Individual
The person repeats useful patterns and uses prompts, checks, and workflow steps on purpose, while still learning the limits.
Experimenting: useful patterns are beginning to repeat.
Promising prompts, checks, or workflow steps are becoming deliberate. Reliability still varies by context, person, or consequence, so the next task is to make the pattern testable and safer to reuse.
How Experimenting appears at each level
Team
The team has repeatable patterns in parts of the work, but quality still depends on who is involved and how the handoff occurs.
Organization
Some practices are repeatable, but adoption, controls, and reliability remain uneven across functions.
A successful example is not yet a reliable operating standard. Test the pattern across representative conditions.
Evidence to look for
Problem framing
Templates or checklists help translate recurring work into a clear task and outcome.
Grounding and evidence
Source boundaries, assumptions, and constraints are documented well enough to repeat the work.
Validation and judgment
Review is matched to consequence, with known failure modes and explicit human checks.
Workflow integration
The AI step fits a selected workflow rather than sitting beside the work as an optional trick.
Ownership and communication
Ownership, handoff context, disclosure, and escalation are visible to the people involved.
Learning and improvement
Corrections and near misses are captured so the pattern improves instead of merely being repeated.
Practical next move
- Document the pattern, inputs, checks, owner, and stop conditions.
- Test it across different examples, users, and consequence levels.
- Measure correction load and update the pattern where the evidence shows weakness.
Common failure mode
Treating one successful pilot as proof of reliability. Variation is the signal to investigate, not an inconvenience to hide.
Ready to move to Integrating when...
The pattern works across representative contexts, controls are documented, correction load is understood, and another person can use the workflow without reinventing it. Continue to Integrating, or take the assessment.
Use the AAOS stages to connect the pattern to repeatable grounding, validation, and ownership.