Good standards are like a good starting word in Wordle
Photo credit: Joshua Hoehne via Unsplash
What’s your starting word in Wordle?
I use STEAM. It has a good combination of common vowels and common consonants, and for some reason I find it pleasing (something to do with steam engines?). There are words which are mathematically proven to be better, but I like this one.
In case you’re one of the few people who didn’t become familiar with Wordle during the pandemic, I should explain. It’s an online game where you have six attempts to guess a five letter word, and each letter in the guess is marked green, for a correct letter in the correct place, yellow, for a correct letter in the wrong place, or grey for a letter which is not in the word at all. It’s just about hard enough to give you a sense of achievement, but easy enough that you get the right word most of the time. It also has the virtue that everyone who plays the game worldwide gets the same word every day, making it feel as if you are all playing together - you can also share your pattern of green, yellow and grey without giving the game away.
One of the engaging aspects of Wordle is the feeling that you are steadily narrowing the field, from a huge range of possibilities to the one which is correct. It sometimes seems astonishing that it its possible to find an answer with so little information. Of course, it is the yellow and green markers that make all the difference. If we just guessed six random words, then the chances of getting the right one would be small. But reliable feedback enables us to navigate to the solution.
I thnk that we should think of good technology standards as similar to a good starting word in Wordle. When we set out to design any technology solution, we have a bewildering array of options. Even when we use tools such as cloud platforms and frameworks to abstract away underlying complexity, we still have thousands of decisions to take all the way down the stack, and these decisions multiply further when considered in combination. Platforms and frameworks are sometimes opinionated, but are rarely so opinionated that they tell us exactly what to do.
Standards can help us fill this gap, although we often get them wrong. In many large organisations, standards are rigid and used to drive consistency, with quality gates and inspection points to check whether they have been ‘correctly’ applied. In such organisations, standards are regarded as instructions which implement well known solutions to thoroughly solved problems.
The difficulty is that in the world of enterprise technology we are solving new problems all the time. If we make our standards too rigid and apply them thoughtlessly, then they are like Wordle guesses with no feedback: we try one thing and find that it doesn’t fit, and then another and find that it doesn’t fit, until we have exhausted our guesses. In practice, reality is rather more flexible than the Wordle app, so we often distort our solution to fit the standard, even if this gives us a sub-optimal result.
If we get standards right, however, then they can be rather more helpful. No-one expects their first Wordle guess to be correct (this has happened to me once, and it didn’t feel particularly rewarding - after all, it is pure chance). Similarly, no-one should expect a technical standard to be a perfect fit as soon as it is applied. Rather, a good standard provides some starting hypotheses which narrow down the solution space, and give good clues about what the right answer might be. The act of implementing these standards is less like following instructions than like making that first guess in Wordle - and finding just how wrong you are.
We could think of enterprise technologists as engaged in the equivalent of a global game of Wordle. We aren’t all trying to find the same word, but we are all figuring out the best ways to use the tools at our disposal, and discovering signs of success that we can share with others. If our standards capture this collective endeavour, then I think that they are useful.
One final thought: when researching this article, I wondered how many words there are in Wordle. I had assumed that the answer was in the order of tens of thousands. When I asked some other Wordle players, they thought that it might be hundred of thousands or even millions. In fact, the number is surprisingly small: the complete list currently comprises just 2,309 words. I think that there is a further lesson for us here: sometimes complexity is not as complex as it looks, and we are navigating a much smaller solution space than we think.
