I've been fortunate enough to work with global experts in the international standard space for the past seven years, having worked on several ISO projects.
I've seen the good, the frustrating and how personal agendas can drive outcomes.
Taking on a leadership role though gave me a completely new perspective on some of those key challenges in in managing global experts from around the world.
But in fact I think that the biggest challenge for me personally, was actually coordinating a whole bunch of meetings in multiple time zones.
And you could never just find that time that would suit everyone.
So for me there was a lot of 3:00 a.m finishes uh and that could have been a little bit challenging at times as well.
One of the other key challenges was really about looking at getting that consensus on our writing style.
So it was looking at who's the audience we're writing this particular standard for.
And it's not for academics or experts. In fact ISO standards are developed for organizations, particularly those in developing countries
where there are no government standards there's no legislation there's no laws to actually guide them in what they need to do.
And so we made a conscious decision at the beginning of this particular project, that we'll always keep front of mind that we are writing for the audience that has nothing in place.
Another key challenge was looking at how the English language translated into other languages around the world, because not every word in the English language will translate.
For example 'safety' does not translate into the same way that it is intended in German.
So we had to be really conscious of that. So we took a a very agile and flexible approach to our writing style to ensure that when that was identified by experts from those countries,
we could adapt our approach and use more generic terms and language, rather than quite specific terms and language, uh that you might see in other kind of uh documents.
Leading such a great project as ISO22336, I'd really like to see governments adopt this as a guiding standard to enhance resilience across government organizations.
To get public and private organizations to adopt this particular standard to ensure that they can start to proactively design their policy execute that through their strategy in a really structured way.
Because if we can achieve that, particularly here, if we can achieve that what we'll see is we will achieve Victoria's outcome of being a more resilient Victoria
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