Claims someone else has to trust
The Evidence Framework
A design for assembling the supporting record as the work happens, and being honest about what is missing.
The situation it's designed for
A ratings analyst publishes a water-stress score for a portfolio of sites. Eight months later a client's counsel asks how the score for one site was reached. The answer exists — in a spreadsheet, an email thread, and the memory of someone who has since left.
Certifications, disclosures, compliance filings and risk scores all share this problem. The claim is the easy part. The record behind the claim is what gets tested, and it gets tested long after the person who made it moved on.
This framework assumes an outside reviewer gets the last word. The record is built while the work is being done, not reconstructed afterwards.
What it hands your team
- A design where every claim carries its own trail: what was observed, when, from what source, and what was inferred rather than measured.
- An explicit gap rule. Where the evidence is thin, the output says so instead of filling the space with a default value.
- A structure that survives the reviewer's question format, not just your internal one.
- A retention design, so the record still resolves after staff turnover and vendor changes.
What stays a human decision
- Signing the claim. A person's name goes on it, always.
- Deciding whether thin evidence is good enough for this particular filing.
- Any dispute with a reviewer, a client, or a regulator.
What it's not for
- Making a weak claim defensible. If the underlying observation is not there, this framework will make that visible, which is sometimes not what a team wants.
- Legal advice on what a given regime requires. We design the record; your counsel decides what it must contain.
- Situations where speed matters more than the trail. That is the Response Framework.