The group uses a small set of words carefully. This is a plain-language list of them, with links to where each is used. The practice guide is the reference; this post is the short version.
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The basics
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\n- Protocol. A recurring way work moves, a decision gets made, or data is found and trusted. Protocols run between people, software and machines: handoffs, checklists, approvals, APIs, permissions, alarms.
\n- Process. The steps of a piece of work and who performs each one. Process management maps the steps; protocol management asks which few rules every step runs through. More in Protocols, not processes.
\n- Agent. AI software that takes actions on its own, such as sending a message, changing a record or calling another system.
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The capability and the practice
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\n- Protocol vision. The capability to see the protocols a business actually runs on, written and unwritten. Most go unnoticed until they break.
\n- Business Protocol Management (BPM). The practice of finding the few rules a business relies on, building them in, and changing them as it grows. It works on one problem at a time, never a company-wide redesign.
\n- See, Design, Evolve. BPM's three phases: find the protocols in play; decide what must be strict and what can stay free; run it, learn and amend.
\n- Protocol watching. Training for protocol vision: observing a protocol in the wild and recording it. See the watching guide.
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How strict a protocol is
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\n- Hard. Enforced by a system every time, such as a payment limit or a required check before release.
\n- Soft. Held by norms and habits, such as how a team runs its weekly planning. For agents, a soft rule works much like no rule at all.
\n- Free. Left to the people or agents doing the work.
\n- Hard core. The small set of hard protocols everything else relies on. Keep it small: every hard rule costs flexibility. The guide proposes a common hard core of eight that most companies seem to share.
\n- Hardness map. A table that sorts a business's protocols into hard, soft and free, and names who may change each one.
\n- Seam, or interface. Where teams, agents and partners meet. Strict rules belong at the seams; the inside of each team stays free.
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Changing protocols
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\n- Amendment rule. For each hard protocol: who may change it, how, and who may stop the work.
\n- Promote and soften. Make a free pattern hard when it keeps paying off; soften a hard rule when it blocks good work.
\n- Liveness. A protocol's ability to keep being amended without breaking, as industries do with their standards. Theme VI of the year.
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Records and measures
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\n- Field log. One shared record that systems, people and agents write as they work, including the reason for each action.
\n- Non-event. A problem that did not happen because a protocol worked: the error caught, the dispute that never started.
\n- Gamed target. A measure that people or agents have learned to hit without the result it stands for.
\n- Emissions. What systems publish for others to act on: files, logs, events, reports and required disclosures. What an organization emits shows where its protocols live. Theme III of the year.
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Questions the group is still testing
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\n- Protocols are not products. Products steer to a target; protocols widen what others can do. How far that holds for a business's hard core is an open question.
\n- How are protocol economics shaped? Who pays for a protocol, who gains from it, and where any fee, sign-off or claim sits. A charge at the core taxes everyone who passes through, so where is capturing value worth it?
\n- Is the purpose in the letter? Anything a rule permits will eventually be done, so the purpose has to be written into the rule.
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Missing a term, or think one is defined wrong? Say so in a session or reply with a blyg of your own.