provisional plan promise

Three Words to Transform How You Communicate Expectations.

Does this situation sound familiar? You’re in a conversation where you throw out an idea as the team leader, finding out only a few days later that someone had taken the initiative to start working on it when it was only an idea. Or maybe you, as a team member, thought that something your leader shared was ready to be executed, only to find out after you started working on it that your leader did not intend for you to complete it.

A lack of clarity in communication is one of the most significant sources of misalignment, drama, and performance issues inside any team. For this reason, leaders must effectively communicate and clarify expectations and plans with their team to stay focused, productive, and on the same page.

If you’ve ever felt a disconnect with your coworkers, maybe you’re not speaking each other’s language. Different personalities have different ways of communicating. On any team, certain personality types tend to live in the “what if?” They love discussing the future and dreaming about where we are going and how we’ll get there. Other personalities are more focused on the here and now. The thrill of the “new” for them can often feel more like dread. This gap can cause a breakdown in communication.

Undisciplined communication and excitement can come across as heavy-handed on one end if it feels like an insensitive directive. Conversely, it can feel flaky when the ideas don’t always come to fruition. I have often experienced this miscommunication when I share a future-oriented idea with someone on my team. The problem wasn’t the idea; instead, it was the perception of that idea as something that needed to be acted upon when all I was doing was dreaming aloud.

We at RethinkWork teach a simple leadership tool that can help resolve this issue. It’s called Provisional, Plan, Promise.

This tool helps us clarify our expectations:

Provisional means that you’re just thinking out loud. The ideas shared may or may not happen, and nothing is being asked of the recipient.

Plan means that the stated ideas/goals are the direction the team/individual should be moving toward, but specifics may change along the way.

Promise means that the idea is where everyone needs to focus their attention (and may require dropping things to focus on what is being shared).

These three simple words — Provisional/Plan/Promise — are powerful and can help your team discuss topics with clarity. As a leader, when talking about an idea, you could say, “This is only provisional. We are throwing ideas out there to see what sticks.” When ready to move to the planning phase, you could say, “Out of all of our brainstorming ideas, this particular one is what we need to flesh-out and plan for”. For the final stage – Promise – it could sound like, “Our planning looks really solid around this upcoming initiative, let’s go execute and promise to hit a homerun.”

By using this tool, everyone in your team will be able to speak openly without concern of being held to an idea. It also allows those who feel the weight of execution to relax and participate in ideation, knowing it will be evident when the plan is ready for implementation. Most importantly, it eliminates the confusion and frustration that happens when team members are operating on different assumptions.