Why I built SDAF
One question that arises when people encounter the scale of SDAF is whether Artificial Intelligence contributed to its development.
The short answer is yes. But that is only a small part of the story.
The more interesting question is:
Why did SDAF need to exist in the first place?
The answer starts long before AI entered the picture.
A question that would not go away
Throughout more than two decades in technology and architecture, I kept observing the same pattern.
Important decisions were being made by intelligent, experienced people using the best information available to them. Yet many of the consequences of those decisions only became visible later.
What puzzled me was not that organisations cared too little about sustainability. It was that sustainability often entered the conversation after the most important decisions had already been made.
By the time impacts were measured, reported and discussed, many of those impacts had already become unavoidable.
That question stayed with me for years.
The problem was not reporting
My initial assumption was that organisations needed better sustainability reporting. The more I explored the issue, the less convinced I became.
Reporting is important. But reporting mostly tells us what has already happened.
What interested me was something different:
How can sustainability become visible before decisions are made?
That question gradually shifted my thinking away from reporting and towards decision-making, governance, evidence, assumptions and accountability.
Eventually, that journey became SDAF.
A framework emerges
SDAF was never intended to be “another sustainability framework”. It emerged as an attempt to answer a connected series of questions:
- What consequences remain invisible during decision-making?
- How do we evaluate evidence quality?
- How do we make assumptions visible?
- How do we separate confidence from impact?
- How do we improve decisions before they become commitments?
Each question led to another. Many of the concepts now found within SDAF began as observations, frustrations or conversations rather than predefined requirements.
Exploration, not substitution
The role of AI
- provide the questions;
- define the problem;
- decide what mattered;
- replace professional judgement.
- challenge assumptions;
- explore alternative perspectives;
- test and refine ideas;
- improve clarity;
- connect patterns across domains.
In many ways, AI became a thinking partner: not a replacement for expertise or judgement, but an accelerator for exploration.
Accountability remains human. AI supported exploration, challenge, drafting and refinement. The framework’s purpose, principles, methodological choices and final content remain my responsibility.
What was human
When people look at SDAF, the visible output is the framework. What they do not always see are the experiences behind it.
The governance concepts came from years of architecture and review work. The lifecycle thinking came from observing how decisions create consequences over time. The emphasis on evidence, traceability and assurance emerged from a recurring frustration that recommendations often outlive the assumptions that created them.
The principle of:
Sustainability Visibility Over Sustainability Priority
did not come from a prompt. It emerged from noticing that many successful sustainability outcomes were achieved through decisions driven by cost reduction, simplification, resilience and operational efficiency.
The patterns existed before SDAF. SDAF simply made them visible.
What I learned
One of the biggest surprises of this journey was realising that the framework itself was not the most important outcome.
The most important outcome was learning to ask better questions:
- What are we not seeing?
- Which assumptions are influencing this decision?
- What evidence supports this recommendation?
- What consequences remain invisible?
- How will we explain this decision three years from now?
Those questions continue to shape how I think about architecture, governance, sustainability and decision-making.
An open invitation
Look beyond the artefacts
If you explore SDAF, I encourage you to look beyond the framework itself. The models, methods, publications and tools are artefacts. The real story is the journey that produced them.
That journey began with a simple observation:
Many of the most important consequences of our decisions are invisible at the moment those decisions are made.
Everything else followed from there.