What a Certificate Actually Certifies

Doug Belshaw has given a name to something most of us have been circling for years. Writing at Open Thinkering, he calls it literacy-slop, and defines it briskly:Literacy-slop is the credential without the community of practice; it’s the qualification without the learning; the skills certificate for getting an AI agent to click through a self-paced module on digital skills. It looks like literacy, satisfying the classifier. But it’s just curation without a social body.He is writing about education. I want to take the idea somewhere it bites harder, because the business version of this problem costs more and is better hidden. In education, the person holding the hollow credential is usually the one who paid for it. In an organisation, the person holding it has been promoted, and someone else pays.The Conference ConvertI have watched this happen more than once, and the shape is always the same.An executive attends a conference, or sits through a roundtable, and encounters a framework.…