The invisible infrastructure every future leader should understand

What happens after the idea

Since entering the world of standards, one thing that has stayed with me is that the biggest breakthroughs don’t come from one person having the best idea. They happen because people find a way to build on that idea together.

Innovation has always driven humanity forward. We spend a great deal of time encouraging future leaders to generate ideas. We spend far less time preparing them for what happens next: turning those ideas into shared progress.

But innovation alone has never changed the world. Ideas only transform societies when people can understand them, trust them and build upon them together. That’s where standards have a role to play.

Invisible until it’s missing

My generation was born into a world where standards already shape everyday life, so quietly that most of us never even notice them. When we plug in our phone charger, it works. When we board a flight, we trust it will land safely on the other side of the world. When we buy food, we assume that it is safe to eat.

That’s perhaps the strangest achievement of a standard: when it works, it disappears. The World Bank recently called standards the world’s “invisible infrastructure”, and I think that’s exactly right. Infrastructure isn’t valuable because we notice it. It’s valuable because everything else quietly depends on it.

Working in standards has taught me that the hardest part of solving a global problem is almost never a shortage of good ideas. Good ideas are everywhere. What’s much rarer is the ability to help an idea travel beyond borders, earn a stranger’s trust, and become useful to someone who had no part in creating it. Standards set the conditions that allow this to happen.

What standards help create

That starts with collaboration. And collaboration begins earlier than most people think – not by agreeing on a solution, but by agreeing on what we’re even talking about. Before countries can regulate artificial intelligence, they first need a shared understanding of what artificial intelligence is. A shared definition becomes a shared measurement. A shared measurement becomes a shared action.

At ISO, experts from more than 170 member countries work together to build that common ground. They bring different experiences, priorities and perspectives. Not all of them begin from the same starting point. And that is precisely the point. Through discussion, technical expertise and the patient work of consensus, they build something that can be understood and used far beyond the room where it began.

That’s still the part I find most impressive – not the documents themselves, but the process behind them. It’s a way for people with profoundly different starting points to build enough common ground to move forward.

The future isn’t something young people will begin shaping one day. We are already shaping it.

Trust travels slower than the product itself

I often think back to the coffee growers I interviewed in Bolivia, my home country, while researching my master thesis. Their altitude-grown coffee was exceptional. That was never the problem. The problem was convincing a buyer thousands of kilometres away, who had never visited the farm, spoke a different language and answered to different regulations. Trust had to travel farther than the coffee itself, and it moved much more slowly.

Standards didn’t make that coffee any better. What they did was allow the rest of the world to recognize the quality that was already there. Watching this from the outside, I saw standards as a way of building trust. But the growers saw something more immediate: opportunity. Standards were the difference between a market that would never consider their coffee and one that would.

That experience changed how I think about standards. They are not simply documents; they’re a way of building trust between people who will never meet. And that trust can open doors that might otherwise remain closed.

What I hope the students take home

Perhaps that’s why I don’t see the Olympiad just as a competition about standards. I see it as a rehearsal for leadership. Not the kind of leadership that insists on having every answer, but the kind that knows how to bring people toward an answer they can share.

I don’t yet know what this year’s students will disagree about over the coming days, or what conclusions they will eventually reach. But conversations like this often follow the same pattern: strangers begin with different perspectives and gradually build something none of them could have created alone. It’s a small but powerful reflection of how global challenges are solved. Not by thinking alike, but by bringing different viewpoints together to create something better.

Because the future isn’t something young people will begin shaping one day. We are already shaping it. If there’s one lesson I hope young people take away from the Olympiad – and from today’s International Youth Day – it is this: some of the world’s greatest advances don’t happen because everyone thinks alike. They happen because people find enough common ground to move forward together.

That’s what standards have taught me.

And perhaps that’s one of the most valuable lessons we can pass on to the next generation.


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