A glossary of the group's terms

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.

The basics

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.
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.
Agent. AI software that takes actions on its own, such as sending a message, changing a record or calling another system.

The capability and the practice

Protocol vision. The capability to see the protocols a business actually runs on, written and unwritten. Most go unnoticed until they break.
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.
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.
Protocol watching. Training for protocol vision: observing a protocol in the wild and recording it. See the watching guide.

How strict a protocol is

Hard. Enforced by a system every time, such as a payment limit or a required check before release.
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.
Free. Left to the people or agents doing the work.
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.
Hardness map. A table that sorts a business's protocols into hard, soft and free, and names who may change each one.
Seam, or interface. Where teams, agents and partners meet. Strict rules belong at the seams; the inside of each team stays free.

Changing protocols

Amendment rule. For each hard protocol: who may change it, how, and who may stop the work.
Promote and soften. Make a free pattern hard when it keeps paying off; soften a hard rule when it blocks good work.
Liveness. A protocol's ability to keep being amended without breaking, as industries do with their standards. Theme VI of the year.

Records and measures

Field log. One shared record that systems, people and agents write as they work, including the reason for each action.
Non-event. A problem that did not happen because a protocol worked: the error caught, the dispute that never started.
Gamed target. A measure that people or agents have learned to hit without the result it stands for.
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.

Questions the group is still testing

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.
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?
Is the purpose in the letter? Anything a rule permits will eventually be done, so the purpose has to be written into the rule.

Missing a term, or think one is defined wrong? Say so in a session or reply with a blyg of your own.