Four commitments. One core
NPM is not a checklist. It is an architecture: four structural commitments that stack into a single governance core, and nothing crosses a layer it has not earned.
Nothing passes into L2 that has not passed L1. Nothing is measured in L3 that is not anchored in L2. Nothing in L0 is a metric; it is a criterion.
A teleological criterion
Net Positive
Polman, P. and Winston, A.S. (2021) Net positive: how courageous companies thrive by giving more than they take. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press., from Polman and Winston: the organization commits to giving back more than it takes, to every stakeholder, at every scale. Used as a filter for what counts as material. Not a goal. A criterion.
Criterion, not metric
A criterion tells you whether a candidate belongs in the core. A metric tells you how well it performs once inside. NPM uses Net Positive only as the former.
Every stakeholder, every scale
Employees, suppliers, communities, customers, future generations, the planet. Each impact surface carries an evidence requirement and anchors indicators in the metric registry.
Conjunctive, on purpose
A candidate passes only when it improves the economic position of the business while reducing or correcting harm to the wider system. That separates NPM from shareholder-value reasoning and from ESG rhetoric alike.
A logical gate
Five ethical invariants, drawn from Ellul's ethics of self-limitationEllul, J. (2021) The technological society. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. and Jonas's ethics of responsibilityJonas, H. (1984) The imperative of responsibility: in search of an ethics for the technological age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.. Any candidate control, policy, metric or model must clear all five at once. Not aspirations. Checks.
Domain-driven governance
Governance is modeled where harm or value lands, not where reporting lines run. Bounded contextsEvans, E. (2004) Domain-driven design: tackling complexity in the heart of software. Boston: Addison-Wesley. are organized around stakeholder impact surfaces, never around the org chart.
Governance follows impact
A single domain may span several departments, and one department may serve several domains. The org chart records reporting lines. It says nothing about consequence lines.
Discovered, not deduced
Event StormingBrandolini, A. (2025) Introducing EventStorming. Leanpub. workshops surface the real events, commands and policies from the people who do the work. A map of what the organization actually does, not a reference-model projection.
A single source of truth
The Business Grid carries controls, risks and obligations on one map. Without it, every domain builds its own partial picture, and none of them shows the full impact surface.
Causal, drift-aware analytics
An analytical pipeline implementing the DCCA loop, under Pearl's structural causal modelsPearl, J. (2013) Causality: models, reasoning, and inference. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. and Gama's concept-drift adaptationGama, J., Žliobaitė, I., Bifet, A., Pechenizkiy, M. and Bouchachia, A. (2014) 'A survey on concept drift adaptation', ACM Computing Surveys, 46(4), pp. 1–37.. When the world moves, the model moves. Auditably.
Correlational, then causal
Every dashboard claim is labeled. Correlational signals come first; causal claims require structural equations, difference-in-differences per control, and eventually a Bayesian network.
Three weight layers
Base weights are policy, set by the governance council. Domain weights adapt from observed data, smoothed every cycle. Effective weights are derived from both, and auditors can inspect all three.
Drift has published bands
Stability is measured against a fixed baseline with thresholds set in advance: stable below 0.10, flagged to 0.25, forced recalibration above. Every recalibration leaves an append-only record.
"An organization compliant with NPM is compliant with each of the underlying standards as a byproduct."