Adaptive fidelity

Fidelity to what a method would have decided in the situation actually present, as opposed to consistency, which is agreement with what the method did last time. The two come apart in any practice whose value depends on responding to the person in the room, because there the deviation is where the judgment lives, and a delivery that never deviates has maximized adherence to form while scoring nothing on the dimensions the method existed to serve. Adaptive fidelity is unclaimable until a method’s functions are stated rather than only its components, since a stated function is the only thing a departure from the script can be judged against. Hawe, Shiell and Riley put it as integrity defined functionally rather than compositionally; the practical test is whether this departure served the function the script exists to serve, a test that a system incapable of departing can neither pass nor fail.