The situation
IUSCA wanted a framework to describe how practitioners progress. One leaders could use to identify decision-making quality across their teams. One practitioners could use to understand where they are and where they're heading.
The problem with existing frameworks was familiar. Progression tended to be pinned to things that were easy to measure. Years in the role. Titles. Qualifications stacked up over time. But the people who make the best decisions don't always have forty years on the clock or the most senior title in the room. Some of the sharpest decision-making comes from people earlier in their careers. And some people with impressive CVs make brittle calls under pressure.
If progression is real, it has to be describable in terms of something other than time served.
The work
I designed and ran the process end to end. Phase one was a survey I built and took out to coaches and practitioners across levels. Nineteen contributors invited, twelve completed. Phase two was translating what came back into a structured framework, then circulating it to a wider group of thirty contributors. Twelve responses came back, ten of them with substantive written feedback.
Between those phases, the real question took shape. If you strip out years and titles, what actually changes in how decisions get made across a career?
The answer the evidence kept pointing to was about how evidence itself gets used.
Early on, you anchor decisions in evidence because you don't have your own experience to anchor against. You lean on what the research says, what the protocol says, what the senior practitioner says. That isn't a weakness. It's how you should reason when your own track record isn't yet reliable.
Further along, you're still using evidence, but you're testing it against what you've seen. The question shifts from "what does the evidence say?" to "when does the evidence hold, and when doesn't it?"
At the far end, evidence isn't just informing your own decisions. It's a tool you use to shape the environment around you. The reasoning conditions for your team. The way problems get defined in the first place. The standards other people's decisions get held to.
That's the spine of the framework. Eight levels, seven domains, each defined by a qualitative shift in how decisions get made rather than how many years someone has been making them.
What changed
The framework is finished. Publication comes next.
When it ships, it gives two things at once.
For practitioners, it's a way to see where they are that doesn't depend on waiting for a title change. Someone five years into their career can recognise the shape of their own reasoning, see what the next shift looks like, and work towards it deliberately rather than assuming they have to put in another decade before anything qualitatively changes.
For leaders, it's a way to identify decision-making quality across teams without conflating it with seniority. That changes how development decisions get made. Who gets stretched. Where support gets directed. Which conversations are worth having. It also gives leaders a shared language for talking about reasoning quality without having to argue first principles every time.
The wider shift is quieter. For the first time, there's a structured way to say that progression is a change in how you think, not how long you've been thinking.