The SAP Activate methodology's Explore phase is centered around Fit-to-Standard workshops. The fundamental principle guiding these workshops is Fit-to-Standard (D), where the project team demonstrates standard SAP Best Practices processes to the business. The goal is to adopt these standards and identify any critical gaps.

A crucial guideline for the success of these workshops is ensuring Active participation (B) from business process owners and end-users. This collaborative, interactive approach is essential for validating the standard processes against business requirements, gathering delta requirements (gaps), and fostering early user buy-in and adoption.

A. Expert configuration definitions: This is a detailed output or a task performed during the Realize phase, not a guiding principle for designing the Explore phase workshops.

C. Validation by end users: While a primary activity and goal within the workshop, "Active participation" is the broader, more foundational design principle that enables this validation to occur effectively.

1. SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer: In the "SAP Activate Methodology for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition," the description for the task "Conduct Fit-to-Standard Workshops" in the Explore phase states: "The purpose of the workshops is to validate the predefined scenarios and identify delta requirements... This requires active involvement of the business users from the customer team." This directly supports both Fit-to-Standard as the context and Active participation as the method.

2. SAP Learning Hub: In the course S4CP01 ("SAP S/4HANA Cloud Implementation with SAP Activate"), Unit 3, Lesson 2: "Fit-to-Standard Analysis," the workshops are characterized as interactive, business-driven, and following a show-and-tell approach. These characteristics are all facets of the Active participation guideline, conducted under the umbrella of the Fit-to-Standard principle.

3. Book: "SAP Activate: Project Management for SAP S/4HANA" (SAP Press, 2020), Chapter 5, "Explore Phase": This chapter explains that Fit-to-Standard analysis is conducted through a series of workshops with business users. It emphasizes that "the project team shows the SAP S/4HANA system to the business and walks them through the process," which inherently requires the Active participation of those business users to be successful within the Fit-to-Standard framework.