trump Administration.
- Read an Issues piece from 1999 on “Why Standards Matter” by Robert L. Mallett, former Deputy Secretary of Commerce.
Transcript
Megan Nicholson: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.
How do you know a pound is a pound? How can you be sure your car is safe to drive? How can you trust your credit card will work almost anywhere? Nearly all aspects of our lives are touched by technical standards, which ensure that products and processes are trustworthy and consistent. Standards are ubiquitous, but they’re also invisible and often overlooked.
I’m Megan Nicholson, senior editor at Issues. I’m joined by Laurie Locascio, the president and CEO of the American National Standards Institute, also known as ANSI. ANSI administers and coordinates US voluntary standards. I’m excited to talk to Laurie about the importance of standards for innovation and competitiveness, and why more people should be involved in standards development.
Well, thank you so much, Laurie, for joining us. I wanted to start the conversation just by hearing how you got involved in standards development.
Laurie Locascio: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I don’t think you go to school, graduate school, undergraduate school thinking, I’m going to get into standards, right? I’ve asked this question to a lot of people and it seems that most people come upon it almost accidentally. And so I came upon my standards career in about 2001. It was the aftermath of the anthrax attacks in the United States. That happened right after September 11th. And the response to the collection and the analysis of anthrax that had been distributed via letters—there were some deaths as a result—the response was criticized in a number of different reports. So the reports actually came later, around a year or two later.
And the criticism was really around, okay, you have a biothreat agent, how do you collect it? Who’s responsible? Who’s in charge? We have public health and we have forensics. Those sometimes are opposing positions with what you do with the sample. And then how do you analyze it? Microbial forensics was a new field at the time. So somebody approached me—I was at NIST at the time—and said, “We need somebody who can be a neutral arbiter of this conversation and help us develop a standard around anthrax or biothreat collection and detection.”
They didn’t want somebody from CDC, from the public health, they didn’t want somebody from the FBI specifically, because they had two different views. There were many, many people with different interests involved, many agencies, but NIST was considered sort of neutral. We weren’t involved in the response, we weren’t involved in the collection, we weren’t involved in the detection. So they invited me to actually lead that group and chair that group, and then develop a standard as a result. If there is a potential biothreat agent, how would you approach it honoring both the public health safety issues and the forensics issues?
So I convened all the agencies that needed to be represented and our community as well, and we hashed out a standard for over the course of, I think a year, less than a year, which was pretty fast for that kind of activity, especially because there were so many opposing views. And that was how I got involved in standards.
Nicholson: I’ve heard you explain or describe the US standard system as this invisible infrastructure of the modern world. What do you mean by that?
[Standards] just thread through every single part of our lives and we don’t think about it.
Locascio: I think one of the best descriptions I’ve ever had of standards was when I saw a talk from somebody from Boeing. And they basically said, “Airplanes are thousands of standards taking flight.” Right? It’s the things you don’t think about, but oh, my God, you’re so glad they’re there, right? It’s really, it winds through every part of our life. I was taking the Metro this morning into work and I thought, “Oh, I wonder what standards were involved in making sure the rails run smoothly, the wheels fit on the rails, the braking systems work so everybody’s safe. How do you exit when you need to exit appropriately?” It’s the same thing. It really covers our entire lives. And from what I would say infrastructure, like I talked about planes and trains and automobiles, to interconnectivity of the phones that we use every day. So it just threads through every single part of our lives and we don’t think about it.
Nicholson: Yeah. Is there a downside, do you think, for it being so invisible, this infrastructure?
Locascio: I guess naturally we take infrastructure for granted, right? We take our roads for granted, right? They’re there, they get us to work, or our trains get us to work, or wherever we’re going, our destinations. The disadvantage of being invisible is that you can get taken for granted. And what does that mean? It means people don’t even think about how it impacts their lives. And if that’s true, then your predisposition is not to join, not to help with it. You just take it for granted. It’s just there and it will always be there.
But that’s just not true, because if we don’t participate, if we don’t have new people coming into the process helping us think about interconnectivity, how do we trade in the global economy? How do we make sure that if I’m a young entrepreneur and I want to buy my parts cheaper, how do I make sure that that other part that I acquire from another part of the world fits into the new invention that I’ve developed? You can’t influence any of that unless you’re a part of the process. And it’s a real disadvantage to being invisible is people not understanding how important it is to their daily lives and to their company’s future.
Nicholson: Yeah. let’s peel back some of those layers of invisibility. Can you describe the development of a standard? What goes into it? Who participates? How does the process take place?
Locascio: I think the most important thing about standards development is that we have representation from every group who’s interested in the standards. We need companies, we need government, we need consumers, we need everybody to be at the table, so we have all interests there to helping us develop the right thing, the right solution that can meet market needs, that can meet safety needs. So what happens is we convene all of those people together and then we talk, and we build consensus and we vote and we decide what goes forward. And then what is going to set the standard for the future? What’s going to be the gold standard for the future?
You asked me at the beginning how did I get involved in standards? One of the things I didn’t know was how important it was going to be to be a negotiator, right? You think about people who go and negotiate trade agreements. You think, oh, my gosh, they’re so skilled at negotiation and influence, all of those soft skills, but it’s a real art. And so I went in with a strong technical background, thinking I’m just going to say, my way’s right. That’s not how you succeed at the standards table, because you have to commit. It’s a lot of other people who are sitting there with you that it’s right based on the best technical arguments, the best logical arguments that would appeal to each person who’s a stakeholder at the table.
That becomes even more profound as you go to the international table, right? Nationally, yeah, you’ve got competitors, but internationally I would say you’ve got mega competitors, because the people who develop the standards set the rules of the road. The people who develop standards first, they could be first movers in a new economy. So backing up, how do you develop standards? You’re at the table and you negotiate and you bring your best, strongest arguments to try to influence others to agree with you.
Nicholson: And what is ANSI’s role within that ecosystem of these many stakeholders?
Our first job is to accredit [standards] to make sure that they’re upholding the values that we as the United States believe in: openness, transparency, making sure everybody’s at the table.
Locascio: We have a number of different roles. One, in the United States, we’re very different than the rest of the world, we have a community of standards developers in the United States. That’s very unlike a lot of parts of the world, through hundreds of people developing standards, specializing in specific areas. So ANSI accredits them. That’s our first job is to accredit them to make sure that they’re upholding the values that we as the United States believe in: openness, transparency, making sure everybody’s at the table. Those kinds of things are how we accredit our standards developers in the United States.
So because we have such a diversity of standards developers, we have a really agile system compared to others in the world. It’s kind of creative and agile, and that’s great. But ANSI kind of pulls it together by accrediting them. I guess if you’re at a university, your university is accredited. It’s like that, lots of different flavors of universities and yet they’re all accredited to certain standards. So we do that.
The second thing we do, we’re a neutral convener. We bring people together to think about what are the most important problems affecting our safety, our economy? Right now, we’re convening people around critical minerals discussion. That’s very important to the United States, and it kind of underlies a lot of the tensions that we’re seeing as well—access to critical materials, access to critical minerals—and so we’re convening the community to talk about that issue and what is needed to support our new technologies, our emerging technology growth, areas like quantum systems, chips that support AI. So we are having that conversation right now, convening the community. That could be a short-term conversation or it can be a long-term conversation. Most important thing is to get to the right outcome and to determine the positions the United States wants to take both nationally and internationally in the standards world.
And so that leads to really the last part. So I’ve talked about accreditation, I talked about convening. The last part is really international engagement. So ANSI represents the United States globally in these conversations, around policy positions around standards, around positions that really support the US economy and support growth of our industry large and small, and support the things that we need to accomplish for our consumers around safety, our people around safety and quality.
Nicholson: I want to talk about the backgrounds that people have when they get involved. Is it mostly just purely technical experts? Do you have people with diplomatic sensibilities? Are they lawyers? Can you talk a little bit more about what skillset is needed for this kind of career?
Locascio: I’d say all of the above. If it’s going to be a technical standard, do you need technical chops? So you need to have that at your table. But typically, we go as a group. Let’s say we go into the international setting and we’re going to negotiate as a team, because it’s in ISO and IEC. It’s one country, one vote.
Nicholson: ISO is the?
Locascio: International Standards Organization.
Nicholson: Okay.
Locascio: Yeah. And IEC is International Electrotechnical Commission. So it’s one country, one vote. So at that table, we want to have all the right people. We want to have technical people, of course. We want to have lawyers. We want to have consumers. We want to have anybody who’s really interested. We want to have entrepreneurs. We want to have university professors who know this inside and out and know where the field is going. Because together, we’re going to develop our position and then we’re going to convince China and France and Germany and Argentina and Brazil and Canada, we’re going to convince them to go in our direction. So you need all the skillsets. You can’t always find them in one single person.
Nicholson: I’m sure you need a lot of people at the table. You’ve already talked about different sectors where these things matter. We talked about critical minerals. We talked about airline safety. We talked anthrax. And it’s like standards are sitting at this really interesting intersection of critical infrastructure and national security. Are the processes for standards development different within those sectors or is there some kind of norm among them all?
Locascio: There is a norm. And so the processes by which we operate include openness and transparency. These are the principles that ANSI espouses and that all of the US participants agree to. So it’s open, transparent. I mentioned some of these before, operating according to what I would say are the values we agree to. That also includes having everybody at the table, trying to get as many voices heard as possible, diverse voices at the table so we can negotiate and agree or disagree, but still come to consensus, because consensus is really the principle by which we all operate in the global standards field. It’s voluntary and consensus based. That’s really important.
Nicholson: And would you say that those positions are unique to the United States or do other countries have similar views?
Locascio: Yeah. So we do operate in an international arena, and it is really important that we all come to agreement on principles by which we operate. And so that is actually under the World Trade Organization’s Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement, where it outlines the principles by which we shop as standards developers. So on the international level, people who participate, for instance, in ISO, International Standards Organization, do agree to operate under those principles. So yeah. Some though are trying to skirt around that using other tactics, and we can talk about that.
Nicholson: In the last few years, more countries have embraced new policies to support their domestic industries, like subsidies for domestic industries or tariffs on imported goods. So are standards used as industrial policy in that way?
People are realizing that standards can be used as a tool to promote their own agenda politically. And so some countries, for instance, are flooding the standards field, especially in emerging technologies, trying to gain a lot more influence than they should.
Locascio: Yeah. I think more and more they’re becoming used as a tool for industrial policy to promote an agenda. So one thing that a lot of people don’t realize is 97% of all trade done in the world is underpinned by a standard. That’s a lot, right? That means we are entirely dependent in our global economy around standards, and so that’s why it’s so important that we uphold these values as we develop them. I might lose when I go to the standard table, but it’s done fairly. It’s a fair argument and a fair fight, right? And then if I lose, I lose, but it’s done fairly according to these principles.
But right now, something really strange is happening globally in the standards area, and that is people are realizing that standards can be used as a tool to promote their own agenda politically. And so some countries, for instance, are flooding the standards field, especially in emerging technologies, trying to gain a lot more influence than they should, I would say. And trying to really go in with a politically motivated agenda that’s supported by their country, right? That’s maybe not technically sound, but is pushed by their political motivations in their own country. That is entirely disruptive. That disrupts the world order as we know it in the standards area, because it should be based on the best, technically sound arguments and not politically motivated. I mentioned that before.
First mover advantage means, okay, I already know how to operate according to this standard. It’s actually my idea. I have products that already conformed to it. I have a supply chain built in because it conforms to the standard. They can move faster than other countries and other companies around globe who have not developed that standard. And so people are starting to see the value of that, and then pushing their companies, paying their companies maybe to be that global influence, to be the ones at the table who shape policy, create the rules of the road for the rest of us to operate in. You can see a multitude of ways that people can start to create barriers to success of other countries at the table.
Nicholson: And you see those things happening now?
Locascio: You do.
Nicholson: How long has that been going on?
Locascio: A couple of years, I think. Yeah.
Nicholson: And ANSI just put out an update to their US standards strategy. You want to talk about what’s in that? Is that to sort of combat these issues that you see coming up?
Locascio: It is. It is. So we have to, first of all, first and foremost respond to the environment we’re in today. Let’s say a hundred years, for a hundred years it was the same, right?
Nicholson: ANSI is a hundred years old?
Locascio: Yeah. And so everybody operated according to the principles. Everybody went in, let’s say, with a fair fight. And now things are changing, so we have to operate in a new environment. Past five years have been very, very different globally in so many respects. I always start out with COVID. We saw supply chain vulnerabilities that could have been really helped out by the development of standards. So there were so many things that have happened in the past five years that have really changed our entire world. And that includes geopolitics. Very different now than it’s been for a very long time.
We have to make sure people understand that to compete in this economy, we have to be at the table.
So most important thing is that we uphold our values at the table. Second most important thing is that we are at the table. We’re at the table with the strongest possible team, and that people don’t forget that this underpins our ability to have market access globally. It underpins the success of every single company, large and small in the United States. It underpins the health and safety of every one of our citizens. If you think about how much that means to you as a person, then you’re like, oh, my gosh, I have to be there, right? It’s our strategy in the United States developed with industry perspective, large and small, developed with academics, developed with really every single stakeholder, consumers and government, of course. We have to make sure people understand that to compete in this economy, we have to be at the table. And so that I think is the second most important thing, protecting our values, being at the table, and promoting our own technology as in our own technological solutions.
I mean, it’s becoming more and more difficult to do that, because emerging tech, the stakes are very high, right? AI has exploded. It is changing economies as we speak. Today is going to be different than tomorrow. As soon as quantum really realizes its potential, that’s going to change everything, too. So we are right now in biotechnology, of course. Just the incredible changes in that field are changing our health and our future lives. So yeah, I think the standard strategy is really there as, one, to teach people and tell people what’s different now and how we should be responding as a nation. And in that respect, I sort of feel like it’s a rallying cry.
Nicholson: So how do people get involved then? How are people roped in?
Locascio: That’s a good question, how do they get roped in? Like I said, unfortunately, it’s been a lot by accident. You’re in a company, somebody knows they need a technical representative because you’re negotiating something really high impact, like a new standard for measuring the performance of a quantum computer. And they realize that their company could really suffer if it’s not measured the way that they need it to be measured, and so they’ll put somebody at the table. So I think with companies, it’s kind of more well known how to get there, because there are a lot of industry groups that talk about standards more than in the academic field or the consumer field or others.
So my goal is to really get out there and talk more about how academics could get involved. I know when I was leading standards groups, after I led the standard for national security, I went on to lead standards groups on the international level related to nanotechnology. And I was dealing specifically with environmental health impacts of nanotechnology, and I knew I needed people from academia who studied that. So I specifically went out and recruited. Come to find out, 20 years later, they’re still involved and their friends are involved too, right? So that’s kind of word of mouth. But you don’t want it to happen one by one, because there are people I don’t know, who I didn’t call, who would be amazing. And so it’s really our responsibility with this standard strategy to get out there and try to talk to people how important it is. I will say that I have been talking to academics lately about teaching more about standards to students, because as we all know, the earlier you would learn, the better, right? Then it becomes part of your just what you know as you grow up.
This summer, we had a student come to ANSI from a local university who did an internship. And at the end of his internship, which was about two months, he said, “I didn’t actually want to come to ANSI.” He said, “I wanted to do something else in Washington that I thought was more meaningful.” And he said, “Now I know that this is so meaningful and nobody knows about it.” Students don’t know about it, even their professors don’t know about. Because maybe it feels niche, but it’s actually not, it’s for all of us.
In China, if you are an engineer, everyone is required to learn about standards. Everyone.
I will say that in China, if you are an engineer, everyone is required to learn about standards. Everyone. And that’s our biggest competitor globally. And they all have a workforce that comes out, whether they go to whatever part in the world, whether they go to government or marketing or industry, they’ll know where are the importance. And they’ll go in with a very strategic view instead of just somebody calling me.
Nicholson: Right. I want to go back to the discussion about competitiveness in certain sectors. Do you see particular sectors as being places where the US is leading still and then the other sectors where we’re falling behind? Can you talk about those differences?
Locascio: Yeah. So the US is, as we all know, incredible at innovation. So let me talk about innovation a second, then I’ll get to that specific question.
Nicholson: Sounds great.
Locascio: And the reason why I’m going to get to talk about innovation is because some people think standards hold back innovation. And I get that all the time. When I talk to people like, “Please join us. Please.” “But that will impede my ability to innovate.” And that is universally untrue, right? If you have a standard that, let’s say, just tells you how to measure performance, then you can compete better. Because then when a venture capitalist comes to you and they say, “How do I know that you really did this?” You can say, “Because I measured it according to this performance standard.” And that’s really important. It’s not just a claim then, it’s reality, because you have data to show that you are better than any other product on the market.
It also allows you to get better, because you can measure it and then you can be like, “Oh, that actually wasn’t good, so I need get better. I need to up my game.” Pull together your engineers, pull together your scientists and say, “We need to up it a level if we’re going to compete on the global stage.” Right? So it’s for helping your own performance, help you get better, help you compete better.
I think where innovation, where people worry about innovation is when they feel like it locks them out. We don’t want that to happen. We don’t want any country to come in and say, “I now have the standard for 6G, I’m going to lock you out of it,” right? And you can do that if you manipulate a technical standard in a way that locks out other companies. We don’t want that to happen. Again, a reason to be at the table. But that’s how you can impede on innovation. But it’s mostly to promote innovation and trade, not to impede innovation by ending up with a bad standard that locks others out.
So where are we doing well or where are we not doing well? So the United States has been so good at that innovation stage, right? We just come up with new ideas. They’re so creative. I was just out at CES, the Consumer Electronic Show out in Las Vegas, and oh, my gosh, just to have bear witness to such an exciting innovation hub, just to see everything new coming out in robotics and exoskeletons and drones and just, it’s really fun autonomy. Autonomous vehicles. US is so good at that, so amazing. Where then we kind of fall off is manufacturing and producing and selling at scale. And so standards are part of that. They’re part of this manufacturing and producing and selling at scale piece really. So I would say the US does often fall behind when you move up that chain, right?
Where are we ahead? We’re definitely ahead… Well, we’re good competitors, because it’s neck-and-neck all the time. But in critical emerging technologies, AI and biotech and in quantum, we have had some of the most incredible discoveries. So now we need to make sure that they get to scale.
Nicholson: To meet the moment.
Locascio: To meet the moment. But yeah, I think our government is very worried about 6G and are we falling behind in 6G? Because a lot of the IP is really led by China. And then critical minerals, critical materials, those are things we have to watch, have to be concerned about, but really have to be actively engaged in as well.
Nicholson: Are there other possible challenges or disruptions to the way that standards are developed, both nationally and internationally, that are on the horizon? Sort of what keeps you up at night, I guess?
Locascio: I think there are a few things that really keep me up at night. One, economies all over the world are starting to think about standards strategically. We are a market-driven approach. We do what’s best for our economy and our people. Other people are starting to, in Europe for instance, just starting to dictate what the standards should say and starting to think about that just for the European economy. China has China standards 2035, which really talks about the importance of them leading in standards globally.
Now, if you can step back a little bit, what the future could look like is the United States has their standards, Europe has their standards, South America has their standards, China has their standards, all economies fall apart, right? The global economy falls apart. The individual economies are fine, but the global economy falls apart, right? Because there’s no interconnectivity, there’s no agreement, there’s no how we’re going to approach that market. Everybody’s thinking only about themselves, and that is what keeps me up at night. So I spend a lot of time traveling and talking to people and telling them, “Our companies, our people want to be at the table. We want to work with you. It’s really important for us, it’s important for you. We have innovations that we can contribute. We have smart people, we have wonderful businesses, and we want to be here. We want to work with you and negotiate hard at the standards table.”
Nicholson: It sounds like ANSI is working very closely with the private sector to sort encourage more participation to be at the table, but also make more tables and make more seats at the table. I’m wondering if you can just give us a picture of the efforts both on ANSI’s part, but also in the private sector to build up those seats.
I think a lot of people are in this world to make impact, and if you want to make impact, this is a great place to play.
Locascio: It’s interesting because that is part of the strategy. So we are putting together ideas for how to bring more people to the table, but I don’t think we’re done yet thinking about that. We’re just in the process of trying to get there. And I’ll tell you why. Because let’s say some of the companies that have been around for a long time, they know standards, they’ve been involved with standards for 50 years, 100… I mean, some of these companies, they just know it. Newer companies maybe not so much, right? Even the newer large companies, maybe not so much. So really trying to get people who aren’t familiar with it, to be familiar with it and to understand how it impacts their business is something that I need to do, we need to do. Collectively, everybody who has an interest in it.
But we’re not finished trying to figure out how to get more people at the table. I would say that a lot of the people who have been in the standards world are retiring now. So how do you get that next level trained up and ready to come to the standards table? I’ll say it’s really an interest… When I say, “How many people have heard of standards or how many people have heard of ANSI?” Or even when I was at NIST, “How many people have heard of NIST?” A lot of people don’t know about standards and they think it’s really boring. It’s not that cool thing about creating something brand new, but it’s so important. I think a lot of people are in this world to make impact, and if you want to make impact, this is a great place to play.
Nicholson: Your enthusiasm for standards really comes through. And I asked you what keeps you up at night, but I guess the other question is what keeps you inspired to keep on in this work?
Locascio: Yeah. I think what keeps me inspired is talking to all the people out there who are just inventing and creating new products that might get to the global market one day, and we can help them get there. Yeah.
Nicholson: Thank you so much, Laurie. This has been great.
Locascio: Thank you, Megan. Really appreciate the conversation.
Nicholson: To learn more about standards, visit ANSI’s website at ansi.org, and visit our show notes to find more resources. Please subscribe to the ongoing transformation wherever you get your podcasts. And write to us at podcast@issues.org. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach, and to our audio engineer, Shannon Lynch. I’m Megan Nicholson, senior editor at Issues. Thank you for listening.