There’s something that happens when you sit in a room full of process practitioners from completely different industries.
At first, it feels like everyone must be dealing with totally different challenges. Different business models, different structures, different levels of maturity.
And then the conversations start. And you realize…we’re all struggling with the same things.
How do we actually sell the value of process work to leadership?
How do we make frameworks usable, not just theoretical?
How do we connect “process” to how work really gets done today?
That was one of my biggest takeaways from APQC’s CONNECT 2026. It was reassuring, in a way. But also a little uncomfortable. Because it means that despite all the progress we’ve made as a discipline, we’re still trying to solve some very fundamental problems.
And this year’s theme—"Bridge. Streamline. Flow.”—made it clear why.
Because the issue isn’t that we’re missing tools or ideas.
It’s that we haven’t fully connected the pieces.
We Need to Stop Chasing AI and Start Fixing the Foundations
AI was everywhere at CONNECT this year. That’s not surprising. What was surprising is how consistent the message was beneath the hype. Repeatedly, across sessions, the same idea came through: “We might be moving faster with AI than our organizations are actually ready for.”
One session used Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare to make the point. AI is the hare—fast, powerful, constantly accelerating. But process management and knowledge management? That’s the tortoise. Slower, more deliberate, but built for endurance.
And the real value comes when they work together.
The problem is that a lot of organizations are still trying to win the race with the hare alone.
We’ve seen this before. Every wave of technology brings the same pattern:
- We invest in tools before we build the capability to use them
- We prioritize implementation over workflow design
- We chase big, flashy use cases instead of fixing everyday work
And then we wonder why the value doesn’t show up.
Several sessions called this out directly:
- Don’t confuse tool acquisition with organizational readiness
- Don’t chase the moonshots—focus on the workflow
- Value comes from small, operational wins, not headlines
Intermountain Health put it even more bluntly: most AI pilots fail because there’s no process, no ownership, no measurement, and no alignment.
And maybe the most important reminder of all: “Garbage in doesn’t just stay garbage. With AI, it gets amplified.”
If your data is messy, your processes are inconsistent, and your knowledge is fragmented, AI doesn’t fix that. It just helps you get the wrong answer faster.
Structure Isn’t Boring. It’s the Advantage.
If there was a quiet theme running underneath a lot of the more technical sessions, it was this: Structure is what makes everything else work.
SAP’s session on knowledge graphs made that incredibly clear. Their point wasn’t just about AI—it was about how AI understands your business. And the answer isn’t more documents. It’s better structure. Their stat stuck with me: “organizations using semantic approaches like knowledge graphs are expected to have significantly less AI technical debt.” Why? Because their data actually makes sense.
Magna International reinforced this from a different angle. They talked about “enterprise friction”—the compounding effect of disconnected systems, inconsistent terminology, and fragmented processes. Not a local problem. An enterprise-wide constraint on speed, cost, and competitiveness.
Their solution isn’t flashy: standardized processes, standardized data definitions, and one shared data foundation. But that’s exactly the point.
Cargill showed what this looks like in practice. They went from more than 50 disconnected repositories to a single, enterprise-wide platform. Not just to clean things up, but to create a single source of truth.
Because in an AI-enabled world, your process repository isn’t just a filing cabinet. It’s a guardrail. Without it, AI pulls conflicting versions of the truth, and no one knows what’s actually right.
The organizations making real progress aren’t just documenting processes. They’re building infrastructure.
Culture Is Still the Hardest Part
For all the talk about AI, architecture, and platforms, one theme came up again and again: The hardest part isn’t the technology. It’s the people.
WECU shared a great example of this. They didn’t position process management as something being rolled out to the organization. They embedded it into their existing culture and values. They made it practical. Visible. Human.
Instead of the process team presenting improvements, leaders shared their own stories—what they tried, what worked, what didn’t. Over time, something shifted. Process stopped being a “push.” It became something people asked for. That’s a very different kind of maturity.
KK Group’s story made this real in a different way. Rolling out BPM across an end-to-end Idea-to-Market process wasn’t just about frameworks. It was about alignment, language, and trust. They talked about the reality of it:
- Different teams speaking different “languages”
- Governance that sometimes feels like herding cats
- Ongoing tension between functional ownership and process ownership
And maybe the most honest takeaway: The BPM puzzle is never solved. It’s constantly evolving. Which means the goal isn’t to “implement BPM.” It’s to build the capability to keep adapting it.
Community and Language Are Doing More Work Than We Think
One of the more subtle—but powerful—themes across multiple sessions was the role of community. Not as a side initiative. As a core enabler.
KK Group built a Process Excellence Community that’s open to anyone who wants to learn or contribute. Not just experts. Not just leadership. A space to build capability and shared understanding.
Cargill’s communities of practice aren’t status updates. They were working sessions—people bringing real problems, showing how they solved them, and learning from each other.
WECU created simple, repeatable moments to reinforce process thinking across the organization.
All of this points to something important: Frameworks don’t scale on their own. Language and community do.
If people don’t understand the work the same way, they can’t improve it together. And if they’re not part of building it, they won’t adopt it.
The Real Enemy Is Friction
If I had to boil everything down into one idea, it’s this: Process excellence is really about reducing friction.
Friction in handoffs.
Friction in decision-making.
Friction in how information flows—or doesn’t.
Magna International said it well: friction isn’t a local issue anymore. It compounds across the enterprise and defines how fast (or slow) you can actually move. And when something big changes—a market shift, a regulatory update, a strategic pivot—those cracks become very visible, very quickly.
The organizations making progress aren’t trying to make everything perfect. They’re trying to make work flow. Which brings it back to the theme of the conference: Bridge. Streamline. Flow.
A Quick but Important Reminder: Don’t Forget the Humans
One session, The Praise Paradox™: Building Leadership Cultures Where Knowledge and Process Flow, stuck with me for a completely different reason was about praise. Only about a third of people said they had been recognized in the past week. And yet recognition drives a significant increase in productivity.
It’s easy to focus on what’s broken. Especially in process work. But if we don’t reinforce what’s working—if we don’t recognize the effort it takes to change how work gets done—those changes don’t stick.
It’s a simple reminder, but an important one.
Where This Leaves Us
If APQC CONNECT 2026 made anything clear, it’s this: We don’t need more tools. We don’t need more frameworks. We need to get better at connecting what we already have.
Connecting:
- Process to actual work
- Data to meaning
- Technology to outcomes
- And people to all of it
AI might be the hare—fast, powerful, and impossible to ignore.
But process, knowledge, and intentional design? That’s the tortoise.
And the organizations that figure out how to bring those together—how to truly bridge, streamline, and flow—won’t just move faster. They’ll move smarter.