A commitment is only worth something the moment you can show what has happened with it. Until then, it is a statement, made during a conversation, an annual report or a panel discussion, that has been left lying somewhere. The question this raises is not only whether the commitment has been met, but whether you can demonstrate that to someone who was not there.
Reporting on commitments means three things that are often organised separately: recording exactly what was said, monitoring when it must happen, and demonstrating that it has happened. If one of those three is missing, the commitment is not complete, even if its content has been carried out. Whoever can recount that something has been done, but cannot show when, by whom and on the basis of which agreement, does not have a report. He has a memory.
Commitments often arise outside the system that should be monitoring them. A statement in an interview, a response to a question from the floor, a sentence in a strategy document that a stakeholder reads as a promise, even though it was not intended as one. Regarding how you record a commitment there is no fixed procedure that works for every organisation, because it depends on where commitments are made and by whom. What is certain: if recording depends on the memory of one person, it is vulnerable to turnover, a change of role, or simply being forgotten.
A commitment that has been recorded but has no owner disappears in a different way: not out of unwillingness, but because no one feels responsible for the deadline. Who monitors a deadline is a question that many organisations do not explicitly answer. The assumption is often that the department that made the commitment is also the one that follows up on it. That is not always the case, especially not when the commitment was made at board level but execution lies elsewhere in the organisation.
Demonstrating that something has happened differs from stating that it has happened. Demonstrating requires a trail: a date, a status, a change that can be traced back to the original commitment. Without that trail, a report remains a claim. That is precisely why a small commitment that is not met weighs more heavily than a large investment that is not made. With the investment, there was never a hard promise, only an intention. With the small commitment, there was a statement, and failing to meet it is demonstrable — even to whoever notices it.
This problem becomes sharper during changes in leadership. A new CEO or CSO inherits commitments that were not his own words, but which are attributed to him as soon as he takes office. What you do with a predecessor's commitment and how you show it is a question that is often skipped over during handovers, while stakeholders make no distinction between who made the commitment and who is now responsible for it.
Not every commitment that is behind schedule belongs directly on the board table. Some are operational and resolve themselves within the line organisation. Others touch on reputation or on a relationship with a stakeholder who can notice the difference between what was said and what was done. Which signals belong on the board table is a question that calls for distinction, not for escalating everything out of caution. A reporting structure that escalates everything loses the distinction between what is urgent and what is simply proceeding.
Reporting frequency is not a matter of a fixed calendar that fits everywhere. It depends on the type of commitment, the stakeholder for whom it was made, and the risk if it remains unaddressed. How often you report on stakeholders is therefore a question about rhythm rather than frequency: when is silence a signal in itself, and when is it simply not yet the moment to report.
The Trust Baseline is built around this distinction between recording, monitoring and demonstrating. An internal survey and an external stakeholder survey place side by side what management thinks is happening and what is being said outside; the difference between them is the first outcome. A commitment tracker keeps track of which commitment must happen when and whether that has been demonstrated. A signal rhythm determines when something must come to the table. This is still under construction. Whoever wants to make use of this as soon as it becomes available can sign up for the waiting list.
Recording and monitoring commitments consists to a large extent of repeatable work: keeping track of statuses, flagging approaching deadlines, summarising what was said against what was done. Whoever wants to know which part of that work can be taken over by AI and which part remains dependent on human judgement can use the work scan from FTE TO AI. It calculates per task which part of the work is eligible for takeover, without attaching any statement to that about what this means for the organisation as a whole.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
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