Who Writes the Rules? How the Standards World Works

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 3m

A brand-new graduate at the Al Sahil Gas Complex asks a simple question: who decides what a "standard" is, and why does the project specification say IEC 61511 in one place and ISA 84 in another? Over one long lunch, Diego Ferrer and Leila Darwish walk her through a hundred and twenty years of the standards world, from a 1906 meeting in London to the parallel vote that makes an IEC text into a European norm on the same day. Along the way: why editions matter, what an amendment really is, why "should" is not "shall", and how one sentence in an owner's specification ripples down to the label on…