CSI Governance and Loss of Membership Trust

 

[NOTE: I sent this letter Monday, June 22, 2026, to each of the CSI Board Members prior to the start of the 2027 Fiscal Year. It's the synthesis of four months of online discussions, conversations, and correspondences with CSI members, sponsors, and customers. If you've found your way here, you are probably aware of what's going on at the Construction Specifications Institute in the first half of 2026.]

CSI Governance and Loss of Membership Trust

[Board Member],

I am contacting you before the first board meeting of CSI’s new fiscal year because I believe the incoming board faces an urgent governance question that cannot be deferred. Over the past several months, CSI has suffered a manifest and pervasive erosion of member trust, organizational reputation, and confidence in executive leadership. While the spark that ignited the current controversy concerned MasterFormat 2026, Dynamic Standards, and The Construction Standard, the deeper issue is neither a botched product rollout nor a questionable licensing strategy, but rather whether CSI’s governance system is functioning as intended.

In a member-based nonprofit organization, the members are the moral owners of the organization. The board derives its authority from membership and governs on membership’s behalf. Under Carver Policy Governance, the board’s duty is to maintain a trustworthy linkage with the membership, to understand member values and expectations, to establish organizational ends, to delegate operational authority to the CEO, and then to assure that executive performance remains consistent with those ends and with board policy. The CEO is accountable to the board; the board is accountable to the members.

That relationship is essential to understanding our present crisis. When members express widespread surprise, confusion, anger, distrust, and disillusionment over a major strategic initiative, those reactions may be indications of dysfunctional executive management, a situation that the board has a duty to examine. A board faithful to Policy Governance cannot treat sustained member distrust as merely a communications problem or resistance to modernization. It must ask whether such wide-spread deterioration of confidence reveals a failure in ownership linkage, executive oversight, strategic judgment, monitoring, or accountability.

Concerns raised by members are serious and specific. Members have questioned whether executive leadership adequately informed them of CSI’s strategy for transforming MasterFormat; whether stakeholder sentiment and market demand were properly assessed; whether risks were realistically evaluated; whether the licensing and commercialization model misunderstood MasterFormat’s role as shared industry infrastructure; and whether CSI’s expenditures on Crosswalk, Dynamic Standards, and CIN have been justified by measurable return and prudent stewardship.

Public discussion has moved beyond internal disagreement. CSI’s handling of Dynamic Standards and MasterFormat 2026 is being vigorously debated on LinkedIn, 4specs, CSI forums, chapter discussions, and trade media. Some comments are undoubtedly sharper than many of us prefer, but the board cannot ignore the underlying pattern. Members and longtime contributors feel ignored, surprised, or betrayed by an organization to which many have given years of volunteer service and professional loyalty.

For these reasons, I respectfully urge the board to begin the new fiscal year with an honest, transparent, and comprehensive inquiry into the decisions, assumptions, expenditures, communications, and governance processes that led to the present controversy. This review cannot be a reflexive validation of management decisions already made; it must a genuine board-level inquiry into whether executive leadership remains capable of rebuilding trust, unifying the membership, and leading CSI through the transitions now underway.

If the board concludes that the current CEO can still successfully lead CSI forward, then membership deserves a clear explanation of the review, evidence, and reasoning supporting that conclusion. If the board concludes otherwise, then it has a fiduciary duty to correct the deficiency. Either way, the board must be transparent and communicative with the membership to whom they are accountable. Silence, defensiveness, or continued non-responsiveness is not consistent with Policy Governance principles. Continued stonewalling will not heal the organization.

As a member of CSI and one of the owners whom the board serves, I want to understand your thoughts regarding the concerns I expressed in this letter. Do you believe my concerns have merit and do you intend to support a meaningful board review of these serious governance, communication, and accountability issues? If not, what is your opinion? I would be pleased to discuss these issues further with you directly at your convenience, by phone or email.

This is not simply about the sale of software. It is about whether CSI can and will remain a member-centered professional institute whose board understands that its authority flows from the membership and whose accountability flows back to that membership. I urge you, as a director, to treat the membership’s current loss of confidence in executive management as a critical governance matter requiring immediate and decisive board action. 

Respectfully,

George Everding FCSI, CCS, CCCA, AIA, SCIP
Greater Saint Louis Chapter

george.everding@outlook.com
314-517-7800