The problem: when the means becomes the end
In schools, public administration and the world of work, the need to certify knowledge, skills and the quality of processes has gradually taken hold. The idea is reasonable: if a person or an organisation claims to be able to do something, it is useful to have tools that can verify that claim by uniform, documented criteria.
This has given rise to certification systems, accredited courses, qualifications, quality standards, scoring grids and control procedures. All this serves an important purpose: reducing arbitrariness, making different situations comparable, keeping a record of decisions and making those involved accountable.
The problem begins when the relationship is reversed. Documentation, originally intended to describe and support a reality, ends up replacing it. The certificate is no longer the consequence of competence; it becomes the goal. The procedure is no longer a tool for managing an activity well; it becomes formal proof that the activity was well managed.
The risk is easy to state: we stop asking whether something actually works and start asking whether a document exists to certify that it should work.
The “mouse paper”: a child's phrase that explains an adult problem
Years ago, I told my family about an incident at a workplace close to me. Following a report by an employee, a workplace safety inspection had taken place. The inspection had not uncovered any striking dangers or substantially serious conditions. Its main finding concerned the paperwork: some documents describing the risks present in the business and the measures taken to prevent or reduce them were missing or incomplete.
The document with which I would now associate that incident is the DVR, the Italian risk assessment document (Documento di Valutazione dei Rischi). It is right that such a document exists: safety cannot depend solely on common sense or on the memory of the people who work there. As I told the story at home, however, the episode highlighted, almost comically, the distance that can open between reality and its bureaucratic representation.
My son was still a child. He listened and, with a child's ability to strip away every complication, summed up the situation in a sentence I have never forgotten:
“So it isn't that they found mice. It's that the paper saying there are no mice is missing.”
Of course, the DVR is not simply “a paper saying there are no mice”: it must identify real risks, assess them and indicate the measures adopted to reduce them. But that is precisely why the joke works. If the document exists to describe and manage reality, danger begins when having the document becomes more important than the reality it is supposed to represent.
Since then, “the mouse paper” has symbolised for me a much wider temptation: mistaking formal evidence for substantive evidence. It concerns more than workplace safety. It concerns quality certification, courses, qualifications, rankings, competitive examinations and even the way we decide who is competent and who is not.
Why documentation really matters
It would be too easy to conclude that bureaucracy is useless and common sense is enough. It is not. Documentation is essential, especially as organisations become complex. An unwritten risk can be forgotten; a procedure that is never formalised may depend entirely on one person's memory; an undefined responsibility can turn into a chain of misunderstandings.
To stay with the example, the DVR requires the employer to pause, identify hazards, assess who is exposed, choose preventive measures and update them when circumstances change. Its value lies not in the paper itself, but in the thinking and organisational process that the paper should make compulsory, verifiable and transferable.
The same applies to many quality systems. A written procedure can prevent a delicate task from being done differently every time. A record lets us understand afterwards what happened. A checklist can prevent an omission. The problem, then, is not the paper. It is the moment the paper becomes detached from the reality it is supposed to represent.
ISO 9001: the quality of a system is not the quality of every outcome
ISO 9001 is an interesting case. People often read a quality certification as if it automatically meant that the certified organisation produced the best results. In fact, its meaning is different: certification concerns the quality management system, that is, how the organisation defines processes, responsibilities, controls, the handling of nonconformities and improvement.
It is an important assurance, but not an absolute one. A well organised process increases the likelihood of reliable outcomes; it does not automatically make every product the best possible product or every employee an excellent professional.
Here the “mouse paper” returns. A procedure showing that a check was planned must not be confused with the result of that check. The document should be a bridge to reality, not a substitute for it.
IT certificates: knowing, being able to do, having done
The same problem is clear with individual certifications. An IT certificate may have a serious syllabus, well prepared materials and properly organised examinations. It may offer a good route to learning and a common foundation of knowledge.
But holding the certificate does not necessarily mean possessing professional competence. A person may know the commands in a spreadsheet yet be unable to design a useful model; may know SQL syntax yet be unable to analyse a real database; may have passed a test yet struggle with a new problem.
It is useful to distinguish at least three levels: knowing, being able to do and having done. Knowing concerns theoretical knowledge. Being able to do concerns the capacity to apply it. Having done concerns concrete, documentable experience gained by confronting real problems. A sound professional assessment should try to observe all three.
Experience that does not fit in a box
I worked in computing for many years and encountered situations where competence emerged in ways that a qualification could not represent. In 1986, for example, I had to complete a final acceptance test by working on software I had not developed myself. The project was worth about two billion lire.
In such a situation, remembering a fact is not enough. You must quickly understand a system built by others, identify where something is going wrong, change the software without introducing new errors and take responsibility for a concrete result. This is a test of competence much closer to professional reality than many exams.
Yet when I later read the requirements for some competitive examinations, I realised that experiences like this could formally count for nothing. A publication had a box. A qualification had a box. A course had a box. A complex project completed under direct responsibility often had no box in which to fit.
This is one of the clearest limits of scoring systems: they tend to reward what is easy to quantify, not necessarily what matters most.
When a qualification becomes administrative currency
This mechanism inevitably creates incentives. If a certificate earns points in a ranking, many people will seek that certificate. If a course earns points, demand for that course will rise. If a publication earns points, the number of publications will grow.
There is nothing strange about that: people adapt rationally to a system's rules. But the system can then drift away from its original purpose. Instead of rewarding competence, it risks rewarding the ability to accumulate indicators of competence.
The problem is particularly apparent when paid courses offer worthwhile content and good study materials but their final examinations are perceived as a formality. In that case, the course may still be useful, but the certificate's ability to distinguish candidates diminishes: it no longer credibly separates those who truly studied and gained skills from those who merely completed the steps needed to obtain the qualification.
When a measure becomes a target, people learn to maximise the measure. And the measure risks ceasing to represent well what it was meant to measure.
The paradox of objectivity
Why, then, do we rely so heavily on qualifications, certificates and points? Because they are easy to check. A certificate either exists or it does not. A course has a set number of hours. A degree has a date. A publication has a reference. A selection committee can quickly check all of these and defend its decision if challenged.
Evaluating experience is much harder. How much is solving a critical problem worth? How do we compare two different projects? How do we prevent a candidate's account from becoming self-promotion? How do we ensure that a committee does not favour someone through subjective judgements?
These objections are serious. But there is a paradox: in trying to eliminate subjectivity, we may also eliminate part of reality. We replace an assessment that is difficult but meaningful with a measurement that is simple but incomplete.
It is like looking for our keys under a streetlamp, not because we know we lost them there, but because the light is better.
The portfolio: documenting competence instead of merely claiming it
One possible way forward is to place a real portfolio of skills alongside formal qualifications. Not a generic résumé full of phrases such as “responsible for,” “involved in” or “worked with,” but a structured collection of verifiable experience. This is where the reasoning behind this essay leads: if a system cannot recognise what a person has actually done, adding another certificate to its scoring grid is not enough; we must change how competence is documented.
For every significant experience, the portfolio could state the project, its context, the problem faced, the person's own role, the actions they actually carried out, the outcome and the available evidence. Where possible, that evidence should be validated by someone who observed the work: a manager, supervisor, client or technical lead. Not a vague letter of praise, but concrete confirmation that a particular activity was performed and a particular competence was demonstrated.
This would change the question. Not just, “What qualifications do you hold?” but also, “What have you done? What problem did you solve? What result can you document?”
Learning on the job
A particularly interesting model can be found in professional training where competence is observed as it is demonstrated. In British medical training, for example, the portfolio accompanies the trainee doctor and records activities, procedures, assessments and skills acquired over time; the supervisor confirms what has actually been observed. The principle is very different from simply collecting certificates.
The logic is reversed: not only “Did you attend the course?” but, above all, “Have you shown that you can do this?” The course remains important, but it is a tool for learning; competence appears when that knowledge is used in a real situation and someone qualified can confirm that it was applied.
In computing, we could ask to see a database designed, a procedure optimised, a system recovered or a problem diagnosed. In schools, we could observe the planning of a lesson, the thoughtful use of a tool or the ability to assess students' learning. In an administrative office, the task might be managing a complex case. In a technical laboratory, it might be diagnosing a fault.
Authentic tasks, not just multiple-choice tests
Examinations, too, could be reconsidered. Multiple-choice tests are useful for checking a great deal of knowledge quickly and offer a degree of consistency in marking. But they cannot be the only tool when what matters is the ability to act in a real situation.
An authentic task places someone before a problem like those they will actually meet. It does not simply ask them to choose the correct answer from four options: it asks them to construct a response, explain it, check it and correct it if necessary.
This is certainly harder to assess. But if the work is complex, perhaps it is inevitable that assessing someone's ability to do it will also involve some complexity.
A proposal: qualifications, practical tests and a validated portfolio
I am not proposing that we abolish certifications, qualifications or procedures. That would be the opposite error, and just as serious. We need common standards, documents, checks and verifiable criteria. But alongside them there should be room for structured professional evidence: a portfolio describing projects completed, roles held, problems faced, solutions adopted and results achieved.
A selection system could therefore combine four elements: qualifications and training; practical or authentic tests; a portfolio of documented experience; and validation by supervisors or managers able to confirm the work actually done. Experience would thus be neither a mere self-declaration nor something erased because it does not fit a predefined box.
Likewise, a quality procedure should be judged partly by its effects. A DVR should matter not because it physically exists in a binder, but because it has led the organisation to understand its risks and really reduce them.
From the “mouse paper” to a culture of evidence
A child's joke can thus become a small lesson about assessment. “They didn't find mice; the paper saying there are no mice is missing” humorously describes a temptation common in modern organisations: confusing what is documented with what is true.
The answer is not to eliminate paperwork. It is to ensure that paperwork keeps pointing towards reality. Every document should have a concrete question behind it: what risk have we reduced? What mistake have we prevented? What competence have we actually observed? What outcome can we show?
When we cannot answer, the document risks becoming a ritual. When the answer is clear, the document regains its purpose: it makes something real visible, checkable and transferable.
Conclusion: do not abolish the paper; reconnect it with reality
Modern societies need certifications because they need trust. We cannot personally know every professional, company, school or organisation we deal with. We therefore need documents, standards and attestations. The problem is not the paper itself; it is the moment the paper ceases to be a trace of reality and claims to replace it.
The conclusion is less radical, but more demanding: we should not choose between qualifications and experience, procedures and common sense, certification and concrete work. We should build systems in which documents continually point back to real evidence. A qualification should say what was learned; certification should rest on a serious assessment; a portfolio should show what was done; a supervisor should be able to confirm what they actually observed.
That is why, in competitive examinations and selection processes, the question “What qualifications do you hold?” should be joined by another: “What problems have you faced, what role did you play, what did you accomplish, and who can confirm it?” That would help recover precisely those experiences that risk counting for nothing today simply because the scoring grid has no ready-made box for them.
In the end, I return to that child's phrase. They had not found mice; the paper saying there were none was missing. It is a joke, but it contains a serious criterion for judging every quality system and every assessment system: paperwork is useful only if it helps us look more closely at reality. Before checking that the paper is in order, we should keep asking whether, behind the paper, there really are mice.
What I Would Like to Leave My Children
To the three of you, I would like to leave an attentiveness to the reality behind every certificate. Study, gain the qualifications you need and respect the rules that protect people. But always ask yourselves what you have truly learned, what problem you can tackle and what facts can support your words.
Do not be embarrassed to document your work: good evidence lets others recognise it. And do not be satisfied with tidy paperwork when the real situation still needs attention. The best document does not conceal a risk; it helps us see it and reduce it.
I hope you will not be judged only by the box you can fill in, and that you will not judge others that way. Keep the curiosity of the child who asked a simple, perceptive question. Behind every certificate, score and promise, always look for the people and the facts.
Papy