Myths of codes and standards

In pursuing strategic initiatives related to our codes and standards, we keep bumping into misconceptions about them.

Four years ago, I wrote an article about the various myths associated with fire. These myths were widely held misconceptions, involving common errors of fact that arise for understandable reasons. The article proved quite popular.

My impression from talking to people is that part of the fun wasn't so much seeing all the myths I described as it was in reflecting on why and how they'd taken hold. In the long run, we're all fire safety educators of one sort or another, and if we understand why people make mistakes, we may be better able to steer them toward the truth.

Earlier this year, the idea surfaced for a similar article on the myths of codes and standards. NFPA's been pursuing a number of strategic initiatives related to our codes and standards over the past several years, and we find we keep bumping into some common misconceptions about them. This article is an opportunity to spend a little time looking at some of these underlying misconceptions.

Let me recap a few ground rules from the previous article before we start. First, I use the term "myth" to refer to a statement about a question of fact that's either provably false or far outside the range of possibility, given the relevant evidence. Given the nature of the topic, I'll discuss some related value questions that are at the very core of what NFPA stands for, but I won't try to confuse philosophical differences over values with conflicts over myths versus truths.

You may say, for example, that poor people are no more likely to die in fires than rich people. That's a myth, and I can show you the evidence. If you say you don't care whether poor people die in fires and you don't think our codes and standards should try to protect them, that's a value judgment, and I wouldn't consider it within the scope of this article.

Second, I won't be surprised if some of you agree with some of the statements I'll label as myths. If you do, don't get mad, get in touch. I'd like to talk with you about any such points, and NFPA Journal would be happy to print your views in a letter to the editor.

Third, I proposed six types of myths in my first article. This time, however, I couldn't find examples for more than two types: oversimplification and myths with an agenda. Or, to sharpen the comparison, inadvertent oversimplification and deliberate oversimplification. That said, let's get into the real stuff.

Who decides? Who runs the show? What is power?

Who writes codes and standards at NFPA? All the technicalities of NFPA's process and system aside, who really has the power to dictate the content of NFPA's codes and standards? The largest number of myths, by far, were some kind of answer to these questions.

Many people think they know who "really" controls NFPA's codes and standards. I'll say more later about some common suspects, but I'll tip you in advance on the right answer: Nobody does-not the fire service, not the insurance industry, not manufacturers, not enforcers, and certainly not the staff.

That's an answer many people just can't imagine. They might listen to arguments about who's in charge but not about whether some small group calls the shots. So before discussing the "suspects," let's talk about the basic idea that somebody always has the power.

Suppose you and three other drivers all arrive simultaneously from four different directions at a four-way intersection with no traffic lights or stop signs. In most states, the driver on the right has the right of way. In this case, however, every driver is on someone else's right and has someone on his or her right, so no one has the overall right of way. Who has the power to go through the intersection first?

On the face of it, no one does. There is no rule or ritual for the drivers to go through to reach a consensus on who's entitled to go first, and if any two drivers decide to act on their separate presumptions that they're entitled, the result is likely to be a collision. A driver might be willing to accept a collision as an outcome, but would any of them point to a car wreck as proof of their power over the situation? Very doubtful.

"Power" means the degree to which you can act to produce the effects you want. So in the situation I've described, none of the drivers has enough power to seize his or her most preferred outcome, without regard for the others' wishes.

This is just one example of the many situations in which any answer to the question of who has the power is a myth. Yet many people believe those myths because they believe there's always a specific answer to the question of power.

In the context of codes and standards, this oversimplification translates into this kind of logic: My group's views are always right, and everybody who disagrees with my group's views is part of The Opposition. My group often loses in deliberations on provisions of codes and standards. Therefore, I know my group doesn't have the power, or else we'd be calling the shots. The power must reside with The Opposition, because power must reside somewhere (the myth), and the system must be stacked in its favor.

This flawed logic isn't always wrong, as there are codes- and standards-development processes in which one group does have the power. More generally, however, there will be situations in which one group has somewhat more influence than another, no matter how carefilly balanced the process is. You can design a process to prevent any one group from dominating the outcomes, but you can't hope to eliminate all differences in influence. Anyone with better skills in group discussion and decision-making can tilt things in the direction of his or her group and interests.

But this is getting too far away from our myths. Let's get into another common one.

I work for the National Fire Protection "Agency?"

Nearly every month, I see NFPA cited in the press as the "National Fire Protection Agency." And if you've been an NFPA member long, you've probably heard some variation of the same from someone who isn't familiar with fire safety or the world of codes and standards.

For the average person, it must seem a very subtle distinction between NFPA's model codes and standards and the state and local laws based on those codes and standards. NFPA and other private codes and standards developers write the rules we all agree on, but adoption into law is only one way of getting everybody to act on the rules, and enforcing the rules isn't NFPA's job.

If NFPA isn't a government agency, a variation of the myth goes, it must be a QUANGO, one of the great-sounding acronyms of my professional life. It stands for QUAsi-governmental Non-Governmental Organization, and it's a category of half-private, half-public organizations now recognized in federal procedures. Nothing wrong with QUANGOs, but that's not NFPA, either. Writing model rules for everyone to live by isn't automatically a governmental function.

Members of the criminal justice system sometimes run into a similar oversimplification myth. We all know people who divide the world into one group called criminals and another group of ordinary people. The criminals are bad people, so they must do a lot of bad things, and the police should arrest them for something-it doesn't matter whatand the prosecutors should put them in jail. Ordinary people are good people, so even if they break the law, they shouldn't be arrested. To someone pursuing this line of reasoning, every arrest is a judgment by the police officer on the virtue of the arrestee.

This kind of oversimplification is dangerous. Unless the rules we live by are set by a consensus process in which everyone affected has a voice and a vote, we're headed down the road to tyranny. Unless the enforcers of the rules ensure compliance with the rules, not simply raise up or hold down favored or disfavored groups, we're headed down the road to oppression. So it's important to teach people not only that NFPA isn't a government agency but also that it's a good thing NFPA isn't a government agency.

Of course, this same logic also says it's a bad thing for the rules we live by to be written by a narrowly based private organization. Regulated industries shouldn't be able to write weak rules for themselves, then ram them through the legislature, but that's not what NFPA and like groups do. The essential concept here is consensus, and there's only one way to get consensus: Give everybody a voice and a vote.

From the point of view of writing the rules, the people who enforce the rules are an interested party. That's why the rules won't represent a broad consensus if they're written exclusively by those who'll enforce them. It isn't a myth to believe enforcers should write the rules, but it's an absolutely crucial value judgment, one that sharply distinguishes a consensus developer of codes and standards such as NFPA from a code developer like the International Code Council (ICC), in which one specific group-in that case, enforcers-does have all the power.

And this is where the myth part becomes important. Some of those who favor an ICC-type process sincerely believe that one specific group always has the power in any code-development process. They wave aside the checks and balances of true consensus processes like NFP.Ns or ASTM's as smoke screens and distractions.

And it's this myth that makes them hard to refute. If you oversimplify the world in that fashion, it won't be hard to line up a large majority behind an enforcers-only process. But if you break through the myth that any process must inevitably give one interest group the power to write the codes and standards they want, no matter what anyone else thinks, then popular opinion is likely to swing back in favor of a true consensus process.

NFPA: the quiet, good-hands company under the umbrella? Second only to the myth that NFPA is a government agency is the myth that it's a support organization in the insurance industry. This myth at least has some historical basis: NFPA was founded by a number of organizations, nearly all of them from the insurance industry. However, few people interested in fire were alive when NFPA was so tightly connected to the insurance industry, so why does that perception persist?

Maybe it's the fact that insurance companies are the best-known example of private entities that write rules related to risk, safety, and health as conditions for access to their services. Maybe it's a variation on that mythical search for the one specific group with the power.

Someone who sees that NFPA is a private organization may infer that the one group with the power must also be a private-interest group. If that person gets past the idea that the entire private sector is one monolithic interest group, then a specific group with a scope of activity broad enough to match NFPA's is the insurance industry.

A variation on this myth is the theory-often voiced by so-called investigative reports-that the group controlling an organization must be the group providing most of the organizations funds. That's not a bad theory in general, but for an organization like NFPA, no group comes close to being a majority funder. It's like trying to decide who controls a grocery store chain by asking who buys most of the groceries. Of course, that doesn't keep some people from asking how much money NFPA gets from government contracts and grants or from the fire sprinkler or detection and alarm industries. And we've got the answers, but they don't always show that the group in question is a minor source of NFPA funding.

An organization funded primarily by one interest is probably controlled by that interest. At least the burden of proof can be reasonably shifted to the organization to prove that's not the case. But the idea that every dollar changing hands is a magic wand conveying absolute control is crazy.

In fact, the truth is more complex. At some point, a financial relationship creates a larger relationship, and influence grows to constitute power. It's naive to think this never happens, but it's cynically foolish to think it always does. The reason for airing these myths is to encourage us all to insist on complex truths over misleading simplifications and to demand evidence for even the most plausible-sounding propositions.

The myth that NFPA is a government agency is a factual error closely aligned with the value judgment that NFPA should be a government agency. The myth that NFPA is part of the insurance industry is also a factual error, aligned with the value judgment that NFPA should operate on insurance-type principles.

If you hang around enough committee meetings, you'll eventually hear someone say that codes and standards are all ultimately about money. How much of our money will we spend to protect our valuable stuff-that is, our money? Which building features and systems, each of which makes money for a different industry, will we use to protect everyone else's money? Which companies will be kept from making money because the stuff they make is too likely to lead to a fire that destroys someone else's money? And by the way, how much money do we spend to save one life or prevent one injury?

There's no question that all these points are relevant and important in the development of codes and standards. A substantial number of our fire safety codes and standards have to do with spending money to protect money, and we should be sure the balance between the two makes financial sense. And even though no one likes to think of trading money in any amount for a human life, it's also true that everyone makes judgments daily on acceptable risk and the value of life or health.

However, it's also true that society can't condone having one person or group do serious, avoidable harm to another person or group, even if the first person or group will gain a great deal of money by doing so. At some level, we all know that safety isn't entirely reducible to a balance between spending and losing money. So we can't simply turn over the process of codes and standards development to some big actuarial model, however sophisticated. We need a consensus of choice among people with different vaLues for what economists call "incommensurable goods"-that is, desirable things that can't be readily compared to one another.

A particularly nasty variation of the myth that codes and standards are just about money is that NFPA's actions on them are all about maximizing NFPA's profit. Fellow staff members tell me they've heard people claim that NFPA introduces new documents that aren't needed because they'll make money for NFPA. Some have even heard it said that NFPA staff receive royalties on the introduction of new standards.

I could make a joke here about how I'm still waiting for my first royalty check, but really, this is too ugly a myth to be treated so lightly. The facts are these: Anyone can propose a new code or standard, but the allvolunteer Standards Council has to agree to give the go-ahead, not NFPA staff. If the Standards Council members agree, that still doesn't guarantee a new document. It only creates a project to draft a proposed document. A new code or standard doesn't exist until the committee, also composed of volunteers, votes to propose one and the members, not the staff, approve it after they review the proposal, the comments for and against it, and the committee's responses to those comments.

Once it's on the books, a new code or standard will produce costs and revenues like any other document. There's no royalty system. In fact, most codes or standards barely break even. If NFPA introduced or revised documents solely on the grounds of profitability, our body of codes and standards would be a lot smaller than it is. You may not like a particular code or standard, but if it's an official NFPA document, it got there because a great many people, none of whom are paid by NFPA, said they wanted or needed it.

NFPA develops standards, not codes?

If you're a student of semantics, you may have noticed that nearly every time I refer to NFPA or the NFPA process, I refer to it in terms of codes and standards development. There are people who believe that NFPA only develops standards. On the other hand, there are people who think codes and standards are just different names for the same thing, and still others who think there's an unambiguous difference between them. All of these views are myths.

In simplified terms, a standard is like a user's manual. It tells you how to proceed to achieve a purpose, but it doesn't define the purpose. A code defines a purpose, then refers to standards for guidance on achieving that purpose. In this relationship, the code is the higherlevel document, and the standard is useful only if it says how to achieve a purpose, as stated in the code, if there is a relevant code.

This should dispose of the idea that codes and standards are essentially the same. In practice, however, the distinction is often like the distinction between heads and tails on a coin: You can talk about them separately, but you can't separate them. The detailed guidance appropriate to a standard inevitably clarifies the purpose being sought. And a code, in order to have some level of clarity in stating goals and objectives, usually has to say something about how the purpose is to be achieved, if only by setting out alternatives.

To the extent that codes and standards differ sharply-with codes setting out value judgments and acceptable levels of risk and safety, and standards providing technical guidance on achieving externally specified goals-it could make sense to develop them using different processes. The code-development process would capture community value judgments, and the standards-development process would capture the best science and the latest technical expertise.

The latter search could even lead one to a document-development process very different than any discussed to this point, such as that seen in work on the Society of Fire Protection Engineers' guide for performance-based design. This approach has not only bypassed the consensus of the NFPA process-only fire protection engineers can participate-but it's also less formal than the NFPA or ICC processes.

In many ways, this third process is modeled after the peer-review process of approving scientific articles for publication. Authorship of a peer-reviewed document attaches to a few individual authors, at most, and a single editor gives approval. Comments are solicited, also from a few individuals whom the editor judges to be experts and independent of the author. Neither the author nor the editor need address every comment, let alone defend the action on each comment or submit the document to comment or a vote by a larger group.

The peer-review process works well to ensure scientific quality in documents that, in the end, carry the authority of their authors. However, a standard or code is expected to carry the authority of an entire issuing organization or a larger community from which the issuing organization is drawn. For such a document, peer review is too limited a model.

In peer review, a single author and an accommodating editor can see a document to publication with no more support than the author's. That's bad enough if the result is shoddy science presented as credible and reliable. But such an article is likely to be offset by future articles in the normal self-correcting process of science. Before those future articles arrive, no one has to follow the dictates of the bad article. But a bad standard isn't as likely to be offset by contradictory standards emerging in the normal operation of the process, and professional practices can be widely and severely affected while the bad standard is on the books. Real people can be hurt, and real money can be wasted.

To summarize, codes and standards are different, but the line between them is blurry, and it's a rare document that's a pure example of either concept. NFPA develops and publishes both types.

The myth that NFPA doesn't write codes-or, more often, the value judgment that NFPA shouldn't write codes-goes back to the view that any organization doing what NFPA does ought to be a government agency or an association of agencies. It's yet another variation of the idea that values should emerge not from consensus, which people holding this viewpoint may regard as a sham concealing power in the hands of the wrong people, but from the enforcers, extending their public-service role of enforcing community rules to the separate-and, I would argue, inappropriate--role of writing the rules they enforce.

What's compatible?

If the myth that says NFPA shouldn't write codes because its process is wrong doesn't sell, another myth may be advanced. This myth says that NFPA shouldn't write codes because its codes won't be compatible with other codes for the built environment, written by other groups whose solution for the incompatibility problem is to have one group issue all the codes. Once again, this can be put forward as a preference-I'd like to get all my codes from one source-or as a myth-codes from one source are compatible, and codes from multiple sources aren't. To unravel this myth, we need to examine what makes two sets of rules consistent and compatible.

If the line between code and standard is so blurry, why write two types of documents? Why not put all the requirements in one big, organically connected, internally consistent document? And why have separate documents for building, plumbing, mechanical, housing, fire, and electrical codes? Why not issue "The Rules," covering everything you need to know and do about any built environment?

The simple answer is that we aren't smart enough to do that. It's the same reason we don't build airplanes out of one piece of metal, like a giant sculpture. We know how to build parts and join them better, faster, and cheaper than we know how to build everything at once. But as soon as we decide to build our requirements in pieces, the stage is set for potential compatibility problems. Once you have two or more documents, you set yourself up for less than perfect compatibility It's inherent in human nature. The task of minimizing incompatibiity is a variation on quality control. It can be done well or badly, and it's never easy, but no matter how far apart two documents start, you can always make them compatible, so long as you can modify one or both documents.

Of course, that's where the myths of compatibility start flying. If you take a building code prepared by one of the model code organizations of model building officials and compare it to NFPA's Life Safety Code, you'll find some inconsistencies. Elevating those inconsistencies to incompatibility, though, implies that there's no good way to modify the two documents to make them consistent.

Maybe there's a good modification approach, and maybe there isn't. But asserting as an unqualified generalization that two documents issued by the same organization are always compatible and two documents issued by two different organizations are always incompatible is a myth or, at best, an unproven, unsubstantiated assertion.

Everything is compatible with a little work. The burden of proof is certainly on the manufacturers to show you, the user, that it's just a little work and that you'll be pleased with the end result. But it's a myth to say that the burden of proof can't be met.

What's an international standard?

This seems like a no-brainer: An international standard is a standard that's recognized and used internationally What else could it be? But some people think it's more important to have multinational involvement in the development or approval of a standard than it is to have international usage. And a surprising number of organizations seem to think that a standard becomes international just by labeling it as such. The International Council of Building Officials (ICBO) has "international" in its name, even though its codes are adopted only regionally in the United States. At least the International Code Council has adoptions around the whole country, but its codes are no closer to being used around the world than ICBO's are. And just to show that no one is immune from the naming game, NFPA's full name is National Fire Protection Association, International, Inc. If one organization can be both national and international, anything's possible. But certain NFPA's codes are adopted worldwide.

What about the International Standardization Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), which are so often portrayed as the only sources of truly international standards?

ISO and IEC operate on a one-country, one-vote basis. This means that China, with 1.2 billion people, carries no more weight than Liechtenstein, with 31,000 people. It means that the United States, with a gross national product of more than $7 trillion, carries no more weight than Tanzania, whose gross national product is about $4 billion. In terms of a body's ability to present its documents as a global consensus, this highly imbalanced voting situation is bad enough, but in practice, only about one-fifth of the world's nations ever participate in ISO deliberations. And that one-fifth is highly unrepresentative.

For the documents related to fire or electrical safety, European nations usually have an absolute majority of the votes cast. If you think of Europe as an interest group, then ISO and IEC voting rules and member participation patterns effectively give one interest group control of the results. That doesn't make their documents inferior in some absolute sense. It just means they can't reasonably be characterized as a global consensus. They're more a continental, regional consensus.

The NFPA National Electrical Code" is the basis of the Mexican electrical code and is regularly harmonized with the Canadian electrical code. For those reasons alone, the NEC is as international as any document from the IEC.

As I write, there are about 6 billion people in the world. The United States has 4 to 5 percent of the total, and Europe has 8 to 9 percent. That leaves most of the world's population to be heard from. The United States and the European Union each have roughly a quarter of the world's total gross national product. That leaves half the world's commerce in need of codes and standards, with no built-in reason to favor documents from the United States or Europe.

The myth that ISO and IEC documents are the only international standards is, of course, a myth with an agenda, because any group that can position itself as the only "true" source of something everybody wants has assured its success. If the push for global commerce is leading to a clamor for harmonized standards, and if two groups can claim to be the only legitimate sources of such standards-a popular myththen those two groups needn't worry about differences in technology, quality, user-friendliness, global value consensus, or anything else. All around the world, the mountains will have to come to Mohammedor to Brussels or Geneva, as the case may be.

I thought this soas a performance-based code

I'll end this review of myths of codes and standards with a somewhat more exotic subject, which is the myths about performance-based codes and standards. I'm not going to claim that there's some universally accepted definition of"performance" against which any use of the term can be measured. But I will argue that the concept of "performancebased" has some bedrock structure to it and that that structure is enough to knock down some widely held notions and shake others.

Codes and standards are requirements for something. That something may be a building, a system, a product, or anything else susceptible to alternative design and to a meaningful concept of better and worse. Performance-based codes and standards are built around the concept of directly measuring better versus worse, then qualifying a design on that basis, which prescriptive codes and standards don't do.

If I prescribe a steel door of a certain width because I know from fire tests and field experience that such a door will do the job, my reasons are performance-based, but my standard isn't. I've prescribed not just the job to be done but also the method by which to do it. Most people recognize that this example is outside the realm of performance-based standards and that a standard calling for a onehour door, for example, can be called a performance-based standard.

But suppose I write a code for a building based on a series of features, systems, and components, each of which has a performance-based standard. Is the result a performance-based code? No, it isn't, but the idea that it's a performance-based code is a persistent myth in the current discussions about performance-based documents.

A performance-based document is based on measuring performance for the subject of the document, not just for all the pieces that make up the subject of the document. You need overall performance, or what you have is a kind of intermediate document-call it a prescriptive code with performance-based reference standards.

A truly performance-based code is much more flexible than this kind of hybrid document, because it allows you to be creative not only in producing the elements but also in choosing which elements to include. That may make everybody more nervous and a lot more determined to make sure that the code's measures of performance are comprehensive, sound, and conservative. In the end, a hybrid document may be the only way to use performance-based concepts that a committee or the public will be comfortable with, for now. But in the context of myths, you need to call a spade a spade, and not claim your spade is really a backhoe.

The myths of codes and standards are few, compared to the myths about fire, perhaps because everyone knows about fire, but relatively few people know codes and standards even exist. But for the relative handful of us who not only know they exist but actually work in the codes and standards field, any myths we believe endanger more than just ourselves. Also affected are all the people who trust us to sort through the complex facts and difficult value judgments regarding safety in a way that respects their wishes as they would voice them if they understood the subject as well as we do.

Codes and standards are decision-making tools produced in a decision-making system, and any group decision-making activity raises questions about power and influence. But to be accurate, any characterization of codes and standards or of the organizations that produce them must respect the specifics of the development process the organization uses. Advocate what you like and criticize what you don't, but don't simplify a process or system you don't like into a distorted caricature that's easy to knock down. You're only kidding yourself if you knock down straw men and think you've defeated an army.

We at NFPA know that we produce model international codes and standards by a true consensus process and that we're moving toward greater use of performance-based principles in those documents. We know there are other organizations doing the same thing and even more organizations doing some things the same and some differently. It's a complex subject, and we're confident that people will make the right choices when they know the truth. Toward that end, this discussion of myths in the field of codes and standards may help. I had fun writing it, and I hope you had fun reading it. Let me know. *

John R. Hall, Jr., is NFPA s assistant vice president of Fire Research and Analysis.

Copyright National Fire Protection Association May/Jun 1999
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