“If you can trust a promise, you can save a lot of time and effort. It helps you to form expectations, and that expectation is knowledge that you build up by having a relationship with something or some process or some personal device.” – Mark Burgess
Related Podcasts and Transcription: The Theory of a Promise
An excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: I’m in sales and marketing, and I mean sales guys never over promise, okay.
Mark: Oh yeah, don’t get me started. That’s a lie by the way, right, when you promise something that you have no intention of keeping but I think the key is that trust play an important role in promises, and I think that’s one reason why this notion of a promise is important because it’s a little bit related to knowledge, how much knowledge you have and if you don’t, you know there’s this great Russian proverb, the “Trust but verify” proverb, which just says that you can save a lot of time by trusting somebody or something if you, because verifying is expensive, right. If you have to verify, meaning you don’t trust anything it’s expensive to do that.
If you can trust a promise, you can save a lot of time and effort. It helps you to form expectations, and that expectation is knowledge that you build up by having a relationship with something or some process or some personal device. I think this is one of the important things about 20th century science was this idea that all of the theories in 20th century science were about incomplete information, having incomplete knowledge but still trying to make the best of it. Statistics came out of this. Trying to analyze the statistical variations in measuring the orbits of the planets but later got turned into thermodynamics by Boltzmann and then quantum mechanics, and then statistics apply to almost every area of modern life and this idea of certainty being sure about something super important.
We have varying degrees of certainty about things, but we still make promises nevertheless if we have some fair assessment that we’re going to be able to keep the promise. What I like about the promise thing though is that it doesn’t get too hooked up on this idea of a guarantee which perhaps is the sales pitch. You just guarantee me that this will be the case. It’s what people want to hear, but a promise kind of admits that you may not be able to keep your promise and there are all kinds of reasons, right, you may be unable to keep a promise, you may be unwilling to keep the promise. It may be beyond your control.
I always use the story of King Canute. He sat on the beach with his throne to ridicule this idea that kings actually had power and he tried to hold back the ocean by saying, “You shall not come in. The tide shall not come in. I decree it.” The tide has washed him away without too much concern. Being able to promise, you need some agency. You need to be able to be in control. You also don’t make promises about things that you’re not in control of and that’s the key, I think, of the Promise Theory. It’s kind of the rule, you know, “An agent can only promise things about its own behavior, the things that it controls.” You cannot make a promise on behalf of somebody else because you don’t control that stuff, and this is why, you know, look what I can do. This is want I can do for you is the way to start trying to put that together.
About: Mark Burgess is the author of numerous books, articles, and papers on topics from physics, Network and System Administration, to fiction. His new book is Thinking in Promises.
Related Podcasts and Transcription: The Theory of a Promise
CAP-Do (More Info): What makes CAP-Do so attractive is that it assumes we do not have the answers. It allows us to create a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services.
Lean Marketing eBooks (More Info): Excerpt from the Lean Marketing House