Give your promises an operating system (not that kind)

18 Apr Give your promises an operating system (not that kind)

Reading Time: 3 minutes

In a past episode of his podcast Making Sense, Sam Harris talked to author and NY Times columnist David Brooks about his book The Road to Character. The episode was titled ‘On Becoming a Better Person’* and my ears perked up when it landed on promises.

David commented,

Self-improvement is part of being an adult, but being faithful to one’s promises may be a more important part; what you choose to promise faithfulness to and then how you execute on them … We make a lot of decisions where the act of making the decision changes who we are. And you can’t go back … It changes the self. And you have no data about who that future self is going to be and what it’s going to be like, and so it makes big decisions hard to do.

Building on that point, Harris added that this flow (of promises) has to be regulated by a values system, so among the constant buffeting of thoughts, desires and whims, you will still have some sense of a map to guide you.

Over the past few years I’ve interviewed dozens of people about promises. Asking how they make them and what gets in the way of keeping them. And while crunching what I’ve learned into something more coherent than ‘promises are hard’, what Brooks and Harris allude to makes a decent starting place.

Brooks’ point focuses on personal character, but why stop there? The character of an organisation collects the characters of the people in it. So using the points he and Harris make can help us better understand the minefield of promises and how an organisation’s values can help navigate them.

Brooks’ observations capture a central struggle with promises that emerged from my interviews. A lack of deliberation and consciousness in making them, and how being faithful to your promises (or not) will change the future, often rippling out in ways you can’t fathom at the time.

For all the talk about where the organisation wants to land in five years, remarkably little thought goes into the relationship between making promises today and that future self. Which is where values earn their keep.

Only real ones matter. So if yours are only a poster on the wall, stop reading now and figure them out. Because in addition to being ‘how we do things around here’, they are a handy guide to help you navigate your promises from today so you recognise that future self.

Put another way, if values are how we do things around here and culture is those things done on repeat, then promises are the face of those things to the world.

Let’s say you make a promise about when you will finish something. Here’s where whim and desire raise their heads. You might say, “I need to get it to them as quickly as possible, so I’ll just say Tuesday, then it’s off my plate for the next few days.” And as Tuesday approaches, you realise it’s going to be hard to keep that promise. There’s more to do than you thought. Do you let Tuesday go by and hope they don’t notice; make the call and beg more time; or drop everything else and hunker down to make the date?

Avoiding those embarrassing and awkward options. What if you’d employed your values when thinking about the promise before you made it? Let’s say you have a value of ‘open communication’ and use it to guide you to a conversation about when the work is needed and the effort required to get it done.

Of course you can’t examine every action and decision. With small ones especially troublesome—we usually make time to examine the big ones. Which is why real values are so important. Embedded and part of your organisation’s collective character, they provide an operating system for making promises you can keep.

Brooks notes, “You can’t go back,” and the march of time is relentless. So rather than be mired in regret and blowback from broken promises, use some values discipline to make sure the promises you’re making hold up and get you where you want to land.

Thanks for reading.