The temptation to make things alike
Leading without standardising means resisting a slope that appears as soon as a structure brings several activities together. You would like the same tools, the same indicators, the same meetings, the same vocabulary. It is simpler to steer, more legible from outside, more reassuring for whoever must answer for the whole.
That slope is rarely discussed, because it never presents itself as a decision. It advances through small successive standardisations, each of which, taken alone, seems reasonable.
What uniformity costs
A trade lives by its particularities. A rhythm that is not the neighbour’s, a different relationship to time, its own way of judging whether the work is good. Erasing that in the name of coherence amounts to removing from each activity what made it competent.
The result is almost always the same: everything becomes comparable, and nothing is accurate any more. You gain a dashboard and lose the fineness that gave the work its value.
There is a deeper reason for this. A way of working is not a convention that could be changed without consequence: it took shape in response to real constraints, often old ones, that a newcomer from outside does not see. Standardising it amounts to removing an answer without having understood the question.
A shared standard, different forms
The unity of a whole is not played out in procedures. It is played out in the level of demand: how a commitment is honoured, how a difficulty is handled, how someone waiting for an answer is spoken to. That can be asked everywhere, and it costs no one their specificity.
What must be shared belongs to manner. What must stay distinct belongs to trade. Confusing the two is the most frequent error, and the hardest to repair once it has settled in.
IRRINIUM: one manner, distinct trades
The activities connected by IRRINIUM do not resemble one another and are not meant to. They do not address the same people, do not work at the same rhythm, are not judged by the same criteria.
What they share is not an organisation but a bearing: the same care given to what is promised, the same attention to those the work concerns. The rest may differ as much as it needs to. This is also what The Coherence of an Ecosystem describes.
Unity is not resemblance
An old facade shows openings of different sizes and periods, and no one doubts it is a single building. What makes unity is not the repetition of a motif, it is the coherence of what carries the load.
Leading without standardising requires accepting a share of apparent disorder. That is the price of a whole that is genuinely alive.
Yannick Costechareyre