"Validated" is one of the most misused words in leadership content online - applied to quizzes that have never been tested against anything. MBA Lab's leadership self-assessments are original, built from public research and behavior-based, situational-judgment items rather than copied or adapted from any licensed instrument. At launch, they are explicitly not validated, and every assessment says so directly rather than implying more rigor than actually exists. This page is the public roadmap for what would actually need to happen to change that.
What "validated" actually requires
A psychological instrument being "validated" isn't a single event - it's a body of evidence built up in stages, and skipping stages is exactly how quizzes end up publicly labeled "scientifically backed" when they aren't:
1. Expert review. Specialists in leadership assessment and psychometrics review the item content for construct clarity, bias, and whether items actually measure what they claim to.
2. Cognitive testing. Real people work through draft items while explaining their reasoning out loud, surfacing items that are ambiguous, leading, or interpreted differently than intended - problems that expert review alone often misses.
3. Piloting. A structured pilot with a real, sufficiently large and varied sample, checking response patterns, completion behavior, and whether the results distribution looks meaningful rather than arbitrary.
4. Reliability analysis. Statistical testing of internal consistency (do the items grouped as one construct actually behave as one construct?) and test-retest stability (does someone get a similar result if nothing about their behavior actually changed?).
5. Comparison with observed behavior or multi-rater data. The most demanding stage: checking whether self-reported results actually correspond to how other people - peers, direct reports, managers - would independently describe the same person's behavior. Self-report alone, no matter how reliable internally, doesn't establish that an assessment measures real-world behavior.
6. Versioned methodology, published openly. Once (and only once) an assessment has real evidence behind it, that evidence - sample sizes, reliability statistics, what the validation did and didn't test - gets published alongside the tool itself, not asserted without support.
Where MBA Lab's assessments stand today
Launch-stage assessments on this site have completed none of these formally. They're built with care - reverse-keyed items and situational-judgment framing specifically to resist obvious gaming, scoring logic that's been checked for internal consistency by the people who built it - but "checked by the builder" is not a substitute for stages 1 through 5 above, and MBA Lab doesn't present it as one.
What this means practically
Every assessment on this site is labeled as educational and developmental - useful for prompting reflection, noticing a pattern, or opening a conversation - and explicitly not as a diagnostic tool, not for personnel decisions, and not as a validated measure of anything. That labeling isn't boilerplate legal language; it's the accurate description of what an assessment can responsibly claim to offer before this roadmap's stages have actually been run.
What's next
Validation work of this kind requires a real sample, statistical analysis, and time - it isn't something a single team completes by asserting it. As each stage above is completed for a given assessment, this page (and the assessment's own methodology section) will be updated with what was actually done, including any results that complicate the tool rather than flatter it. If that never happens for a given tool, the tool keeps its "educational, unvalidated" label indefinitely - that's the honest default, not a temporary placeholder.