A Promise of Value, properly articulated, is quite a comprehensive thing.   As a kind of definition of your culture, it’s too big to reduce to an easily applicable ‘mission statment’.   That’s why you have a Customer Experience Score – it embodies your Promise of Value in the actions your business takes on a day-to-day basis.

There are times though, when the Score can’t help, because the situation in front of you has never happened before, and could not have been foreseen.  Often these times are crises, when your people don’t have the time to delve into the Promise of Value for guidance.  They need something more immediate, concrete and practical, less open to interpretation.

This is where an Unbreakable Promise comes into its own.   It’s another brilliant idea from Brian Chesky which I’ve incorporated into my Define Promise process.

Here’s how it works:

Once you have your Promise of Value defined, in all its expansive glory, identify who the key stakeholders for your business are.  Obvious stakeholders are clients or customers, your team, your investors, your suppliers etc, but you can define as few or as many as you want.

Then for each stakeholder group, define a promise you will never break, based on what’s already in your Promise of Value.

Make that promise as concrete and measurable as you can.  Someone in your team needs to be able to tell in a split second whether it is about to be broken, and the kind of action they should take to prevent that.  It’s usually easier to phrase it negatively – “we will never…“, rather then positively  “we will always…”, but whatever works for you.

Then make sure that all your different Unbreakable Promises are in accord with each other – that by keeping one, you don’t break another.

Finally, make sure everyone knows them off by heart.

Unbreakable Promises are not easy to make, and there’s no guarantee they won’t be broken.  It’s impossible to predict every eventuality.  But having them is a great way to set the boundaries of interpretation of your Customer Experience Score.

Discipline makes daring possible.