Accreditation & Credibility

Benchmark Six Sigma is an Accredited Training Provider of Exemplar Global (formerly RABQSA), a globally recognized certification body and part of the ASQ (American Society for Quality) family.

Exemplar Global accreditation ensures consistent standards, credible assessments, and global acceptance — validating capability without replacing it.

Duration & Format

Who It’s For / Entry Requirements

Managers, leaders, consultants and improvement professionals who own or materially influence real decisions — and the natural next craft for Lean Six Sigma belt alumni, whose process judgment becomes the raw material for direction.

The signal that this domain fits: you are accountable for choices made under incomplete evidence, competing options and stakeholder disagreement.

The Benchmark signature domain.

Basic digital fluency. No coding, no technical AI background, no prior AI experience.

Access to at least one suitable generative-AI tool — a free plan is often enough — and genuine work you are accountable for. Employed, consulting, freelance, entrepreneurial and nonprofit work all qualify; a fictional case study does not.

Before this domain begins you must have completed the free nine-question Diagnostic and passed the mandatory Foundation — a one-hour live online session at a scheduled time, normally one to two days before your first domain. Foundation carries a two-part assessment that must be passed before any capstone is accepted.

This domain is not a standalone entry point. If you have not yet earned CAIDA, your route in is Foundation plus two domains. Individual domains are available once you hold the credential or are already progressing toward it.

Unique Value Proposition

Every domain teaches the same eight Direction Abilities. What differs is how the work goes wrong.

Decision making fails in a specific way: criteria written after the choice — constructed to justify a decision already made. Its close relatives are causes accepted merely because AI generated them, options that are variants of one preferred answer with the status quo never seriously considered, a recommendation adopted without the accountable person examining the reasoning behind it, and a premortem run on a decision nobody was willing to change.

Learning to validate research does not teach you to notice when your own criteria were reverse-engineered. The ability is the same; the way of being wrong is not. That is why the credential requires two domains.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this domain you can:

• Establish who owns a decision, and keep that ownership human
• Decompose an ambiguous situation into questions evidence can answer
• Direct AI to generate cause hypotheses without letting it declare a cause
• Set criteria before scoring, and show that you did
• Examine trade-offs with explicit sensitivity to weights and assumptions
• Red-team a conclusion you are already attached to
• Produce a decision record with rationale, alternatives, risks, reversal conditions and a review date

Capstone: take a real problem or decision you own or materially influence from ambiguity to a defensible decision, experiment, recommendation, rejection or justified deferment — framing, evidence, alternatives, criteria and adversarial challenge all visible, considered by the decision owner, and captured as a reusable Skill. Assessed on all eight Direction Abilities against a four-level scale; every ability must reach at least Demonstrated.

Reusable Skills you may build: Problem Framing Canvas · Root Cause Explorer · Options and Trade-off Evaluator · Premortem and Scenario Challenger · Decision Record and Review.

Topics Covered

1. Define the problem or decision and its ownership
2. Frame and decompose the situation
3. Explore and test cause hypotheses
4. Generate options and establish criteria
5. Evaluate trade-offs under uncertainty
6. Challenge the emerging conclusion
7. Decide, document, act and learn

You separate symptoms from problems and facts from assumptions, and identify who actually owns the decision. AI supports the work; it never becomes the accountable decision-maker. You generate and organise cause hypotheses with supporting and contradicting evidence rather than asking AI to pronounce a root cause.

Then you widen the option set, set evaluation criteria before scoring, and examine trade-offs with sensitivity to weights, assumptions and the value of gathering more information. You red-team your own emerging conclusion — premortems, failure scenarios, disconfirming evidence, the sceptical stakeholder’s challenge — and produce a decision record that survives scrutiny, judging decision quality separately from outcome luck.

Target Audience (Professional Roles, Experience Level)

Prerequisites (Required/Recommended Knowledge)

Recommended Prior Courses (if applicable)

Interactive Components (Practice projects, Case studies, Quizzes)

Support Services (Forums, Technical Support, Post-training guidance)

Certification Earned

This domain does not issue a certificate of its own. There are no module badges and no sub-certificates.

A demonstrated capstone here is added to your Certificate in AI Direction and Application under the same permanent credential ID, with earlier achievements intact, and appears on your public verification record as a demonstrated domain. Demonstrating all six adds the CAIDA Complete – All Six Domains Demonstrated distinction.

If you have not yet earned CAIDA, this domain counts as one of the two required for the credential.

Value to Employers (Efficiency, Cost Reduction, Quality Improvement)

Career Goals (Roles you can aim for post-certification)

Bundled Programs (Packages or pathways that include this course)

Certificate in AI Direction and Application (CAIDA) — Foundation plus two domains, accredited by Exemplar Global, part of the ASQ family. Start with the free nine-question Diagnostic, which recommends the two or three domains where directed AI is most likely to give you leverage first.

Further domains are added to the same credential at a fee that depends on how many you have already demonstrated. Contact us for your price.

Suggested Sequence

Return on Investment (Salary increase potential, Recognition)

Capacity Limits

Limited to 20 participants per domain batch. Every capstone is pre-evaluated offline by your trainer before Week 4 and confirmed in a mandatory live viva, with deeper examination scheduled into overflow slots rather than compressed into the session.

Batch dates follow the published CAIDA calendar. Domains in high demand normally begin on the first weekend of each month; the rest follow a rotating schedule with at least one planned batch opportunity each quarter. Contact us for the next available date in this domain.

PDUs