If People Are Making Shit Up to Pass Your Assessment, You Might Be Assessing the Wrong Thing

If otherwise decent businesses are making shit up to pass your assessment, maybe the problem isn’t entirely them. Maybe the assessment is rewarding the wrong thing. And that reward can literally be the difference between staying in business or not...

We all know that every assessment wants hard evidence. No grey areas. No “we do it, but we don’t have a form for it.” No “our supervisor checks that every day.” No “talk to the crew, they’ll tell you.” It wants the document. The signature. In some cases it wants The Name.

So the business produces the document. Policies. Registers. Names. Meeting minutes. Training records. Procedures. Review dates. Signed forms. The evidence goes in, the score comes back, and that score gets used to win tenders and everyone’s happy.

The workers probably never see most of the evidence that got submitted. They don’t know which document earned the points, what was written behind the scenes or what got polished up before it was uploaded.

They just see the result: a great score, an approved business, a tick in the right box that means the chances of the business winning work are still alive.

They know it doesn’t totally reflect the business they work in.

They know which controls are solid and which ones are patchy. They know what gets talked about, what gets ignored and where the gaps really are. So when an assessment says everything looks great but their day-to-day experience says otherwise, they don’t need to know exactly how the score was achieved.

They just know it’s bullshit.

And that matters, because now the system hasn’t just failed to reflect reality. It has rewarded a version of reality the workers don’t recognise.

It reinforces the bullshit that was already there.

Once the score matters, people chase the score

That’s not some shocking insight into human behaviour. It’s just what happens.

If the score helps you win work, you optimise for the score. If the document gets you the point, you create the document. If the box needs something uploaded into it, something gets uploaded. If the assessment wants a process, a process appears.

That doesn’t automatically mean the business is dishonest. It means we’ve built a system where producing evidence can become more valuable than improving the work.

A business can be excellent at managing risk and rubbish at presenting tidy evidence. Another can be brilliant at presenting evidence and average at managing risk. Yet the one with the better paperwork can come out looking stronger.

That should make us uncomfortable.

What are we trying to prove?

If the question is whether a business manages a risk properly, then show me that.

Show me the control, the gear and how people know what to do. Show me what happens when conditions change. Show me how the supervisor knows the operator is competent. Show me what happened the last time something went wrong and what changed because of it.

Only then should we look at the paperwork.

With all the genius of technology today we should be able to load a video, have a Teams call or (God forbid) have site assessments. Anything to SHOW what good is. Not rely on a pre-determined document to tell someone who has never seen the worksite how good we should be.

Evidence should come from the work. It should support reality, not replace it.

We’ve ended up rewarding the version that looks best on paper

And that has consequences. Not just because businesses waste time creating stuff they don’t need, or because paperwork ends up disconnected from the people doing the work. The bigger problem is that we start trusting the score.

Approved contractor. Prequalified. Compliant. Good result. Tender-ready.

All of that sounds reassuring, but what did we actually verify?

Did we verify that the controls work, that people understand the job and that the business responds well when things change? Did we verify that the critical risks are genuinely being managed?

Or did we verify that somebody knew what files to upload?

Those are not the same thing.

Evidence still matters

Of course it does. Good records matter, and being able to demonstrate what you’ve done matters.

But the paperwork should be the trail left behind by good work. It shouldn’t be a separate version of the business created to satisfy an assessment.

Because if a business can produce immaculate evidence, get a great score and win the tender while the

work carries on exactly as it always did, we haven’t improved anything.

We’ve just got very good at rewarding the bullshit.