Individual
The person helps others adopt the method, sets local standards, and improves the workflow for a group.
Leading: the practice is strong enough to teach and spread.
The method is no longer held by a small number of experienced users. People can teach the workflow, set local standards, and absorb normal variation without losing quality or control.
How Leading appears at each level
Team
The team can teach the method, define what good looks like, and absorb normal variation without losing quality.
Organization
The organization can standardize, train, and coordinate across functions while retaining governance and control.
Leadership is demonstrated by transfer. A strong local practice must survive a new person, context, or team using it.
Evidence to look for
Problem framing
People share a common way to frame work while allowing domain experts to name important differences.
Grounding and evidence
Standards identify acceptable sources, evidence quality, assumptions, and limits across contexts.
Validation and judgment
Review adapts to consequence, with escalation and stop conditions understood by those doing the work.
Workflow integration
Patterns transfer across people or teams without requiring the original champion to be present.
Ownership and communication
Roles, accountability, disclosure, and escalation remain clear as the practice spreads.
Learning and improvement
Teaching, metrics, corrections, and near misses feed a shared improvement cycle.
Practical next move
- Make the operating pattern teachable with examples, boundaries, and review artifacts.
- Transfer it to a different person, team, or function and observe where quality changes.
- Strengthen support, escalation, and measurement before increasing the scale of adoption.
Common failure mode
Using the language of scale before the organization has the support and control capacity to carry it. Transfer must preserve evidence and judgment, not just replicate prompts.
Ready to sustain Augmenting when...
A transferred practice retains quality, ownership, evidence, and safe stop conditions across changing contexts. Continue to Augmenting, or take the assessment.
Use the AAOS stages to teach the complete operating method rather than a single tool or prompt.