This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Laurent Bossavit. Original Post: Promises Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts) Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Laurent Bossavit Latest Posts From Incipient(thoughts)

Currently, I think of a promise as a speech act on my part, which creates in someone else an expectation that I will behave in some specific ways in the future.

A commitment is more of an internal promise: it is an act whereby my own expectation arises that I will behave in some specific manner in the future.

Breaking a promise is failing to fulfill the expectations created by the promise. This suggests exercising special caution to monitor the expectations we create when we make promises: they may not be the same as the expectations we intended to create.

If a promise is a speech act which creates expectation, then I will hear a promise whenever I hear something which causes me to have expectations of another person's future behaviour. I will want to check that the promise I heard is accompanied by a matching commitment on the part of the person making the promise.

My own promises are only ethical if they are, at the same time, commitments of equal strength: that is, my expectations of my own future behaviour are at least as firm as the expectations I intend to create in others when I make the promise.

It seems to me that a group may perform promises and commitments, to the extent that it possesses the "coherence" David Schmaltz mentions in The Blind Men and the Elephant. No single person may make a promise on behalf of a group without coherence, because such a promise would not, in and of itself, create a matching commitment.

Promises and commitments are sometimes made explicitly, but most of the time they are implicit. For instance, when I ask someone a question, I'm making an implicit promise: I'm creating the expectation that I will listen to the answer. I may or may not have a commitment to listen. (In fact, all too frequently I frame something as a question without having any intention of taking in the answer.)

Many promises are made when we reply in the affirmative to a request. I suspect that many divergences in expectations occur because of carelessness there.

A project manager asks an engineer, "Will you write a unit test and fix that bug ?" The engineer agrees, "Yeah, no problem." She is focusing on the latter part of the PM's request: her commitment is to fix the bug. The PM's expectations are almost entirely concerned with the engineer's writing automated unit tests. If the conversation stops there, the engineer will fulfill her commitment, but the PM will think she has broken a promise.