Back in the 70’s, Holiday Inn executives chose a new marketing slogan “The Best Surprise Is No Surprise.” Their promise was that the American Traveler would experience the same quality of stay no matter where in the world they traveled. And by 1972, founder Kemmons Wilson was featured on the cover of Time Magazine – his company by that point franchised 1,405 inns in the United States and around the world. For us as leaders, whether its hospitality, or consumer goods in the marketplace, government or the non-profit sector, the most powerful promises hold no surprises.
There’s no worse surprise than when what’s been promised us in an offer doesn’t meet our expectations. Unless its when we’ve promised to meet someone else’s request but fail to meet their expectations. Trust is damaged, tempers are strained, relationships broken. Even costly penalties can be incurred or worse contracts are canceled with huge loss of time, finances, and even careers.
Surprise and disappointment can occur when a standard of quality is missed, or a delivery comes past due. But the greater difficulty of keeping our promises rests in our ability to negotiate clear, shared “Conditions of Satisfaction” up front before production or performance begins. Let me start with a couple of definitions followed by a terrific picture of the Cycle of Conversation that can help us as leaders to see the promises we oversee are fulfilled with no surprises.
Conditions of Satisfaction
Remember a couple days back as we listed the Components of An Effective Request? Conditions of Satisfaction (CoS) was one of them – These are the conditions that exist when a request is fulfilled that will have customer declaring themselves satisfied. One of the most important things about conditions of satisfaction is that they must be assertions: specific, measurable and quantifiable.
Assertions – our fourth Speech Act
An assertion is a claim that something is true or false through a tangible measurement using an agreed upon standard. For instance if I claim to be 6 feet tall, it is an assertion that can be determined true or false by using a ruler to measure my height. Okay, that assertion would measure up false – lol. And when we make an assertion we are committing ourselves to provide evidence for our claim. This brings an interesting aspect of assertions and conditions of satisfaction. In the midst of negotiating the CoS, there must be agreement of what evidence both parties will accept because a request is not fulfilled at delivery of the service or product, it is only fulfilled when the customer evaluates the work and declares satisfaction and acceptance. If the CoS is not met acceptable, the request can either be withdrawn or renegotiated. Next is a great picture of the whole process.
Cycle of Conversational Action
So how do requests, offers and promises all fit together for conversations that change the world? It’s a lot simpler and more intuitive than one might guess. Here is a diagram originally comprised from the teaching of Chilean political exile Fernando Flores, a UC Berkeley Univ. PhD who developed amazing work on Conversations for Action and Workflow.
While the above chart is fairly self-explanatory, allow me a helpful narrative. Lets say a purchasing agent for a chain of retail sporting goods stores has a request for a new piece of training equipment from its customers. Recently, media spotlight turned to a professional athlete excelling in their field. This athlete credited their success on a newly designed piece of training equipment. Due to the great publicity, the stores have customers who are requesting similar training equipment.
So our Cycle begins with PREPARATION, our Customer (speaker making request) would be a Purchasing Agent for the retail stores, making a REQUEST of a Manufacturer’s Representative for the design and production of a similar training product. The timing of fulfillment of this request would be important because such opportunities are usually short lived as media spotlights quickly shift and created other fads.
We now move to the top right quadrant where the Manufacture’s Rep would NEGOTIATE with the Customer to define what we term “Conditions of Satisfaction.” In our case, such things as all the “specifications” of the equipment, material and production costs, packaging, shipping costs, delivery date and locations would all be a part of the lengthy Conditions of Satisfaction. Once those terms are agreed upon and ACCEPTED, a PROMISE in the form of a written contact is usually signed between the two.
The Cycle continues in PERFORMANCE (bottom right quadrant) as the Manufacturer produces the equipment order to fulfill the requirements and deliver the finished produce on time (COMPLETION).
The final stage is ACCEPTANCE. Once the Manufacturer completes their promise, it is up for our Customer to “accept” or “decline” the product according to whether they determine that the Conditions of Satisfaction have been fulfilled . If the delivery is ACCEPTED, the Cycle is complete, the request fulfilled and the work accomplished. If the delivery is not accepted, this can lead to either a withdraw of the initial request or renegotiation of new terms of satisfaction.
How are you at making powerful requests or offers? Do you complete the full cycle by detailing the “conditions of satisfaction”? Do you obtain a true “promise” with a time constraint as part of the negotiation? These are all important factors that comprise the agility of powerful leader whose promises hold no surprises. If you have a few minutes, comment below about an experience you’ve had where promises were kept or broken because of the conditions of satisfaction (or lack thereof).
Tomorrow
Understanding the distinction between Assertions and Assessments is critical for powerful conversations that bring about Action and desired Results. Your leadership agility depends on it!
This post is part of the 31 Days of Leadership Agility series. Subscribe here so you never miss a post.
Coach Dave is a Leadership Coach specializing in elevating emerging and entrepreneurial leaders. He has a Master’s Degree in Divinity and years of experience in coaching. He is a father, and husband to Coach Sue. Learn more about Coach Dave here.