I'm at the TED Conference in my annual attempt to escape the confines of making and selling software. It's a box, not a process, sometimes. And this year's lineup has pretty much exceeded expectations. Heavy emphasis on physics; I mean, when Amy Tan says "ambiguity is the cosmological constant" of her book writing process, you know that science is on the ascendant. Here at TED, anyway.

This is the third day. Day one was 6 hours of content. Day two began at 9am and the content portion ended at 8:15pm with Karen Armstrong revealing her "TED Wish" that leaders, maybe 1,000 leaders, of the three major monotheistic faiths would establish and proliferate a single governing document, a Charter of Compassion, for how the scriptures of faith should be interpreted. A mental model for reading scripture, if you will, based on looking for the Golden Rule in each passage. Not a bad wish.

Today we just went from 9,000 feet deep (still 4,000 feet above the deepest parts of the ocean floor) to the top of the oldest redwoods in the world. And there was unexpected life in both places. We also heard from Paul Stamets who believes, and attempted to show, that mushrooms have the power to save humanity. At a minimum we saw how fire ants could be eradicated with mycelium. It was pretty good, but not as good as seeing Stephen Hawking speak to us Wednesday, and hear him say that, in his opinion, there probably isn't life (as we know it) in the Milky Way galaxy. Rare earth, indeed.

Well, I come here to keep the entirety of the world - not simply my software world - in perspective, yet this year I find myself drawn further into the web of "process" - Lombardi-style. Amy Tan considered this phenomenon when she said that while writing about a given subject she often stumbles, serendipitously, into chance encounters with the topics she's writing about. She said she's come to the conclusion that "when I am aware of chance encounters being connected, then chance encounters connected to work I'm doing tend to happen more often.... so now I just look for them."

And so I see process everywhere. Today a track on the creative process. Yesterday a disorienting, disturbing talk on the process that led to Abu Ghraib. Today I met a gentleman who "works with companies on their mythology." He helps them rediscover who they are, so they can get on with becoming who they want to be. I call that BPM, he calls it mythology (no wise cracks from BPM cynics, please). Today Brian Cox, one of the scientists at the CERN big particle accelerator said that once the accelerator comes online (the final pieces were put in place, literally, today!) then the story of the process of creation might actually become known. We may know more about who we are, and may be in a better position to figure out who we can be.

The other aspect of all this that's been interesting is the number of people who talk about the closer we get to actual creative process, the closer we get to simplicity. Complexity is the result of time and scale, but the heart of any great scalable system is simplicity. And I find in this, again, an important connection to our world at Lombardi. Brian Cox showed us the very few elements that existed at the beginning, during the 1/billionth second of the big bang.

At Lombardi, we believe process is the story. It is the structured book through which what you do and what you want to be is communicated. How we behave and to what we aspire form the lynchpins of culture. A company's relationship with its customers. How it behaves amongst its employees, between one another. These behaviors are instantiated in processes, whether formal or informal.

At many companies, their mythology, their culture, has become stale. Inert. It's not known, it's not understood or it's inaccessible. We find this is often the case because the means of transference have become so convoluted that any semblance of narrative is lost. When process is not explicit, which is simply another way of saying the process is informal then, oddly, communication becomes formal. And this is exactly the wrong way to go. Folklore, the stories of culture, these memes survive in large part due to their informality.

Ironically, then, the result of informal process is formal communication ("knowledge is power" syndrome). The result of formal process is more informal communication ("transparency" and "open-door policy").

This formal communication results in left-brain actions on the part of the people in the process. Silos. Hidden factories. Leading to unproductive work. Low quality. More exceptions. And finally, lost market share.

Transparency results in innovation - positive change based on trust. "Good fences make good neighbors". If you look at the history of this phrase, it wasn't to say that "excluding others is a good thing," it originally meant that explicit relationships enhanced trust and understanding, and therefore increased empathy and compassion.

To me, BPM is the means by which you document, communicate and then instantiate your actions and aspirations. If your processes are the mechanisms that transfer your culture - internally, externally and into the future - then BPM is the means to make your culture great.

BPM can help you create that possibility.