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From the point of decision to actually develop and validate a set of CAE principles, we knew that what we would be able to produce would only be preliminary. It will be through ongoing use and reflective, systematic assessment that we can learn about the extent to which the principles are effective and how they might be improved to make them more effective. Here is how we put it on previous occasions:

The principles would not be written in stone, but rather they would be the subject of continuous analysis and renewal through dialogue and systematic inquiry…. Moreover, we would propose that a set of working principles be subject to field testing and inquiry and that such inquiry should be, in and of itself, collaborative. (Cousins et al., 2013, p. 19)

Our sense is that the principles, when used as a set to guide and reflect on collaborative practice holds strong potential for enhancing the success of such evaluations, and we encourage ongoing, well-documented field trials to confirm this hunch…. It is our conviction that the principles require solid test driving opportunities, and they should be revised and perhaps reengineered sometime not too far down the road. (Shulha et al., 2016, p. 213)

To paraphrase what we said earlier in the chapter, the thing about laying out proposals favoring specific courses of action is that doing so comes with a certain amount of risk. That is to say, it is one thing to come up with direction for the field, but it is quite another to walk the talk. This book is our attempt to do just that; to make good on a commitment to test driving the principles in a range of contexts around the globe and to do so through the collaborative involvement of many of our evaluation colleagues. In this section, we describe our launch of the principles and our efforts to promote them as well as the global call for empirical field studies to test the principles in action.