You memories are not perfect, but the interpreter can help to fill in details which are plausible.  Evidence of this is seen from how people who have suffered trauma that eliminates some of their real memories, will confabulate things to fill in the gaps, in a way to make a consistent narrative.  We do this all the time, and if you memories are complete enough, and your understanding of the context good enough, this confabulation works in your favor.

This tendency to create a plausible narrative effects process design in two ways.  The first is that when people are interviewed about a given process they have been taking part of, the interpreter part of the brain will make up things to fill in the gaps in the process story that they might not have been aware of.  Indeed, while working in the process, people will have a narrative of how the process proceeds outside of their direct interaction that may be completely inaccurate.  That narrative, however, help to support their own part of it.  Memory works by having a consistent story, not necessarily an accurate story.  They may hold false beliefs about a process, but as long as they do their part correctly there is no harm.  It may be hard, however, for a process researcher to distinguish the parts that they actually know, from the parts that they filled in to make a consistent narrative.

The second reason it gets in the way is that when the process changes, the narrative can change along with it, and in doing so the original process is forgotten.  Organizations are constantly changing around us, but as we learn of a change we incorporate it into our narratives, and forget that there was a change.  Because the memory has a filled in narrative, it is hard for people to remember the exceptional cases.  People will often insist that they have been running a process the same way every time, until you remind them of a particular exception they handled.  Then the remark is usually “oh yes, that did happen.”

I have written about “Process Confabulation” before as a danger inherent interviewing people to find out the existing process.  I found Michael Gazzaniga’s video interesting because it explains how this is caused by a basic element in the way memory works.

Official Title: The First International Workshop on Adaptive Case Management and other non-workflow approaches to BPM (ACM 2012) in conjunction with BPM 2012

Goal: While practitioners are trying to overcome the restrictions of workflow thinking, the research on the topic is somewhat lagging. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss theoretical and practical problems and solutions in the area of non-workflow based approaches to BPM in general, and ACM (as a leading movement) in particular. This workshop is aimed to promote new, non-traditional ways of modelling and controlling business processes, the ones that suit better the dynamic environment in which contemporary enterprises and public organizations function.

Important Dates:

• Submission deadline: 1 June 2012
• Notification due 2 July 2012
• Camera-ready submission deadline: 30 July 2012
• Workshop: 3 September 2012

Submissions Categories:

• Position papers raising relevant questions in the workshop area, identifying problems and providing a glimpse of solution for a given problem. Representing a basis for discussion, a position paper does not necessarily need to include solutions to its stated problems. Position papers must not exceed 4 pages.
• Idea papers exploring the history, successes, and challenges for various non-workflow approaches to BPM and outlining research roadmaps for the future. Contrary to short position papers, idea papers should provide the in-depth analysis of a problem, review its existing solutions, demonstrate insufficiency of these solutions and suggest new (yet unevaluated but well argued) solutions. Idea papers must not exceed 12 pages.
• Experience reports presenting challenges encountered in practice, their related case studies, success and failure stories. An experience report should clearly describe the working context, and focus on the problem and on the lessons learned. Experience reports should be complete and allow for rigorous testing of research theories methods and tools. Experience reports must be limited to 5-12 pages.
• Research papers reporting original results in the area addressed by the workshop. A research paper should clearly describe the problem tackled, explore the relevant state of the art, describe the proposed solution and provide a preliminary validation of this solution. Research papers must not exceed 12 pages.

The real motivation for holding a workshop came from Irina Rychkova of the University Paris and Ilia Bider of Ibisoft in Stockholm who both got me involved as well.  Those who know me well may find it ironic that first academic workshop is being held in conjunction with the academic BPM conference.  Indeed, I criticized the BPM 2010 conference for its complete lack of case management topics.  While many proponents of BPM seem entrenched in Taylorist ideas that behind every job is a simple fixed process, there are many others who are searching simply for ways to make workers more efficient, regardless of whether the process can be predicted or not.  The forming of this workshop is evidence of that, and association with the well respected BPM conference series, it is likely that this workshop will include many well considered rigorous papers on Adaptive Case Management research.

I have been to Tallinn only once before, when I took the ferry across the Baltic from Helsinki where I was working on the TeamWARE Flow product in the early 1990′s.   That visit was marvelous, and I can only expect that Estonia much have changed remarkably in the long time since it has been out from under the shadow of the Soviet Union.  I am looking forward to it.

This is the third of three ACM events already planned for 2012, the other two are the ACM Awards, and the ACM Live Virtual Event in June.

I don’t yet see the detailed agenda yet of the event — that announcement is still yet to come.  It is not my intention to scoop the announcement, but what I do know is that that we are planning to announce the winners of the 2012 International ACM Awards at this event.

Last year’s event featured one-on-one interviews with many top speakers on Adaptive Case Management as well as a keynotes by Jim Champy and Tom K himself.   Also, we announced the winners of the 2011 ACM Awards there as well.  Because the entire two day event is virtual, it is easy to attend from anywhere. And all the talks and presentations were video recorded and so they can still be viewed now, on demand.  I felt the event was well organized and represented a solid way for people to become much more knowledgeable about Adaptive Case Management.

I will update this entry when I have more specifics about this event.

Last year the WfMC sponsored the ACM awards and it was a huge success.  From the submissions, the panel of world renown judges selected the best 10 examples of the use of case management.  These were then featured in the First ACM Virtual Summit, and then in September the case studies became available to everyone in the form of the first ACM case book called “Taming the Unpredictable.”  The feedback has been incredibly positive.  It is very vaulable to have a book that describes in detail how people have actually used case management techniques to accomplish business goals.

This year we want to make it bigger and better.

• We are going to spend more effort up front making sure that everyone knows about it, and attract a larger set of submissions, and hopefully select more finalists from that.
• The judging criteria will be more refined after what we learned last year.
• We already know to plan for the virtual summit which will encourage more people to participate.
• We have an example of a successful book which will attract interest in submissions.

This format, of accepting case studies, judging, selecting, then presenting, and publishing in a book is a accepted way to gather the best examples into a place for delivering to an audience.  It is clear to me that the more that the public knows about this approach, the better they will be able to make appropriate use of it.

Most of the information you need is at the Adaptive Case Management Awards site.  The schedule is as follows:

• Any time between now and Feb 28 register an intent by submitting an abstract.  There is no risk, and those who do this early will get some feedback and guidance on the abstract.
• Before March 15 officially register.
• Before April 20, submit the finished case study for judging.
• June 6, winners will be announced at the ACMLive Virtual Summit
• September, the associated book will be launched

Mark these dates on your calendar, you don’t want to miss out just because you missed the deadline.  I have a list of questions an answers below:

Must the case use a bona fide ACM product?  No.  ACM is an approach to supporting knowledge workers, not a type of product.  Many of the submissions last year were on custom home grown systems.  Some other cases were hosted on systems designed specifically for ACM, while still others were build on systems that had to be, shall we say, adapted into supporting case work.  Instead of looking at the system, you should ask the question of whether the case study is about supporting knowledge workers, and if so that would most likely be appropriate.

What really constitutes knowledge work?  A good reseource for this is my chapter from the 2010 BPM and Workflow Handbook on Business Intelligence which I link here for convenience (pdf):  Knowledge Work and Unpredictable Processes.  The publisher has made other books available to registrants at a discount.

What about Enterprise 2.0, or Social BPM Cases?  There is a big overlap between E20, social business, and enterprise social with adaptive case management.  See the judging criteria to evaluate whether your E20 case might qualify.  The case must show how knowledge workers are supported while getting work done.

How about Just Plain Case Management?  Be aware of the importance of adaptability.  Read my post on Understanding what “Adaptive” means.  For example, telephones clearly support knowledge workers, but they are not adaptive in any significant way.  Judges will be looking for some ability to mold the system to the individual knowledge worker over time.

Do you need more judges?  I am hoping to expand the pool of judges this year, and if you are have made a contribution to ACM discussions in the past year, please send a message to .

Stay tuned, I still have to cover the following posts:

• The ACM Live Virtual Summit in June 2012
• The 1st International Workshop on Adaptive Case Management (ACM 2012) in conjunction with BPM 2012 in September

Traditional Process Life Cycle

The traditional process life cycle for BPM has been set out in a very definite form.  We start by designing a process — maybe laying out the boxes on a flow diagram.  We interview people, and ask them what they think the process is. Or maybe we use a tool to allow business people to collaborate directly on describing the process.  Implementation then starts, and that can either be a model preserving strategy where the process diagram is interpreted directly, or it is somehow transformed to an executable form.  The completed application is tested in the standard manner, and finally deployed into actual production use.

After deploying, we can switch to a number of different tools to monitor and measure the success of the process, like process analytics, history, or even just simply asking the users where the process is working, and where it does not. We use that insight to improve the process, and after testing, the improved application is deployed to production.

This is not just the BPM life cycle; everyone in the IT department knows this is right and proper way to make an application or solution of any type.  BPM offers some special capabilities through more powerful tools, but the life cycle is the same.

Flipping the Life Cycle stands this Approach on its Head.

Step 1: deploy the system into production with real users.  There is no need to develop an application or a solution, they simply start using it.  The system itself is useful without any modification, the same way that telephone or email are useful without building an application.

Step 2: After it has been in use for a while, use process mining to see what the process has been.  Process mining gives you an aggregate picture across an organization of any size, picking out the most common processes, and the exceptions.   You have access to metrics telling you how long workers spent in any given step.  It can show you what percentage of the time the work proceeded done one path, or down another.  From this you understand how to improve the work of the organization.

Flipping the life cycle is an extension to the basic Adaptive Case Management (ACM) pattern.

Why Flip the Life Cycle?

Flipping the life cycle is a useful technique in a number of situations:

• The process is too vast to automate.  Consider a patient today interacting with a healthcare supplier.  There are literally thousands of reasons that a person might need to interact with a doctor today.  It is simply not possible to ask everyone to stop getting healthcare until we have had time to automate every possible interaction.  While parts of this interaction is being ever more automated, but  show must go on, and it will be a long long time before that job is complete.
• The work is too complex to automate.  You think that it is impossible for a process to be too complex?  You think that a programming language can handle any degree of complexity?  Tell that to someone who is negotiating the merger of two companies.  The complexity is great, and even the number of factors have not been enumerated.  Case managers are doing these job today, and they will not be automated any time soon.
• The work is too unpredictable.  Anyone who has followed my writings has seen plenty of examples of processes that are done only once, and then thrown away.  The board of directors that asks a company to shift the focus of a product line in a new direction, or to consolidate two different departments into one.  It simply is not economical to automate processes that are different every time.
• The work requires a person who has specific knowledge to that specific particular situation.  These are what Jacob Ukelson calls a knowledge process, and they do not have the same characteristics as routine business processes.

Flipping the process life cycle avoids the up-front expense and lock-in to a suboptimal path while at the same time gives you many of the advantages of being able to measure the process performance, and find ways to improve the work.

What Difference Does It Make?

With Adaptive Case Management (ACM), we often say there is no life cycle to mean that there is no separation between design and doing.  There is no distinction between the development environment and the run time environment.  Planning is part of doing.  In fact, you don’t really design a process, you really just plan your work.  Planning is somewhat like process design, but it is very much less like programming, and a lot more like communicating.

Planning for knowledge work has to be done by knowledge worker themselves, without specialized skill in designing processes.  The doctor himself plans the treatment.  The detective herself plans the investigation.  These people are specialists in their field, but have no special skills in process design.  ACM must not require specialized process skills.

Note that the traditional process life cycle enables different technical specialists to be involved at different times: at the very beginning high level requirements are drawn up by the business owner; then business workers help define the process; then the process specialist (a.k.a. process analyst) figures how best to express this as the process model; then developers and testers may be involved in crafting the application, forms, data persistence; finally an administrator will deploy and manage the final application.  The fact that you have specialists for process support means that you can have much more specialized tools, and that drives a kind of arms race of features for more powerful process support.

I have nothing against powerful tools for developing applications, but they quickly become so specialized that a typical doctor, policeman, lawyer, judge, or nurse can no longer use them effectively.  The highly specialized tools distance the knowledge worker from the planning activity.

Many knowledge workers will plan and complete their own work. They are evaluated by the normal means: satisfied clients and financial measures.  When warning signs appear, managers of large organizations will want to know more about what is going wrong.  Post facto process mining gives those managers many of the benefits of a rigorous process: they have visibility to what has been working well, and they have a visual representation of why particular processes did not go well.

The traditional life cycle introduces a delay between the design of the process, and the actual use of the process.  This is not a technical delay, as most BPM vendors will show you one-button deployment that can put a process on-line in seconds.  Instead the delay is caused by more mundane reasons having to do with approvals, sign-offs, testing, debugging, and simply manpower available to do the improvement.  By flipping the order of these, and you can actually compare the work with a process that was designed after the work was done.

If you think about this last idea it is really amazing:  If your process lasts years, you can monitor progress, and discover practices from ones going well, and then apply those practices to other cases — even when those techniques were not known when the work was started.

Background

Process mining is the scanning historical records of activity in order to determine the process that had been used.  A process is simply a sequence of actions.  Process mining uses recorded evidence of many such sequences to give you a picture of the typical path and exceptional paths as well.

Research on this field started in the mid 1990′s.  This means it is still a relatively young field, it has come surprisingly far in a decade and a half, and can be used successfully in business situations today.

Fujitsu launched process mining as a service offering three years ago, called Interstage Automated Process Discovery.  I have been involved in the launch and evangelism of this new approach for understanding and optimizing business.  See this 9 minute demo and this podcast on Integration Developer News.  My most recent webinar last month to ASQ was on how process mining can be used to support Lean and Six Sigma methodologies.

Why a Manifesto?

I have personal experience with using the approach, and the results are dramatic.  A simple, two week consulting engagement can give a medium to large organization a number of tips that will certainly save that organization millions of dollars.

I recently attended a presentation to a fortune 50 company where some Fujitsu consultants had spent a few days analyzing some of their order fulfillment history records.  Focusing on operations in two countries, we were able to pin point individual products which had handled incorrectly.  We were able to show how sales progressed differently in the two countries.  We could break this out by specific product line, and could tell them, for example, how long different models were typical delayed in customs or other processing.  I remember particularly the enthusiastic response of one IT executive saying “This is witchcraft!“

It is not unusual for people who hear about the approach without experiencing it, to believe that it is too good to be true.   They have a hard time believing that it really works, and it is pretty amazing.  Other members of the IEEE Task Force have run into the same thing: there is not enough known about process mining, and it seems too good to be believed.

This drove the need for a Process Mining Manifesto to clearly define process mining and to help people understand the real promise of this new technology.  It was written largely by Wil van der Aalst and his colleagues at the Technical University of Eindhoven, but also with representation from a broad range of contributors across industry and academia.  It is now being translated into a dozen languages.

If you are not already familiar with process mining, the manifesto is probably the best way to come up to speed quickly.  If you have a high level understanding, the manifesto will give you a solid base to understand in detail when you might want to make use of this approach

Relevance to ACM

Process mining is especially important to Adaptive Case Management (ACM).  When it is impossible to predict the process ahead of time, knowledge workers need to move forward without a predefined process.  Process mining promises a way to retrospectively see what the pattern of work turned out to be, even though it was planned as the work was being one.

Process mining can give you metrics about the process which can be used to evaluate how well the work is being done.  Even though the process is not automated, you can get many of the benefits normally associated with BPM.

It may be possible to avoid completely the large expense of designing the process up front.  This would allow social business software to be used for planning and managing work directly, and still have the insight to improve the business processes over time.

See my next post about “Flipping the Process Life Cycle” to see how process mining might be incorporated into everyday management of knowledge workers.

Links

• Mining Activity Streams – from Oct 2010 link with social technology
• Process Mining Update -  from Oct 2010 summary of BPM 2010
• Webinar on Automated Process Discovery – Oct 2011

Discussion on what is required for ACM is often held by people with a lot of experience supporting work with BPM.  The discussion often falls into what I call the “process-analysis-trap”: analyze the work, find common sub-patterns, simplify, automate patterns, work to unify and consolidate automation.  This comes directly from the idea that there must be one right way to do something, and we just need to find it.  Then automate it because that would make it easier.  This all makes perfect sense depending upon what your definition of the “user” is.  In particular, it has nothing to do with knowledge workers.

It is helpful to think of a knowledge worker as an artist.  An Andy Goldsworthy who takes a bunch of sticks from a field and makes a wonderful pattern from them.  A Christo who unexpectedly wraps things up.  Painters like Dali, Picasso, Michelangelo, and Leonardo Da Vinci.  All different, all creative.  (Not all artists are famous like these, but in a public blog post I need to use famous names that we are all likely to have some knowledge of.)

I will use these the example of these artists to show that the process-analysis-trap leads us to entirely the wrong conclusion about how to support artists.  My goal is to show that the process-analysis-trap also leads us to the wrong conclusion on how to support knowledge workers.

Art-Kits 1

How would a bunch of process wonks define tools for artists?  We would define “art kits” that had paints,  paint brushes, paper, paint-by-number instructions, etc.  Only consider this: a real artist does not use a “paint-by-number art kit”.  Wouldn’t it be great if my paint-by-number could produce a work of art like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.  I can arrogantly say that it never will.

That does not mean that art kits don’t exist, and there are certainly people who buy them.  There are a lot of people who have the job to put paint on canvas, and who are not artists.  For those people (whether hobby or profession) the paint-by-number approach is unquestionably easier to use. Ease of use is not necessarily the goal of the artist.

It is important not to get mixed up between the artist, and the person who paints for a living.  Similarly, we must not get mixed up between the knowledge worker, and the person who simply handles cases for a living — there are a lot of both out there.  If we attempt to draw conclusions without being sensitive to whether the person is really a knowledge worker, we will get invalid results. This is why in these discussions I obsess about “unpredictable” behavior.

Randomness

Even the most creative artist does not start each day with a completely random action.  Do artists follow a pattern, a methodology?  Of course they do, that is the essence of their learning to become an artist in a particular school of art.  The method is what they bring to the table.  The method is what they learn from others and from doing the job. They practice the method.  The exercise themselves.

It is the same with knowledge workers. Their approach to a problem is their approach which has been learned from history and from others.

Enforcing a particular method would unacceptably constrain what a knowledge worker does.  ACM should not enforce any particular method.  The knowledge worker pours their own method into the system. Through use, the ACM system is adapted to the work, but each knowledge worker can define their own method, or decide to use any method from anyone else.

Art-Kits 2

Here is an irony: when I say that a true artist will never use a paint by number kit, I don’t really mean to say this.  The kit, after all, has paint and brushes, and it is possible for a true artist to make a real piece of art from such a kit … even when basically following the numbers.  Does this contradict my earlier statement about the Sunflowers?  Yes it does.  That is the process-analysis-trap we fall into by assuming that there is one true process.  In a certain sense, a true artist can use an art-kit just as well as anything else.

It is the same with knowledge workers.  A knowledge worker can use pre-defined processes, working with them or around them as needed, using email and telephone if necessary.  Pointing to a particular use of a pre-defined processes by knowledge workers is like pointing to a paint-by-number kit used by an artist.  It is not the construct that matters, but what the people do with it that it key.  We can say, however, that an art kit that prevented the artist from painting outside the lines would be too restrictive for an artist to use.  The key for ACM is the ability to ignore the rules when necessary, to redefine the process as needed, and to alter all aspects of the predefined structures.

Artist Supplies

Must artists start with their bare hands?  No.  There are art supplies in standardized forms.  For example, you can buy canvas that is already stretched over a frame in standardized sizes.  This both constrains the artist, and yet is a common enough pattern that it is useful.   The important thing to note is that the canvas stretched over a frame did not come from any smart analysis of what an artist might need, but instead as a result of artists over many years stretching their own canvas: the pattern emerged.

Once pre-built canvasses become available, they cease to be part of the job that the artist does.

As knowledge workers/case managers work, they will develop patterns, and those patterns will be codified into applications (process or otherwise).  When those become codified, they cease to be part of the work of the knowledge work: the knowledge work is just the stuff that is not automated, not formalized.

What did we learn?

The knowledge worker/case manager needs an environment to get work done, and to express any method they want to bring.  There are a set of capabilities that support re-use, but it is all completely under the control of the case manager.

Later, as patterns emerge, an IT department may take on the job of formalizing a part of the work, and producing a BPM application.  When the BPM application becomes available the knowledge worker may start to use it, but it is no longer knowledge work.  In a very real sense, the work has been taken out of the ACM system, and put into a BPM system. It is this last conclusion that makes me feel that ACM and BPM really are completely non-overlapping sets of capabilities.

It is not a different in the technology, but a difference in how you use it.  If the technology is optimized for self-adaptation by a knowledge worker with typical skills for that domain, then it us useful for ACM style work.  If the benefits require a specialist in any kind of skill that is not common in the domain, then this removes it from consideration as ACM.  Artists can use a surprising variety of things to make art.  Similarly, knowledge workers work in a wide variety of environment.  Today, 99% of the knowledge work is being done with email and documents.  Let stop falling into the process-analysis-trap, and focus instead on how to help creative knowledge workers do things their own way.

Don Tapscott – Macrowikinomics: Rethinking the enterprise for the age of networked intelligence.

In 1991 he wrote a book “paradigm shift” where enterprise is shifting from hierarchical to network.  It seems like we are discussing the same thing today, while we are a lot more networked, we still have a ways to go.

Business processes are no longer structural, but instead molecular reconfigurable.  We live in the age of information liquidity.   The focus has changed: now relationships have become a form of capital.   One of the biggest focuses should be on how we create a positive customer experience.

Four key drivers: technology, economic, the net generation (digital natives are bathed in bits), social revolution (the rise of social networking, becoming social production).   Profoundly changing the deep structure. What does it tell us that the best selling business book was written by Scott Adams?

New operating system for the enterprise. We need to be constructing industrial strength social networks. We are seeing a new generation project tools — that enable people to work together in teams.  Mentioned collaborative decision management: what he calls support for deliberation.

In reference to the financial crisis of Sept 2008 he quoted Bob Dylan: “Because something is happening here; But you don’t know what it is.”   Who would imagine a few years ago that the big theme for business books would be “how to save capitalism“.

Our schools have the very best model of learning that the technology of 17th century can provide.

A trillion dollars of toxic assets are on the balance sheets of the big banks. Some call them the zombie banks. 21% youth unemployment rate.  80% of new jobs come from companies 5 years old or less.  One solution: put all the information about the toxic assets on line, open it up. Get a bunch of financial experts to review it, make a model, figure out the value, and get rid of them. Get them off the books, and then move ahead.

How about healthcare and research? It is designed around an industrial age model. I am a clinition, you are a patient, don’t ask anyone else for help.  Made a reference to “PatientsLikeMe” which is a social site for people with rare diseases to be able to help themselves.  There are a lot of these taking off like wildfire, having a big effect.

A large part of the drug industry will be hitting in the next couple years the pharma patent cliff. Need to move collaboration out to the internet and fix the industry. Place research and clinical trials into the public. The whole model of the industry is broken.

The music industry is collapsing. It inherited a bloated distribution model from a business model decades old based on shipping around things made of atoms.  The Internet eliminates the need for shipping atoms, but they refuse to adapt to this reality. The business model forces the industry to bets only on home-runs. They just need to change music from being a product to a service. Put all the music into a commons, and become a service to distribute and access this. Everyone in this room will pay $3/month for every song ever written streamed to their devices. The industry that brought you Elvis and the Beatles is now suing and hated by children.

Education and higher learning is broken.  Need to change the entire model of how we teach and learn.  Climate change is an issue as well that needs to be address.

Perhaps one model is the “open cities initiative“.  They opened up an internet site to list things that need to be done, and allowed people (politicians?) to say yes or no whether they would do that.  The citizens of Bogota produced 2K proposals for the mayor.

How can we best use collective activity for social change? Syria has hundreds of snipers killing people. Kids are using cell phones to triangulate where the snipers are and report them to others. London had their riots. The occupy movement spreading around the world. You can say what you want, but there is a deep deep sentiment that the system is broken. We need to make some very fundamental changes.  Leadership is everybody’s opportunity. It is you. You self selected to attend this event.

Can we learn from nature? Played a wonderful video of “murmuration” a behavior of starlings. It helps protects the birds and warms them up for the night. There is no one leader – they follow the crowd as a single big collaboration. Can we learn from this?  We are not in an information age, but an age of cranial intelligence.  Showed pictures of the Arab Spring, and stated that the kids in Egypt knew their collective power and used it.

Rachel Happe – Are You Getting Ahead, or Are You the Red Queen

The title comes from a Louis Carol quote where the red queen says that you have to run very fast just to stand still, and to get somewhere you need to run at least twice as fast.

People are the weakest link in our organizations.  In the past we have reorganized the company around, and focused on, transactions.  this made sense when comupters and equipment was very expensive and rare.  But now infrastructure (servers, networks, storage space) is cheap and plentiful.  People are now the scarce resource.  Need to optimize the performance of humans in a way we never have had to do before.  Labor used to be cheap (and still is some places) but here at home labor needs to be enhanced and supported.

The benefit of the early adopters of social are fading.  Problem is we can’t absorb all this technology.  Culture does not change quickly enough. So we need to be careful and thoughtful about what technology we select.

Culture is the competitive differentiator in the future.

She talked primarily about forming relationships with customers.   These soft things have hard returns for our businesses, but hard to measure.

• Customer loyalty is the savings of having to pay for a new customer acquisition.
• Forgiveness is very valuable.
• Relationships give you time .. something we feel we don’t have enough of.  A customer that trusts you will wait for the time to develop the right thing.
• Peer support in external communities, same with mentoring inside communities.
• Humans are good at recognizing others needs before those individual recognize themselves:  we can only specifically ask for a small part of our real needs.
• If you are friends with your customers they are telling you exactly what they thing … so you get better.

These lead to Revenue:

• If your customers are in your cultural sphere you will get lockout of competitors.
• Patience for release scheduled.
• You want all your customers to be advocates for you.
• Authentic insights are better through friendship.

Relationships increase in value along the following step:

• Encounter -  awareness
• Recognition – resonance
• Development – understanding of compatibility, interest, acknowledgement
• Friendship – contextual trust, loyalty, advocacy
• Partnership – forgiveness, advocacy, defense, trust, loyalty

Social media really helps with the first 2 or 3 three of these!  But it only gets you so far chit-chatting about content.    Community takes you the next step, and can get you to the friendship step.  If you want partnership, then get on a plane and spend a lot of time.  Direct engagement can get you through all the steps, but it is expensive and slow.

Do a gap analysis on the relationships that your organization has, and what do you want?

We get into trouble a lot because enterprises want results NOW.  Investment in a community can be quite long, before there is any return.  And, you need to carry through and continue to invest.  Some companies have outsourced their community effort. Seems strange given how critical it is for success.  Presented the “community maturity model”.  Mapping a community management approach to business management is going to be a big challenge.

My summary: She starts with a recognition that we are moving to a knowledge worker economy and i tis time to focus on support for people to do this.  One key support is for relationships, and she made an excellent case for the power of forming better relationships with customers.  To do this, you need to have a  longer term view, but the results are clear and significant.

Aaron Levy – Box.net

2011 was a good year. $630M spent on social business $21B on cloud buildup. Enterprise software just isn’t sexy.

• 91% of enterprises think the high cost of ownership is a problem
• 62% spend too much time on projects

most enterprises stuck on outdated systems.  They say “I can’t get to to my information; I can’t integrate my apps; I can’t share outside the org; I can’t see what is being done.”  All this really valuable data is stuck behind the firewall.

Before, IT had to manage all this. You had to buy storage, servers, software, applications, firewall, integrate it all, and maintain it all. All this had to be done by the IT group. Cost prohibitive in small to medium enterprise. The rainbow to value was not actually happening and things are beginning to fail. IT spends 80% of time, energy, resources on maintaining their current infrastructure.

The problem with most software is that it continues to propogate these problems. Silos, can’t share with each other. Mapped to technology and hierarrchy of organization. But enterprises are changing faster than the technology.  What do you do about the new workers joining?  The new workplace is all over the place. Need a new IT.

Information and people become more valuable at scale. As you have more teams, more data, this produces more value. Today it is the opposite. Smarter enterprise. Need technology that changes the way that we work. Faster decisions, more visibility, better speed. More social, so that anyone in the organization can see. Better intelligence on the information on the data and the people you are working with. Finally how is it all connected? (social, speed, connected, intelligence)

Last decade we had “on demand”. We can deliver over web/cloud. Now we can be smarter. What if we could start from the ground up?

Yesterday’s technology is far too stale. It does not “get” that people are the center of everything. (He showed a picture of SharePoint 2010 with a bunch of menus open, showing the complexity.)

Social must be pervasive in everything we do. Not just a single application. How do you lower the wall on what people are doing? How do you make sure that people are more connected? So we can ask questions: what content do I need? Like that project three years ago: how do I gain access to that instead of being locked up? Need visibility and exposure.

• what content do I need?
• what are people working on?
• what client shoudl I talk to?
• what is this project’s next step (instead of rigid workflow, how do you build workflow into the people network)

We are getting out of the dark ages. Way more visibility into what is going on.

How do we put compute in cloud computing. Let’s do interesting things with big data. Starting to see happen. How to find meaning all this data? How do you build systems that build better relevance.

Are we going from closed to open?

The cloud brings a new level of oppenness. Take content from all sorts of systems, and have them propogate. This is very different from enterprise software.

We need to balance security and simplicity. Locking down was the definition of security in the past. But we also need visibility. Need something more appropriate for users, not IT: balance.

• speed,
• social, bring down the walls, share with everyone
• intelligence – better relevance
• connected – apps, sharing

Comment from MC: Aaron should be an auctioneer.

Mike Gotta - Architecting the Building Blocks of Enterprise Social Networking

He started by reminding us that almost all human interaction occur in a network context. The IT Department looks too much at an application view of things. Thinking of a transactional view is a potential pitfall.

People connect through activities. They connect through the artifacts that are created through those interactions. We need broaden our understanding of what social networks are and how they effect the workplace. He says that he “sees networks everywhere.”

The role of technology is interaction, but the role of culture is participation. These can’t be separate, but instead need to be blended. There are many different contexts for networking.

Business Value vs. Organizational Value. There is a lot of talk about focus shifting to be more purpose oriented, more activity and goal oriented, because it is hard to calculate ROI. Had to shift the positioning so it is not seen as a rebake of Knowledge Management. Instead apply social to our productivity applications.

Converged a bunch of things on a SNS (Social Network Site). Six things:

• Traditional Collabortation,
• E2.0
• Semantic and Social Analyics
• Visualization
• ECM
• UC

in the past we focused on “a place to go”, somthing like a corporate Facebook.  Now we are getting beyond the “collaboration site”. More of a platform approach. Not about social tools, but how those capabilities are embedded.

Activity streams are getting a lot of attention.

Roles:

• EA Role – organizational architect
• IA Role – social insight
• Solution Role – community management
• Technology Role – social platform

Interested in both front stage, and back stage use.

Identity

Ascribed: Profiles – some see it as a directory, some as contact info. I see it as an identity. Employee number, department name. When we ask employees who they are, they are kind of shocked.

Claimed: Go beyond the identity that is given to them, and thinkg about interests, hobbies, tidbits. Scaffolding for people to connect. Claimed identity because we can’t prove it. This is difficult in a compliance world. Approved fields vs. freeform fields.

Performed: You perform you identity. If I see people working their identity, I am more likely to believe it. Platforms are being automatically attached now. (and want ability to say yes or no)

Reciprocated: others confirm and agree.

Mentioned Mark Smith, Social Roles, looking at people in email and discussion forums. In many cases people know that “John” is the person to go to, but only because they know him. Looking at new algorithms to be able to figure out that “John” is the person without having to explicitly specify in advance. We all perform roles that are not recognized by the organization. One idea is to track “My Questions and Answers”

Social Graph: we think of a very simplified model. Communities are a network. Teams are as well. Processes are role based networks. Management hierarchy is just a network based on reporting relationship.

Activity Streams: the “observable work”.  Then we need to filter. Vendors do not give you a lot of capability yet. Would like to taylor to the type of participation we would like to invite to help mediate latent ties.

• Ask a qeustion
• Follow a tag/topic – connect you to a community.
• Exception handling for a task

Latent Ties: ties that are technically possible but not yet activated. I should know “Dan” but we just have never met yet. Activating latent ties will build healthier and more robust networks.

Curation of activity streams. Can we find patterns? Could be really interesting from a process improvement point of view. Activity stream coupled to analytics coupled to social graph. Doing that activates the network.

Social Object: what is it? Activity stream entry, the data in it. Parse that. Connect so that others can interact and reappropriate it. How to share it, put it into a community. Finally analytics. Build over time.

“Cultivating Social Resources” a lot of the chit-chat is improtant for building social relationships. Emails saying “great team!” May dismiss as having no business relevance, but it is important for relationships. Hard to argue ROI of this. Like “pay it forward”.

Teams are not just the team. There might be 8 people on the (official) team, but if you do the network analysis, you find there are 15 others networked in that nobody knows about.  Social maps are a form of inquiry, exploration. Explored the social map, and found significant number of teams are interacting and nobody knew it.

Change Management is a program, not a project. Need standing investment. Talk to Booz Allen – at one point 80% of their activity was change management. Need to think about succession planning: how do the stories get passed on to the next people who take over.

Social Psychology of change. Rear-view analytics can yield stories on how they saved money. Nothing that ever showed up on the forecast of what was to be accomplished. Unpredictable results.

Never found a pattern that says bottom up always wins, nor that top down never wins. It depends upon the specific organization. Must consider the culture of the people.

In conclusion:

• Theory: when consideration of the organizational design constructs, you really should take a look at some of the theory. Don’t need a PhD, but become familiarity and understandign of some of the research, theory, and definitions.
• Methods: there are many ways to tell stories. Use case scenarios help to put a persona into the description of the system.
• Practices: have to create the feedback loop. Expect pushback. The complaints are the requirement. What happens when these systems are in place for 10 years. How will the timeline of the organization effect the design of the site.

PC: Do you think most companies “get it?”

JH: Most companies are still trying to figure enterprise 2.0 / social business technology out.  They don’t know what it is about, nor how to adopt it.

PC: What are some patterns that people use to get into it.

JH: It is the same pattern that you have seen in the tech industry for a long time.  Each wave of new technology comes into the enterprise under the radar.  People start using it without permission.  The broadest adoption of E2.0 within the enterprise is by teams with a 6 to 12 month timeline without permission of IT dept.  They think “why not try this out” even though it is not officially sanctioned.  It ends up being helpful to the team but it does not spread. When that team disbands you lose a lot of what they learned.

Second form of adoptions is when an executive finds out about the new technology, and decides to deploy it.  This is often good, but adoption process is a bit ad-hoc.

A third pattern is becoming more prevalent: a check-the-box approach for cool things.  Once it appears that all cool enterprises have to have a micro-blogging capability in the company, they get and deploy one.  However these users are not always clear about why they are deploying it and what it is really useful for.

PC: What is the right way to treat this?

JH: Companies are most successful when they realize that tech by itself will not achieve anything.  Instead, companies have to change the way that they work.  Consider ERP systems, where the purpose was to eliminate people as much as possible, you could eliminate people and tell the remaining to use the software.  This time, with E2.0, it is about individuals understanding how the technology works and how they benefit.  Surveys of executives show that 2/3 of executives are resistant to the use of social technology.  More than 70% of employees as well.  Part of this is just the tendency to stick with the familiar.  Others resist because think it is added work.

PC: What is the role of change management?

JH: Change management process is not a rational process.  Instead, it is a political process.  It is important to understand that it is about strengthening the allies, and neutralizing the enemies.  The best way move forward is to show tangible improvement as quickly as possible.

We came up with the notion of “metrics that matter”.  Different metrics matter at different levels of the organization.  Senior managers care and are motivated by financial measures.  Mid-level managers are most focused on operating metrics.  Customer churn rate, etc.   Further down to the front line, there are performance metrics they are measured on a daily basis.  To get the most impact, start with the overall financial pain points.  If you focus on that, it may turn out the customer churn rate is identified as a problem that contributes to this.

PC: Can you talk about examples of how to drill down through the metrics?

JH: I have a recent example from an agency of the government that runs the bus service.  They were interested in social software, and so they were thinking about creating a FaceBook page, and wanted advice on how to best leverage this.  We were not convinced that this was the area of highest impact.  We started analysis with the high level finance metrics: how much revenue, and how much cost.  We found of that the single biggest cost component was maintenance of the buses, and it was growing.  Why?  The key operating metric was the lead time between when a bus broke down and when it got back on the road.  It was taking longer to get them back on the road.  Why?  They were having a hard time finding the parts for their aging fleet of buses.  Social software can make this an easier job:  make missing parts visible.  They had many locations, and when someone was in critical need for a particular part, they would post a message asking other for help.  Others pitched in to help location and the result is they could more quickly find the part.  That really changed the mindset of the implementers: these repairmen were the last people they ever through would use social software.  In fact, it provided a real, immediate benefit, and they quickly adopted it.  It sped up repairs, and made a real difference in costs.

PC: The flip side of social network inside, is the social media outside.  What about this divide?  Is it artifical?

JH: There are several reasons for this sharp distinction.  For example the bus maintenance issue was purely internal.  But there can be a lot of problems to integrate the external and internal.  There are a lot of places you would like to do this, e.g. a call center.

PC: When do companies get to the point that they start thinking about adoption more seriously?  What do you recommend?

JH: I am a contrarian.  People talk about measuring the ROI.  But the reality is that who ever controls the underlying assumptions can deliver whatever ROI they want.  I have yet to see any enterprise that has gone back to look at the ROI to see if it materializes.   It is better to focus on operating metrics.  If your issue is lead time to get a bus on the road … you can track that on a daily basis.  Then refine the approach.  In many case studies on companies, very few had gone back and measured whether they actually achieved the projected success.

PC: Are those focused on a specific set of goals?

JH: Focus on specific parts of the org, specific people.  There is a general pattern where social software can make the most difference: exception handling.  I call this the shadow economy of the enterprise.  Ask an executive “where do people spend their time?”  60-70% of time is spent on exceptions, and this generally not very visible.  These are cases that have been thrown out of the automated system — and you have to resolve them quickly.  Must find the right people engaged, the right data, resolve the issue quickly.  In general, this work is all manual, and very inefficient.  What is social good for?  Finding the right people, finding the right information, and getting them to work together.  Social software is a perfect fit for exception handling.  In the bus example: the part was supposed to be there, but wasn’t, so that exception had to be handled.

PC: My own personal example was a big customer in Japan had big problem, and the social platform took care of it.  Before I woke up there was already 26 posts of people who had jumped in to take care of the situation.  I didn’t have to chase a lot of email.  Without the software, would have taken many days to find out.  The system helps with serendipity and speed.

JH: The other advantage, often underestimated, is making the invisible visible.  Think about exceptions:  because they are manually handled, there are no records.  Executives can not tell you precisely how many exceptions they have.  Some are truly some one-off cases.  But there are also cases that are occurring with some frequency.  As long as it is manual you will never find it.

PC: What do you advise clients to do?  What other traits will see more success and benefit from new paradigm?

JH: Get the right senior sponsorship and quickly demonstrate results.  There is a generational issue: the younger will adopt more rapidly.  However, in the bus example the workers were in their 50s & 60s.

PC: What about industry: retail, health care, high tech???

JH: We looked for patterns like that, but didn’t see any real patterns.   For externally facing deployments we found that highly regulated industries have more obstacles to deployment.  Otherwise, every where that has pain point and senior sponsorship.

Questions from the Audience

Q: when we hear that 2/3 within an organization are resistant, it seems the technology is in advance of what the organization wants.  Is the resistance coming from those who contribute help, or more from those who are asking for help?

JH: There is a big culture gap between the executives of the companies that I work with, and the vendors of the social software.  The vendors talk about communities and relationships, and the executives don’t make the connection.  The big issue in knowledge management is that the knowledge that is most valuable is in people’s heads.  This means that the real job is about connecting people.  Also, the collection of information needs to a fully integrated part of your job: if posting the records is a separate action that can be a problem.   If you have to wait, the delay can be a problem.  Needs to be integrated.  If I can eliminate email, that can eliminate the burden.  If the work style by nature is sharing, then everything is connected, and no additional work.  But how do you change your behavior?

Companies underestimate the value of a reputation system.  Most don’t pay enough attention to this.  60-70% say that recognition is a key, above salary, for motivating people.

Q: what is the impact of DeLoitte using community tools?

It happens that professional service firms are made for social software.  The work is project oriented.  It is about finding the right person.  We are now looking now at the analytics on top of social software.  You can take patterns of interactions within Deloitte, and connect this to operating metrics.

In one study interaction patterns, we found two kinds of interaction.  One pattern was very tight interaction within small part of the organization.  The other pattern was loose and more casual interactions but spread across more of the company.  The latter pattern  (loose but wide spread) has better tie in to performance metrics.  In the case of the first pattern, the teams were TOO tightly knit.

Q: Any sense of whether big organization or small is more likely to success with tight/less tight?

The difference is less about size.  With smaller companies, the primary value is connecting the company with the outside, because you already communicate well within the compan.  In larger companies there are bigger problems with silos and fragmentation within the companies.

Q: What other elements are necessary for the chaotic harmony?

Consider the notion of passion in the workforce.  The shift index is trying to measure long term changes.  We tried to measure passion in the workplace.  One common element is that participants are deeply passionate about what they are doing tended to be more associated with sustained improvement in performance.   Passionate people are more connected.  They instinctively reach out.  A passionate employee is twice as connected. These passionate employees are more likely to connect with social software.

Q: How is the culture inside Deloitte?  What was before using social media, and what was the impact after that?  Case study inside Deloitte?

Growing adoption within Deloitte.  Started in the way we said: early teams brought it in without IT involvement.  But started to catch on an be used.

Q: How do you see social technology fitting with BPM and business process?

In any business process that is automated, there are always exceptions that fall out of the normal processing.  As I mentioned before, social software is perfect for picking up those exceptions.  Thus I see social software going hand in hand with BPM.

My Summary

What I found interesting about this talk was how John Hagel talks about social software in exactly the same way many of us have been talking about case management.  He sees it as a way for people to get things done, by finding the right people, finding the right data, connecting, and arranging to complete activities.  I am not surprised by this, but that he spend no time at all talking about Facebook and non-work aspects of social software.  There is no question in his mind that social software is a productivity tool. Nobody in the audience suggested in any way that BPM is the same thing.  How refreshing.

The bus repair example brilliantly shows how solving a real need is more effective at gaining adoption than any amount of fanfare and persuasion.  John continues to be an effective and important evangelist for the Big Shift in the way that companies get work done.

In A Nutshell

Whenever you hear about an adaptive system, you should think about muscles.  If you want to increase the size or strength of a muscle, you exercise it.  The use of a muscle triggers a response to build the muscle.  Conversely, lack of use causes muscle atrophy.

Adaptiveness is not simply the capability to increase or decrease muscle size.  Instead it is more about the ability of the muscle to self-modify to fit the situation; the ability to sense a need, and to respond to it in a kind of feedback loop.  Organizations are naturally adaptive if you have experienced people in management and they are getting accurate information about the situation.

Homeostatis is the idea that an adaptive system responds to external changes in such as way as to keep certain aspects constant.  Your body maintains a constant temperature by various mechanisms that respond to temperature change.  A retail stores that can detect the increasing popularity of an item will order larger quantities in order to keep the number on the shelf constant.

When we talk about a case management system being adaptive, the complete system includes the case managers as well.  Humans are not excluded from the feedback loop.  We talk about a good ACM system facilitating what the professional wants (needs) to do.  Professionals play active roles in adapting the system to their needs.  We can think of this as being self-modification because there is no external software professional, or process analysts, needed: the professional can adapt the system anyway necessary to meet the constantly changing requirements.  For example, when a doctor gets the idea for a new treatment plan, they can institute that new plan without involving a software expert.

Examples Adaptive System

There are three good examples of adaptive systems we all are familiar with: the human body, the human brain, and an ecosystem.

Human Body

Not just the human body, but all life forms have aspects of adaptiveness.  Your DNA specifies how to form all the various muscles, but it does not include complete specifics on size.  Instead a feedback loop is used to find the optimal size.  There is no need to predict ahead of time exactly the amount of muscle needed.  Each muscle is built with the ability to measure the amount of use and respond by growing, or shrinking, appropriately.  This simple mechanism eliminates any necessity to predict up front precisely how much is needed.

Adaptive systems optimize themselves.  Take for example someone who suffers the tragedy of losing the use of their legs.  The muscles that are no longer used will reduce in size, while the muscles in the arms will increase to accommodate the increased use.

There are many such systems in the body.  The skin responds to light exposure by varying the amount of melanin at the points that received the exposure.  This saves one from having to figure out in advance which parts of the skin should be more and less pigmented.  Body temperature is maintained at a homeostatic constant through a number of mechanisms including sweat glands shivering.

The concept of “practice” pertains exclusively to adaptive mechanisms.  Want to learn the piano?  The sit down at the keys and practice, practice, practice.  Want to learn to play tennis?  Start playing hitting the ball and practice the right moves. Practice only works because the system is adaptive.

The Brain

The brain is another example of a complex adaptive system.  The child learns the language that they hear spoken around them.  We study subjects in order to learn them.  The concept of “learning” is again something that refers only to an adaptive system.

Going beyond simple learning, there is ample evidence that the brain itself changes structure in response to environment.  Large parts of the brain (e.g. the neocortex) appear to be able to take on substantially different roles depending upon the need.  When a person suffers the loss of a limb, the part of the brain that used to control that limb appears to be reallocated to do other functions.  There is a great book on such neuroplasticity by Norman Doidge called “The Brain That Changes Itself.” The brain allocates space to those functions that need it.  In doing so, it optimizes the resources in the brain without needing to predict in advance exactly how much processing power is needed for each function.

Ecosystems

Forest fires will occasionally burn every tree off the top of a mountain, and yet, the following spring there is plenty of new life growing.  In New Mexico, where I grew up, the Aspen trees are the first to grow after fire has made a clearing.   In 5 to 10 years you have what used to be a clearing filled with Aspen trees which turn golden yellow in the autumn.  The mountains appear patched in different colors.  Small pine trees need the shade of the Aspens to get started, but they eventually grow more substantial and crowd out the Aspens.  The colorful patches are eventually filled in with the darker green pines — until the next forest fire.

The diversity of different organisms that thrive in differing conditions form a adaptive network, each organism dominating different aspects of the ecosystem when the conditions permit.  The forest as a whole is extremely robust due to the adaptive nature of the biodiversity.

Enterprise as Adaptive System

Human organizations are also naturally adaptive.  The day to day decisions are decentralized and delegated to front line workers.  Different divisions compete for scarce resources, and good management will shift resources as needed.  There may be a centralized view and control at a very high level, but generally this is very much abstracted away from the details of day to day operations.  The parts of the organization are sensing and responding to their situation.  There is a nested, recursive aspect of this, so that as you get to smaller parts of the organization, the sensing and responding is more finely tuned and detailed.

Organizations are constantly changing, and responding to that change. When a single person leaves a position, that may change the jobs of dozens of others.  When an individual is promoted, dozens or hundreds of people will change their own behavior in response.

Yet the organization is stable.  Adaptiveness does not cause constant fluctuation in the organization as a whole.  In fact, it is well know that it is incredibly difficult to change an organization once it is in place.  Adaptiveness presents a kind of homeostasis that allows an organization to keeps its character and form over the years even though people within the organization are constantly coming and going.

The Right Concept for Case Management

For case management to be successful, it needs to be adaptive.  It needs to be under the control of the case managers to be in a position to sense and respond to the situation.

• simplified deployment: the case templates do not need to be designed in advance to fit the situation.  You deploy an uncustomized system into the organization, and then it is adapted by the case managers themselves as needed.
• exercise: The system is not “designed” by a central planner, but instead it is trained by exercising it.  Those parts that get the most use, and have the most need of improvement, will get the most effort.
• learning: the system as a whole learns how to support the organization.  Instead of designing for a theoretical idealized business case, it learns from the real business cases, with the real people working on them.
• practice: the training is accomplished by doing the work, and without the need to make an abstract theory about the underlying mechanisms.
• stability: the system can be extremely stable because it senses and responds to perturbations automatically. The case managers themselves can shift behavior as needed, without waiting for programmers or other specialists.
• optimized: each part of the organization can optimize use to their particular needs, for their particular part of the business, and their particular employees and skills. This level of optimization can only be achieved through self-modification.

That is why I and my colleagues have persisted in calling this capability “Adaptive Case Management“. Others use the term “Dynamic” or “Advanced”.  At a high level, we know we are talking about the same thing, so in some sense the exact term does not matter. But this lack of coordination on the name does confuse the audience.

My friends at Forrester have latched onto the term “Dynamic Case Management.” Perhaps they feel that changing would be a sign of weakness.  But “dynamic” means only that something “moves” and “changes”. The term dynamic tells you nothing about the agent causing the change.  An oppressive dictator can be dynamic, but never adaptive.  The idea of self-change, self-regulation, and self-control is a very key concept, central to enabling case management.  If dynamic requires a programmer, then it can never be adaptive for the knowledge worker.

I understand the need for analysts to maintain consistency over time.  Documents are useful over a period of many years, and changing terms can create undesirable internal problems.  Having invested so much into the term “dynamic,” they might be concerned that they would be losing some of that investment.  However, in the long term “adaptive” is the right term that describes the right idea.   They must decide the right tradeoff between loss of respect by changing a term, vs. loss of respect by stubbornly holding onto an outdated term. I would invite, in the friendliest of terms, to rally around the idea that case management is best when adaptive.

However, my goal with this post is not to change terms in use, but instead to simply give people an easy way to understand what the concept of adaptive.

When you hear that something is adaptive, think about how muscles respond to use by growing, how exercise is used to increase strength, and how practice is the way to learn to do things.