Putting mistakes into context. An introduction to your Promise System.

Hey there,

In a crisis, having some kind of process to follow is invaluable. It helps everyone to unfreeze and get moving on what’s important. But your ‘Restore Customer Faith’ and ‘Handle Client Mistake’ processes are much more than safety nets or lifelines.

They are one of the key ways your business can learn to do better at what it exists to do - to make and keep promises to the people it serves.

So today, I’m going to show you where those processes fit into your ‘Promise System’:

• How dealing with mistakes is part of keeping your Promise.
• How mistakes feed into improving how you make and keep your Promise.
• Why thinking about your business as a Promise System makes sense.

But first, what do I mean by ‘Promise System’?

For me, every business is a system for making and keeping promises to the people it serves.

At the highest, most universal level, that system consists of just two processes:

The first looks like this:

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In this process, you Define what your Promise is, Package it up to suit what your ideal clients needin the here and now, Share your promise with the world, in such a way that your ideal clients find you, and finally Keep that Promise so your ideal clients come back again and again, and maybe even refer their frinds and family to you too.

The second looks even simpler:

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In this process, you collect feedback from how well your Share Promise and Keep Promise activities are working, and use that feedback to change how you Package, Share and Keep our Promise to better suit what your ideal clients want and need:

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Mistakes (whether yours or your clients’) are one kind of feedback. As we’ll see, they get dealt with in Keep Promise, but can affect how you Package, Share and Keep your Promise to future clients.

Let’s dive into how that can be.

How dealing with mistakes is part of keeping your Promise.

Of course my diagram above is a gross simplification. That doesn’t make it untrue, it just means that to define processes that are practially useful, you need to dig down behind it.

One level down into ‘Keep Promise’ is going to look something like this:

As soon as a client says ‘Yes! I’m in!’ you’ve finished with Share Promise and moved into Keep Promise, and once you’ve welcomed them aboard and got everything set up, you can get on with delivering whatever Package they have bought into.

It’s while you’re in ‘Deliver Package’ that mistakes are most likely to manifest themselves.

And it really doesn’t matter whether the mistake is made by you or the client - it happens because the system isn’t working as well as it should.

So here, I’ve put both processes together into a single activity called ‘Keep Client Faith’.

Here’s what ‘Keep Client Faith’ looks like inside the bubble:

In this diagram, ‘Restore Client Faith’ is the same as the ‘Restore Customer Faith’ I’ve written about before, that deals with a mistake you’ve made. ‘Bolster Client Faith’ is my new name for the ‘Handle Customer Mistake’ process we talked about last time.

Ideally, you never get into either of these activities for a client, but if you do, there are only two possible routes out for the client: They either go back into ‘Deliver Package’, because the mistake has been put right for them, or they go into ‘Bid Client Farewell’ earlier than you or they hoped. These arrows are bendy because its not certain which of the two it will be at any one time.

The key point I want to make here is that dealing with an actual mistake for an actual client is part of Keeping your Promise.

‘Keep Client Faith ‘ is not an extra. It’s a possible variation. One that you will probably never avoid, but can at least hope to reduce.

How mistakes feed into improving how you make and keep your Promise.

If ‘Keep Promise’ is where things that go wrong for a client are put right for that particular client, then the place where you put things right for everyone who comes after that specific client is ‘Improve Process’.

The two straight arrows from ‘Restore Client Faith’ and ‘Bolster Client Faith’ capture this link in your system.

Whatever the mistake, whoever made it, you and your team will look at what went wrong and think about how you can prevent one of your team or a client from making the same mistake again. Then you will adjust the processes in your Promise System accordingly.

This is you using feedback from Keep Promise to improve the whole system, for everyone.

In other words, this:

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Is a more detailed view of this:

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But how could one mistake affect any part of this system?

Well, it depends on the mistake obviously. Maybe some examples will help:

Imagine you sell an app that people run on their phone.

You notice that your team are constantly dealing with clients making the same mistake - they keep hitting the wrong key when they are trying to perform a particular task.

You could say that the client isn’t complaining, so this isn’t a problem, but it is a client mistake, and even if it’s not disastrous, it’s annoying for them, and it takes up time for your team. So you might redesign the app so that it is no longer possible to make that mistake.

In other words, you might change the way you Keep your Promise, so that the problem disappears.

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Now imagine you’re Ryanair or easyjet, and a customer complains that there was no free meal served on their flight.

You could say that isn’t a mistake on your part as such, because your airline is no-frills. You don’t include free meals on any flights for anyone. And you make it clear that that’s the case in your advertising.

And yet, that passenger didn’t realise it.

So, actually, you did make a mistake, because it wasn’t clear enough to put that passenger off flying with you.

You might compensate this particular passenger for their disappointment, but you wouldn’t change the deal for future passengers - you wouldn’t change how you Keep your Promise.

But you might change the way you Share your Promise, to make the deal even clearer, so that passengers expectations are more accurate.

OR, you realise that this is happening a lot.

Maybe there’s something else going on here?

Maybe there are people who can no longer afford to fly a ‘full-frills’ airline, but who baulk at going full spartan.

Maybe your Promise is now relevant to a whole new set of people, with a bit of tweaking?

Maybe the ‘full-frills’ airlines’ losses could be your gain?

You do the research and decide to create a new offer - somewhere between no-frills and full-frills, close to the no-frills end, to suit this new category of client. In other words, you might change how you Package your Promise to suit what your clients need right here, right now.

Why thinking about your business as a Promise System makes sense.

It gives your business a different structure to build on. A structure that’s dynamic, rather than static. That’s based on what it does, rather than how it’s organised. That is centred around the needs of clients, not the needs of management.

This structure works whether you’re a one-man band, a small team, a partnership, a co-operative or a charity. It can work with departments, or outsourced functions. It’s the processes that matter, not the org chart.

You get more control over your business. When you see how the different activities in your Promise system are connected with each other, you can makes changes on purpose, instead of feeling like changes just happen to you.

Managing your business becomes less about getting people to do what you want, more about re-jigging the system to do what’s best for your clients.

In fact, once they can see the system, your whole team can get involved in this, with you, not just for you. Which means your job as boss changes, from telling people what to do, to enabling them to run the system as well as you can. Which in turn frees you up to not be there.

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But Kirsten, what about making money?

Simples.

Money is the side-effect of doing a great job at making and keeping your Promise to the people you serve.

Here’s what your Promise System looks like, with Money at its heart:

When you start your business, you have a bucket of money.

The processes you run drain money out of your bucket, or feed money into it. Sometimes, the same process does both.

Sharing your Promise drains your bucket. But at the same time, Sharing puts money into your bucket when people sign up with you.

Keeping your Promise drains your bucket, but if you do it well, clients will come back and put more money back into it. What’s more, some of those clients will also refer people to you, short-cutting Share Promise, and many of them will sign up, putting money back into your bucket.

And of course it costs money to Improve your Processes, but improvement should mean that more of the right people sign up, more of them stay and more of them refer you to other people.

As long as running your Promise System drains your bucket more slowly than it fills it, you are in profit.

That’s it.

Here’s what you learned today:

• Dealing with actual mistakes, whether they’ve been made by you or made by a client is part of Keeping your Promise to them. it's not a nice to have, it's part of the process.
• Using those mistakes as feedback, to improve how you Package, Share and Keep your Promise for future clients is part of Improve Process. Improve Process is how your business learns and adapts to keep abreast of changes in your clients and the world around you.
• Every business is a system. Certain processes are run, leading to certain results. It’s just that as part of getting going, business owners rarely think about designing that system. It just grows. But it doesn’t need to stay that way. You can reconfigure your business to consciously make and keep your Promise to the people you serve, and improve how it works on purpose. so that it works for you and your team as well as your clients.

This has been a bit of an abstract post, so here’s something concrete you can do to help you absorb it:

Draw out the Promise System model on a large sheet of paper (the back of an old year planner works really well).

Now, think about all the different processes you run inside your business, and map them onto this model.

What Packages have you already defined?

Which ones belong in Share Promise? Hint: this is what most people call ‘marketing and sales’.

Which ones belong in Keep Promise? Hint: this is what most people call ‘operations’

Which ones belong in Improve Process? Hint: this is what most people call ‘management’

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Once you’ve mapped them, ask:

How could I streamline this?

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Next time we’ll look at the beginning of Keep Promise:

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or what many might call ‘Client Onboarding’.

Thanks for reading!

PS. what did you think of this post? Does it make sense to you? Do you want help mapping what you've got against it?

Let me know.

It's all feedback!

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