Once the questions have been asked, and the answer have been learned from, the next step is to use the new knowledge in some way. There are essentially two ways to use the knowledge gained from the answers to your questions:

• Adapt – change your approach or process based on your new knowledge – you mix the new with the old
• Adopt – you use the new knowledge to base your approach or process on what you have learned – completely replacing the old

Actually, a third option is to not use the new knowledge at all. Unless the questions you are asking are such that you get either irrelevant or no new knowledge, this does not happen often.

Adapt is actually the situation in between no change and 100% using the new knowledge as the ground truth, by adopting as your new approach or process. This can be schematically presented in the following formula:

$A_n = A_o (1 – C) + K_n C$

where C is the measure for the amount of change, A_n is the new approach, A_o is the old approach and K_n is the new knowledge.

#### No Change – no new knowledge

If you do not want to change then you get:

$C = 0 \implies A_n = A_o$

This might indicate you need to think about the questions you are asking or how you are learning from the answers.

$C = 1 \implies A_n = K_n$

This means you have learned information that made you adopt to the new approach.

When you find some useful knowledge in the answers or responses you get, you can adapt you approach:

$0 < C < 1 \implies A_n = A_0 (1-c) + K_n C$

Thus you mix some of what you did before with some of the new knowledge.

In all cases this is not an exact mathematical formula! (this is just a schematic representation to indicate the difference between adapt and adopt)