Reducing risk sits at the very heart of standards development.

Feb 27, 2026

Nearly all day, every day, we’re making conscious and unconscious decisions about mitigating risk. Is it safe to cross the street here? Should I really say this in an email? Is this expiration date real?  Even when we’re considering an opportunity, we’re simultaneously evaluating risk. What if I don’t like this new job?

There’s a frequently recycled meme I always find amusing because it’s true. How many of us thought quicksand was going to be a bigger risk in our life than it turned out to be? How many other risks did we prepare for as children that ultimately were less of a risk than we imagined they would be? Some of those, like quicksand, are likely because they caught our imagination and were magnified in our minds and were never truly widespread risks. Most, however, were likely real risks that someone in the intervening years spent significant thought, time, and effort to mitigate. 

“Stop, drop, and roll” (same meme). I bet you thought you’d be using that more in your daily life than you have. Has fire become safer? No, but solutions for the myriad risks associated with personal injury due to fire have and continue to progress. Fire-resistant clothing and bedding, better personal protective equipment, more fire-resistant construction materials and methods, spark-arresting gasoline containers – the list goes on. All of these risk-mitigation solutions and products are all facilitated by standards. I’d venture to say that we don’t even realize that most of the thousands of physical risks that we encounter every day are actually risks, because the invisible infrastructure of standards mitigates risk without us even having to think about it.

As you’ll read in the features, the theme of this issue of Standardization News is “reducing risk” – a core aspect of the work we do in the standards-development community, albeit one with a wide variety of possible approaches.

I’ve heard it said that: “The way you treat the elderly says a lot about who you are as a person.” I think that is probably applicable to the way we treat each other collectively, but I subscribe to the notion that we are better people when we support our most vulnerable.

In our world, a world of test methods, performance specifications, practices, guides, classification, and terminology, we work to protect our most vulnerable through the development of standards that aim to reduce risk and keep people safe. Whether that’s through the development of standards for keeping babies safe, like toys, crib mattresses, and tip-over restraints; or those for the elderly, like bedrails or medical implants, the core objective is reducing risk in a tangible way. 

But as I noted, reducing risk can be addressed in a wide variety of ways. Although not as tangible as the other example, standards can (and often do) play a considerable role in risk management at the enterprise level. Standards play a key role in reducing financial risk for organizations through things like asset management or resilience policies. 

Organizationally, reducing risk makes me think of the path ASTM has been on for the past few years to develop and enhance a more formal business strategy that aims to align our decision-making process with our mission and core objectives. When operational, we trust this framework will help us reduce risk by ensuring existing ventures can be appropriately supported, and prospective ventures will be evaluated on their benefit to our organizational success. We’re not quite ready to roll this out broadly yet, but stay tuned for more information in the coming months.

Taken together, the features in this issue (along with the important information shared in the Update and Outreach sections) highlight how reducing risk sits at the very heart of standards development. Whether the impact is physical, tangible, or strategic, standards help position shared values as practical applications that keep people safe and organizations strong. ●

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