Over the past decade adaptive clinical trial designs have become an extremely "hot" area in the medical industry. In this talk we will review some of the basic principles of the adaptive design process both from a statistical perspective and from a logistical perspective (e.g. how does one interact with a clinical team to design and execute an adaptive clinical trial). We will illustrate techniques used to shorten trial duration, different criteria for stopping trials early, and mechanisms for adaptive allocation of subjects which allow more patients to be allocated to the most important arms of a study (arms which may not be known at the beginning of the study). We will also discuss the use of trial simulation in refining clinical trial design, which allows clinical teams to "test drive" the design to refine its operating characteristics and ensure the design answers the current research questions