EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 56Commitments

While most objectives are meant to be aspirational, where we aren't sure which will succeed and to what degree, and we can vary the degree of ambition the team strives for, there are always certain cases where we need the team to make what is called a high‐integrity commitment.

High‐Integrity Commitments

Few people like what I'm about to say, but if you haven't learned this yet about the commercial product world, it's time you do:

In all businesses there are occasional situations where something important must be delivered by a specific deadline date.

The deadline might be a major industry trade show–driven date, or it might be a partner‐driven date due to a contract, or a calendar‐driven date due to tax days or the holiday period, or a marketing‐driven date due to a purchased advertising campaign.

Realize that one of the main reasons leaders gravitate toward the command‐and‐control model of management—especially with old‐style roadmaps of features and projects delivered on dates—is precisely because of this need to know when important things are going to happen.

So a key condition to moving to empowered teams is that the teams be able to provide dates and deliverables when necessary—not just the low‐integrity dates of the roadmap era (because we really had very little understanding of what was being committed to), but dates the leaders can count on.

If you're used to conventional‐style Agile processes, you probably know that coming up with a high‐confidence ...