Bar Raiser
Summary: An AWS-inspired hiring concept — a voice from outside the immediate team empowered to ask “will this make us better?” — extended into AI governance as a voice empowered to ask “yes, we can do this, but should we?”
Sources: LinkedIn Posts.md (“Bar Raiser,” posted 2025-10-21, authored by Paul)
Last updated: 2026-07-07
Early in his career, Paul kept hearing the cliché “people are our most important asset” — and spent a large part of his leadership journey proving it out through hiring, developing, and retaining people with diverse backgrounds who were willing to challenge assumptions (source: LinkedIn Posts.md).
On a visit to AWS, he was introduced to their Bar Raiser concept: every hiring decision includes someone from outside the immediate organization, empowered to ask one question — will hiring this person make us better? Will they raise the bar for all of us? Paul adopted a version of this in his own organization, with results that changed not just who was hired but how the team thought about its own culture (source: LinkedIn Posts.md).
Extending Bar Raiser to AI governance
As AI gained momentum, Paul saw a parallel principle take shape around governance — the constant balancing act between speed and safety, with “safety through design, not supervision” as the mantra. Karmela Malone and Lori Walters are credited with the evolution of applying the Bar Raiser idea to AI governance specifically: a person empowered — yet removed enough from the build — to ask a different question: yes, we can do this, but should we? (source: LinkedIn Posts.md)
Paul frames governance explicitly as not a brake pedal but a navigation system — it ensures what gets deployed is appropriate, safe, and enduring, and forces teams to think ahead to how models will behave, learn, and evolve outside the lab. Building responsible AI isn’t rules applied after the fact; it’s embedding curiosity, challenge, and accountability into the process from ideation through deployment and ongoing trust maintenance (source: LinkedIn Posts.md).
This is a specific, named-role elaboration of the same instinct behind team-yes and safe-enablement — bringing an outside, empowered voice in before a decision is made, rather than auditing it after.