It is impossible to improve any process until is has been standardised – Masaaki Imai

Attempts to standardise responses to complex lives always fail.

Yet still, we standardise.

Standardisation is the prerequisite for the Holy Grail of public service: efficiency.

Faced with tightening budgets and growing complexity, modern institutions constantly seek ways to streamline processes, cut costs, and manage resources. Yet, despite decades of optimisation, the pressure on our public services continues to rise, and the people relying on them often feel more let down than ever.

Why? Because the modern administrative state is still trapped in the paradox of standardisation: a situation where the relentless pursuit of narrow, technical efficiency through the measurement of anything and everything, actually manufactures the very demand it seeks to manage.

Standardised responses prioritise internal institutional logic over the actual, lived needs of citizens.

Large institutions seek efficiency through control, measurement, and cost reduction. However, to make a system efficient, managers first have to make it ‘legible’. You cannot ‘optimise’ what you cannot ‘measure’.

You must standardise: because the conventional belief is that “it is impossible to improve any process until is has been standardised.”

The origin story of standardisation goes back a long way. As political scientist James C. Scott argues in his foundational book Seeing Like a State, governments historically struggled to control order because societies were too complex and illegible to manage from the centre. To solve this, the state forces ‘administrative legibility’ upon its subjects by standardising, homogenising, and simplifying pre-existing social arrangements.

He gives the useful example of the creation of permanent last names to track citizens. He cites the case of a Welsh man who appeared in court and identified himself with a long string of patronyms: “John, ap Thomas ap William” etc. Although this name was very useful at a local level to distinguish his lineage, the court demanded that John take a permanent last name (in this case, the name of his village). This helped the central government keep track of its subjects, at the cost of a more nuanced yet fuzzy and less legible understanding of local conditions.

Other examples are the standardisation of weights and measures to replace highly contextual local systems, or the standardisation of language to ensure that communication and legal discourse were uniform and manageable by the centre.

These may seem common sense continuous improvements that any developing society would make. However, the problem is that when standardisation is taken too far we start to miss important nuance and ride roughshod over local or individual context.

Today , our own institutions still seek to achieve this through classification—sorting complex human realities into neat, exclusive boxes (vulnerable, mentally ill, homeless, at risk etc) to make them administratively actionable. The internal system logic values precision and symmetry over an accurate reflection of the messy real world where people don’t fit so easily into boxes.

Scott identified this as ‘high modernism’—a supreme, overconfidence in the ability to rationally design social order. The tragic flaw of high modernism is its reliance on standardised, top-down knowledge at the expense of what he called metis, a Greek term, applied to mean the practical, local wisdom and informal improvisation required to make any community or system actually work.

Metis represents the deeply contextual, practical knowledge and improvisational skills gained through direct, hands-on experience. Unlike rigid, standardised, or textbook learning, metis is flexible and strictly local, relying on a nuanced understanding of a specific environment that cannot be easily codified into universal rules.

As a couple of examples of metis:

Emergency responders, such as paramedics, disaster teams, and firefighters, constantly rely on metis. Because every fire or accident is unique, they must know when to rely on a rule of thumb, in what order to apply them, and when to throw the rulebook away completely and improvise.

People in poverty frequently utilise metis to navigate systems that are hostile to them. For example, using street lenders instead of formal banks might seem irrational to a wealthier person, but often offers a better, more practical deal for the poor based on hidden complexities in their lives.

When the state or institution ignores metis, it creates systems that might look beautifully logical on a spreadsheet, but can fail disastrously in practice.

This behaviour can be compounded what James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, termed a “logic of appropriateness.” Managers do not act based on what will practically solve a citizen’s unique problem; instead, they act by matching a situation to established institutional rules. They start from, “What is the correct procedure?” rather than “What does this person actually need?”.

This thinking is so deeply entrenched into our organisations that we don’t always see it. Just the other day I was talking with some very enlightened colleagues who said you couldn’t argue with a particular process because of the efficiency it had generated. But if you unpicked this , you’d find the efficiency was based upon a logic of appropriateness that served an internal KPI. Efficient for the system, maybe, but not necessarily for the end user.

True efficiency is not about how fast a system can process a citizen through a standardised flowchart. True efficiency is the ability to enable people to lead flourishing, self-reliant lives without needing constant intervention.

By prioritising human relationships, local metis, and genuine outcomes over internal bureaucratic logic, we could finally design public services that serve the people, rather than asking the people to serve the system.

Photo by Luke Heibert on Unsplash