How to Manage by Promises

Computerworld - In many organizations, customers hurl requests at IT like paperboys chucking newspapers onto doorsteps, says Donald N. Sull in this month’s Harvard Business Review. This lack of interaction between service providers and customers doesn’t lead to the kind of commitment that gets projects done. It’s no wonder that managers told Sull and co-author Charles Spinosa that they can rely on only about half of the business commitments made to them. Sull, an associate professor of management practice at London Business School, talked with Kathleen Melymuka about a better way to get work done.

What is a promise in a business context?

A promise is just a pledge that a provider makes to a customer. A CIO can be a customer when requesting data from finance but [is] a provider when promising IT support to the CFO. The roles change based on who’s making promises. The starting point is viewing a firm as a network of promises to get stuff done.

Why is promise-based management particularly relevant for a CIO in today’s business environment? Because we’ve got to fight against the tyranny of process. Lean and Six Sigma and TQM are overrunning organizations. I’m not saying those are bad; they are very helpful for a limited set of activities. If I do something a million times a year, I should use a process for that. But proc­ess is an obsession now. It’s being applied to everything. That’s insane. A huge chunk of a CIO’s life is not standard. Take a new ERP installation: You need all parts of the organization working together, you can’t specify all the requirements in advance, you’re not sure how the technology is going to evolve, but you’ve got to execute. That’s not susceptible to process. We’re articulating an approach that gives CIOs [the] tools to execute the nonroutine activities that are really what they get paid for.

You write about five characteristics of a well-made promise. The first is that good promises are public. Why is that important? When you make a promise in front of people, you’ve upped the stakes. Your reputation is on the line. That’s what leads people to deliver. Also, when you make a promise publicly, you can get good feedback. If the CIO and the head of investment banking are talking through something publicly, the head of retail banking might say, “If you guys are doing that, have you thought about this?”

You say good promises are active. What does that mean? Psychologists have found that people who have a chance to actively discuss a promise feel much more bound to deliver. But often what happens is someone comes in and says, “We want this functionality. I’m in a rush; I have to go.” If you leave it at that, there’s a lot of room for misunderstanding. Customers have to realize that part of their job is investing time to explain themselves well and to check and ensure that the provider has actually understood. It also means that both parties take responsibility for maintaining the conversation throughout execution, as when the CIO comes up with better technology to solve the problem.