PGI Essentials
Not everything requires a cohort.
Six short self-paced programs, each built around a single question a leader is likely to face this quarter. Ninety minutes to two hours, taken alone or worked through by a team.
What an Essential Is
One question, worked properly.
Each Essential opens with the situation a leader is actually in, works through what is known, what is contested and what is a matter of organizational choice, then closes with the questions to put to a team and a short piece of work to do with them.
There is no quiz and no certificate. What you leave with is a position you can defend and the material to take into a meeting.
- Length
- 90 minutes to two hours, taken in one sitting or across a week
- Format
- Self-paced, online, with a short workbook and a set of team questions
- Who it suits
- Executives, directors, managers and governance professionals
- What it is not
- Not a credential, not a compliance course, not a video library
- Access
- Twelve months from purchase, including updates
The Six
Each one answers a question someone is already being asked.
They follow the same six areas the Institute works across, so an Essential, a QuickCheck and a research brief on the same subject speak to each other.
Essentials · E01
Responsible AI Essentials
Technology can accelerate work. Responsibility cannot be automated.
What a leader needs to understand about these systems in order to govern them — not how they work internally, but what they change about who decides, what gets recorded, and who answers for the outcome.
- Where AI meets a decision about a person
- The oversight that has to exist around it
- What to require before adoption
≈ 2 hours
Essentials · E02
Responsible AI Procurement Essentials
A purchasing decision quietly becomes a governance decision.
Most organizations meet AI through a vendor. This works through the questions to put before signing, how to read the answers, and which contract terms determine what governance is available to you afterwards.
- The vendor questions that matter
- Reading a claim against evidence
- Accountability and data terms
≈ 90 minutes
Essentials · E03
Documentation & Defensible Practice Essentials
More documentation does not necessarily mean better accountability.
What makes a record defensible, what makes it merely long, and how to reduce documentation load without losing the reasoning that protects a client, a worker and an organization under review.
- What a defensible record contains
- Reasoning versus recording
- Reducing load safely
≈ 90 minutes
Essentials · E04
Human Oversight Essentials
A person in the loop is not the same as a person able to say no.
How to design review that is real: where a human decision point genuinely belongs, what the reviewer must be able to see, and how much time oversight actually takes when the volume is honest.
- Designing meaningful review points
- What a reviewer needs to see
- Resourcing oversight realistically
≈ 90 minutes
Essentials · E05
Public Trust & Transparency Essentials
Public trust is built slowly and tested quickly.
What an organization should be able to explain about itself before anyone asks — to a client, a funder, a regulator or a journalist — and how to write a position you would still stand behind in a difficult week.
- What to publish, and when
- Telling people a system was involved
- Answering under scrutiny
≈ 90 minutes
Essentials · E06
Workforce Risk Essentials
Workforce wellbeing matters. So does accountability.
How to read load, turnover and psychological safety as organizational risk rather than an HR concern, and how to protect people without quietly lowering the standard the service is held to.
- Load and turnover as risk signals
- Psychological safety and standards
- Where leadership responsibility sits
≈ 90 minutes
Taking One
Alone, or with the people you work with.
One person
Individual
A single Essential, taken at your own pace, with twelve months of access including any updates we publish.
$295
CAD per Essential
Register InterestA leadership team
Team licence
The same material for a management team, board or department, with a short facilitation guide for working through it together.
From $2,500
CAD · scoped to the group
Discuss a Team LicenceAcross an organization
Included with Institutional Membership
Institutional members hold access to the full set across the organization, alongside the rest of the year-round programme.
Included
With Institutional Membership
See MembershipChoosing Between Them
Knowledge closes some gaps. Judgement closes the rest.
If you know what you need to learn, an Essential is faster and cheaper. If the difficulty is that reasonable people in your organization disagree about what the right answer is, that is not a knowledge problem and no self-paced program will resolve it.
Before
PGI Assess
Alongside
PGI Tools
When it is judgement
The Academy
Free to read