When can you change a promise?

24 Mar When can you change a promise?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Have you ever needed to change a promise? Committed and agreed, then circumstances went pear-shaped or something unexpected got in the way. You feel conflicted. Social practice says you must keep your promises. No matter what’s happening.

I’m guilty of that. My work is littered with encouraging words for how to make promises you can keep. I focus on how to think before you make them. Trumpet the cost of breaking them. And occasionally discuss navigating the fallout when you do. Yet, I rarely mention changing them. In fact, there’s scant guidance for when to change a promise.

Promises are central to how I define brand. It’s an animating force, putting value in motion. They contain and communicate what you intend. Yet, because they’re always future state, whether you fully expect to deliver or receive what was agreed, you do have a window to adjust.

So, should you ever change a promise?

I’ve worked with several organisations on core values about promises. We rumbled when and how to keep or change them. Which revealed people’s reluctance to even ask, worrying about others judging their integrity.

To help manage those concerns, we identified pragmatic behaviours which included setting sincere and realistic expectations. Obtaining permission to reset by communicating with others involved. And taking responsibility to renegotiate.

Stuff happens to even the most ‘sincere and realistic’ plans. Do you double down and keep the promise no matter what? Or do you ask the ‘others involved’ if there’s room to ‘reset and renegotiate’? Rarely do people make toxic promises they intend to break. So, people are likely to give you leeway if they can.

Yet, regardless of how you act. Failing to distinguish between Big P and small p promises can narrow your options to zero. In his latest book, Reset, author Dan Heath shares parts of a Jeff Bezos letter to shareholders describing Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. The idea usefully mirrors promises.

“Type 1 decisions, in his terminology, ‘are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible—one-way doors … If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before.”

Type 2 decisions, though, are reversible. Two-way streets. If you make a decision and you don’t like the results, you just undo it. “Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly…” (p130-131)

Big P promises equate to Type 1. Making them should involve careful calculation. Changing them is difficult, if not impossible, without serious consequences. Similar to Type 2, Small p promises get made more quickly and are easier to adjust. And breaking them costs your personal integrity rather than wider harm.

The idea of big P and small p holds for both promisor and promisee. And which kind of promise you are party to should figure in any calculation for both. Because, a promise is always between two parties, others response to changes you propose may first examine … Which kind is it? What’s riding on you delivering? Will changing it set off a cascade of consequences for them?

Big P’s are obviously harder to change. Think of the complex commitments that populate supply chains and outsource partner relationships, and mark commercial agreements. Changing them without fallout is difficult to impossible. While breaking them can have legal and financial consequences that cascade into multiple areas of your business or life.

Because small p’s are simpler, the power over the promise is more equitable between both sides. For example, an agreement about a shared task or meeting. So, changing them is rarely destructive, provided you do it before the promise is due.

Consider Sam’s question to Jenny. “Hey Jenny, we agreed I’d send you the report this Tuesday. But I only received the missing data today. Any chance of an extra day to look at how it impacts the findings, and I’ll get it to you on Wednesday instead?”

Jenny might say no. The data can wait for the next version. She needs the rest of the report to meet promises she’s made. In which case, you send it on Tuesday. Or she might say no problem. Even offering Thursday as a new deadline.

Contained in their exchange is the primary principle of how to change a promise—permission of the promisee. Yet, them holding that authority doesn’t rule out cooperation for a different outcome.

Poet and author David Whyte says, “Often the breaking of a promise is the simple coming to understand that the horizon has actually already gone, that it disappeared a long time ago and must be re-gathered and re-established.”

Substitute horizon for situation, and you start to see the conditions for when change can happen. If the landscape has altered and is unrecognisable from when you made the promise or will require herculean efforts to keep it. Perhaps now is the time to take a deep breath, open an email, and ask.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Fun fact, experiments show that brain activity exposes people who intend to break their promises.