Working with a team on their positioning, I asked them what their promise was. I wanted to gain a better understanding of what value they were seeing themselves deliver to their customers.

They bravely set out to answer the question, but it was clear that they all had very different ideas about it. And coming back to the subject in a subsequent meeting they shared how unexpected that question had been to them. But also, how difficult it was to find an answer to that question.

As we continued our work, the question was doing its work. The team frequently came back to it by themselves. A remarkable example of this was a context within which it was very clear to them what they could promise in that specific situation. By regularly coming back to their promise, they were slowly becoming able to see all the elements in their work that were shaping a promise they would be willing to make. They also started to see how they could change their working process to make their results visible. They started to see how to make them measurable. Until then, they had done their work, appreciating the feedback they were receiving as well as the progress they were seeing. However, they relied on their instinct to make it quantifiable. They were not enabling themselves to see how their skills were developing and serving their customers. Nor were they seeing how their working approach helped them to make decisions ensuring they could achieve better results. These decisions were constraining their activity by shaping the space they would not become active in.

Along the way, their promise became an accountability system for themselves and a story they could share with their prospects and clients.