Culture is critical to keeping the promises you make

My research side-project examines what wasn’t considered and leads to the downfall. So along with reading philosophical essays about promising and agreements, I’m an avid student of what’s missing when people fail to keep a promise.

That failure undermines more than integrity and reputation – it also erodes the brand result you’re trying to achieve. Let’s start with the promises underlying conditions.

A promise is between two people or entities and is always future state. It communicates what is intended. A quick aside – you can make a promise to your self, and it’s still two people. Your current self is making it with your future self!

The what and how and to what end of promising encompasses a raft of characteristics. And are where things usually come unstuck.

So far, I’ve identified six characteristics:

1. Time – how long do you have to keep the promise
2. Risk – to both promisee (them) and promisor (you) of breaking promise
3. Reward – to both promisee (them) and promisor (you) of keeping the promise
4. Resources – people and money it will take to keep the promise
5. Culture – values and principles you operate within
6. Environment – external conditions

In this article, we will look into #5 culture. Because in the ruins of organisations broken promises, ignoring culture too often sits at the heart of the failure.

Culture is, first and foremost, how we do things. Keeping a promise is entirely made up of doing, so the connection between the two should be obvious. But not so fast. Because alongside the reality of the culture is the aspiration we paint our culture with.

I’ve yet to work with an organisation who doesn’t harbour some level of delusion about their culture. Rather than striving for improvement across whatever attributes seem wanting, wilful blindness steps in.

“We’re quick to adapt”, says the business mired in legacy processes. Now imagine an organisation stuck within that delusion and how it plays into a broken promise.

Among other elements, keeping the particular promise will require they modify several processes. The time is short, there are a sizeable risk and companion reward on offer. The people and financial resources needed are on tap, and the external environment is favourable.

And lastly, their delusion of adaptability tells them to go ahead and make the promise. Sadly the culture is not actually wired that way and mired in how they’ve always done things, the necessary shifts don’t happen in time, and the promise gets broken.

Culture doesn’t change on a dime, which is the main reason it is thorny. Anyone who has worked in an organisation trying to shift the culture and embrace new ways of doing knows the struggle it takes to make even modest moves.

Simply put, if your culture – how you do things, doesn’t support the promises you make, you doom them to failure.