Standards governance
Independence is the credential.
The Institute can be founder-led in vision while certification is independently governed, evidence-based, appealable, and separated from vendor access decisions. This page states how that is meant to work — and, for each mechanism, whether it is running yet.
- 01 / 06Designed, not yet operating
Independent standards council
A council, with a majority of members drawn from outside the Institute, that owns the competency blueprint and the certification decisions rather than advising on them. Its remit includes the power to refuse a decision the Institute wants.
Why it is there
A credential governed by the person who benefits from issuing it is a marketing asset, not a standard. The council is the mechanism that makes the difference structural rather than a promise. It is being recruited and has not been seated, so no decision made so far has had independent review — and none is described as though it has.
- 02 / 06Partly in place
Published competency blueprint
The full statement of what the assessment tests: domains, weightings, and the level of judgement expected at each. Published before candidates sit, and versioned when it changes.
Why it is there
A candidate who cannot see what is being assessed cannot prepare for it, and an employer who cannot see it cannot tell what the credential means. Publishing it in advance also makes the assessment falsifiable: if the questions do not match the blueprint, that is visible. Version 0.1.0 is published at /blueprint as a draft, not yet signed off, and no candidate has been assessed against it.
- 03 / 06Designed, not yet operating
Conflict and recusal register
A standing record of the employment, holdings, venue affiliations and funding relationships of everyone who takes part in a standards or certification decision — and of the specific decisions each of them stood out of.
Why it is there
The Institute has one material conflict to manage: its founder also founded Tomorrow, a platform with its own separate practitioner qualification. A register is how that stops being something you have to take on trust. No recusal is recorded yet, because no certification decision has been made.
- 04 / 06Designed, not yet operating
Psychometric review and item lineage
Independent review of the assessment as a measuring instrument — whether items discriminate, whether the pass mark is defensible, whether the whole thing measures what it claims to. Each item carries a lineage: who wrote it, against which blueprint section, and how it has performed.
Why it is there
An exam is a measurement, and a measurement nobody has checked is an opinion with a score attached. It is also what makes a pass mark something the Institute can defend to a candidate who failed, rather than something it chose.
- 05 / 06Designed, not yet operating
Transparent appeals and discipline
A published route to challenge a certification or discipline decision, with stated grounds, a stated window, a decision-maker who was not part of the original decision, and a written outcome.
Why it is there
A body that can withdraw someone’s professional standing needs a process that is legible before it is used, not designed in response to the first person who objects. The absence of appeals to date is a consequence of having issued nothing, not of the process working.
- 06 / 06Designed, not yet operating
Annual public standards consultation
An open comment period on proposed changes to the blueprint and the standards, with the comments received and the reasons for accepting or rejecting each one published alongside the outcome.
Why it is there
These markets change faster than any standard written about them. A consultation cycle is how the standard keeps up without the Institute quietly rewriting it — and publishing the rejected comments, with reasons, is what stops a consultation being a formality.
The point of all this
A standard is only worth what its governance is worth.
Any organisation can write an exam. What makes a credential mean something to the person relying on it — a client, a supervisor, a firm deciding who may advise on these contracts — is whether the body issuing it can be overruled, whether its conflicts are visible, and whether a decision can be challenged by the person it went against.
Those are the six mechanisms above. Publishing them before any of them exists is deliberate: it fixes the standard the Institute has to meet while it is still cheap to meet it, and it gives anyone reading a specific list to hold it to later.