Avoiding the Ritual Trap
One of the most common concerns during a credentialing technology modernization effort is the fear that new technology could compromise the organization’s standards.
It’s a reasonable concern. Standards create the trust that gives a credential its value.
The problem arises when organizations begin to confuse the processes built to support a standard with the standard itself.
Sociologist Robert K. Merton described a phenomenon called ritualism, where compliance with a process becomes more important than the outcome the process was intended to achieve. I refer to this as the Ritual Trap.
When process replaces purpose, compliance becomes indistinguishable from quality.
What are some symptoms of this?
- Manual reviews become synonymous with rigor.
- Multiple layers of approval become synonymous with quality.
- Complex workflows become synonymous with oversight.
At some point, it becomes difficult to separate the underlying standard from the collection of processes surrounding it, which causes us to ask the wrong questions.
The real question is not “How much of our process can we automate”?
The real question is “How can technology help us uphold our standards while allowing people to focus their expertise where it matters most?”
This distinction matters because the technology is not the standard. Technology does not even define the standard. The role of technology is to support the standard.
People who care about the integrity of the credential and the expertise that it represents define the standard. Understanding this is absolutely crucial in a successful credentialing modernization.
The Standard Exists Before the Technology
Let’s go back to first principles. Why does a credential have value at all? What does it mean?
I would say a credential has value exactly to the extent the organization has established standards that the profession trusts and maintains the discipline and rigor required to enforce those standards.
- The platform didn’t determine what competencies matter.
- The analytics tool didn’t decide what evidence is required.
- The AI agent didn’t establish eligibility criteria, appeals processes, ethical requirements, or standards of professional practice.
Those decisions were made by subject matter experts, volunteer leaders, credentialing staff, certification boards, and accreditation bodies – by people who understood and cared about the profession.
The technology came later, and its only role is to help the organization apply those standards in a consistent, disciplined, and effective way.
Modernization efforts often immediately become technology discussions while skipping right past the standards discussions.
The integrity of a credential doesn’t come from the software. It comes from the rigor and consistency of the standard itself.
The Purpose of Technology Is to Support the Standard
So if technology doesn’t define the standard, then what does it do?
It supports it; and how it can best perform that function should be the focus of the technology conversations.
Organizations often evaluate technology through the lens of efficiency:
- Can we automate this?
- Can we reduce staff effort?
- Can we process applications faster?
- Can we eliminate this review step?
To be clear, these are reasonable questions and may be great steps to take. But even these are begging the question – they are assuming that efficiency is the objective.
I would submit that for credentialing organizations, efficiency is usually not the primary objective. Rather, maintaining the integrity of the credential is.
Technology supports the standard when it helps an organization apply its standards more consistently, more transparently, and more sustainably.
- Sometimes that creates efficiency.
- Sometimes it improves auditability.
- Sometimes it improves the candidate experience.
- Sometimes it improves visibility.
Those are all positive outcomes. But they are outcomes, not objectives.
The objective remains the same – preserve and consistently apply the standard.
So the question is not necessarily “How much work can we remove?” but rather “How can technology help us uphold our standards more effectively?”
The Friction Fallacy: Confusing Manual Effort with Rigor
Many organizations today understand the points above regarding the importance of the standard and have earned trust and demonstrated value precisely because they care deeply about the decisions they make.
That commitment shows up in many ways, such as careful review, consistency, oversight, documentation, defensible decision-making. These practices are not problems – in fact, they are often a significant reason a credential is respected in the first place.
But as with the Ritual Trap described above, something else can happen over time.
Sometimes a process that once required manual review because technology was limited becomes embedded in the organization’s operating model. Over time, the manual step starts to feel synonymous with quality. The effort itself becomes evidence of rigor. The harder a process feels, the more valuable it is assumed to be. What was once an acquiescence to the limitations of technology becomes a showcase of organizational discipline.
But these are not necessarily the same thing.
- Re-entering information between systems isn’t quality control.
- Reviewing every application by hand isn’t automatically more rigorous than a well-designed process that consistently applies approved rules and directs human attention to exceptions.
- Maintaining multiple spreadsheets isn’t governance.
- Routing routine applications through three layers of review doesn’t always improve decisions.
This is what I call the Friction Fallacy, which is the belief that if a process isn’t difficult, painful, or labor-intensive, it must lack rigor. More succinctly, it is the tendency to confuse effort with value.
As I outlined at the beginning of this piece, organizations are absolutely right to protect their standards.
The mistake is assuming that preserving the standard requires preserving every process that grew up around it, and in particular viewing the arduousness of the task as evidence of its necessity.
Human Judgment Matters – “Thou Shalt Judge”
The goal of modernization should not be to eliminate human judgement but to reserve that judgement for the decisions that require it.
A subject matter expert who understands the standard, believes in the value of the credential, and takes seriously the trust the organization has earned is one of the most valuable resources a credentialing organization possesses, and should deployed strategically.
The goal should be ensuring that these people spend their time where their expertise creates the most value, instead of areas of where the value is suboptimal (Friction Fallacy) or entirely illusory (Ritual Trap).
When technology handles routine, well-defined activities, credentialing professionals gain more time to focus on the areas where discernment and judgement come into play, such as exceptions, appeals, investigations, and program quality and improvement.
In other words, technology shouldn’t reduce the organization’s standard but should allow that standard to be applied more intentionally.
Trust Is the Product
Technology will continue to evolve. Today’s conversation is AI, and tomorrow it will be something else. But none of those innovations determine what a profession values or what competence means.
I believe that the future of credentialing is not really about technology. It’s about trust, and the governance needed to establish and maintain that trust.
Technology matters to the extent it helps organizations uphold standards with greater scale, transparency, and consistency. But technology cannot define those standards.
Standards are established by people, maintained by governance, and trusted because organizations defend them consistently over time.
Technology doesn’t define the standard. People do.
