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It would be very annoying if battery-powered toys, radios, and clocks each required a unique kind of battery. Fortunately, just a few standardized kinds of batteries, such as the AA, AAA, C, D, and 9-volt kinds, are needed for most of these devices. This is an example of a situation in which standardization offers big advantages.
But in many situations flexibility, which is the opposite of standardization, can offer worthwhile advantages.
Real estate developers commonly design large apartment complexes using only one or two standardized apartment layouts. Although this saves money in designing and building the apartments, do the future renters necessarily want to be living next to people who also want the same kind of apartment? This practice of standardization leaves out options such as building an apartment complex that accommodates both families and senior citizens. In this kind of apartment complex, senior citizens could provide day care services in return for assistance doing what they are physically unable to do.
Situations that involve people are especially ripe for creative solutions that involve flexibility. For instance, businesses have lately used flexibility to offer greater incentives to their employees without spending additional money. Two such innovations are flexible working hours and "flexible benefits." Flexible hours enable employees to match or complement the schedule of other family members or avoid peak traffic congestion. A flexible benefits program allows each employee to choose how a fixed amount of money is distributed for their health care options and retirement program options.
Flexibility is not necessarily better than standardization. But flexibility is often neglected because standardization has been a key ingredient in industrialization.
But now that computer technology has arrived, even industry will increasingly incorporate flexibility. For instance, a long-awaited future innovation will be the manufacturing of clothing that fits a particular person's size and taste. This will be a dramatic contrast to standardized sizes (which, for many people, don't fit them) and standardized styles (which don't fit many people's preferences).
Standardization is so often useful that its opposite, flexibility (an accommodation of diversity), is commonly overlooked as a useful feature in solutions and innovations.
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