The Weakness Of Weak Commissives
Commissives, vows and pledges, are a peculiar class of rhetorical tool.
I’ll argue that their predictive value vary by culture.
Commissives as a cultural product
I credit Liubertė and Dimov (2021) for telling me what a commissive is, and Trott (2013) for explaining just how important they are in American culture.
A commissive is a vow, pledge, or a promise. I use the com- prefix to remember it. The com- prefix signals ideas like come together, commingle, community, or commitment.
Trott highlights the difference between British culture, in which its fashionable to not commit, and American, where it’s expected. In America, you have to be all in. You have got to be stoked. To borrow from Komori (2015): it’s to have ones’ head, heart, and hips aligned. Or, to link back to Voss and Raz (2016), there is a fine distinction between the Three Yes’: Yes I commit, Yes I intent to fail, Yes screw you. For Americans, a Yes needs to be Yes: I commit.
Despite how cheap commissive statements are to manufacture, many Americans find them persuasive. And isn’t that curious?
Commissives as tools
Commissives, like any tool, can serve to help you realize an objective or work as you intend them, and they have an actual effect on the receiver. You may intend to use the hammer on an steel nail, but may have the effect of hitting your thumb. A commissive may have be used with the intent of communicating one thing, such as the intent to commit to a course of action, while having quite a different effect on the listener, such as doubt.
Consider the following stripped down dialogues:
Speaker A: “If you do X, then I will do Y.”
Speaker B: “I will do X.”
Speaker A: “Then I will do Y.”
Speaker B: “I believe that you will succeed.”
And the following potential outcomes later in time. Here’s outcome A:
Speaker B: “You did not succeed.”
Speaker A: “I did not say that I would succeed.”
Speaker B: “But you promised.”
Speaker A: “I promised that I would do Y. I did Y. Our combined efforts did not have the outcome that you expected.”
Speaker B: “That’s an excuse.”
Speaker A: “It is a statement of fact.”
Or the more common variant, outcome B:
Speaker B: “You did not do Y.”
Speaker A: “You did not do X.”
Speaker B: “But you promised.”
Speaker A: “As did you.”
Speaker B: “I did not promise.”
Or the unfortunately less common outcome C:
Speaker B: “You did not do Y.”
Speaker A: “I tried to do Y, and I failed at completing Y.”
Speaker B: “But you promised.”
Speaker A: “And I failed. I have learned a lot and will adjust my estimates in the future.”
Or the rarely stated outcome D:
Speaker B: “You did not do Y.”
Speaker A: “I never intended to do Y.”
Speaker B: “But you promised.”
Speaker A: “Would you have done X if I had not promised to do Y?”
Speaker B: “No.”
Speaker A: “I got what I wanted.”
English is considerably less specific than French.
I end up using a lot more English words to describe intent than I do in French. Even in these abbreviated, agonized, English dialogues — you can spot the opportunity for even honest, well-meaning, well-intentioned, actors to fail. Even Speaker A may not even be aware of the full range of consequences of using a commissive to secure the dialogue in outcome D!
Weak commissives
A conditional transforms a yes into a maybe.
“Yes. If this happens, then I will do that” is equivalent to “Maybe. If something happens, then I will do that.”
It may very well be that a lot of people hear the YES and don’t remember the IF. If Yes is maybe, then why not say maybe?
Perhaps a maybe is sometimes misheard as a no. There’s a common sales psychology tactic: to consider a declaration of NO from a prospect as “MAYBE, JUST NOT YET”. In response to a statement in the form: “No, I’m not interested. If pigs fly, then maybe,” a dedicated entrepreneur will put a live pig in a trebuchet.
And it may be that some corporate cultures absolutely abhor the utterance of the word NO. If one does not have the liberty to say no, one resorts to saying Yes, but with so many conditionals that it amounts to a never.
Consider the statement:
“Yes, I will do that, sometime after the heat death of the Universe.”
That statement of Yes is an extremely weak commissive. I challenged myself to derive a weaker one. Maybe you can do better?
And so, by setting up traps around the word NO, an organization contaminates the very information it needs to create anything. Weak commissives are poor foundations to build anything upon because they mask their true underlying weakness.
Commissives as an input to and output of decision making
I’ve written so much about this Allison and Zelikow quote:
“…decision-making is fundamentally a process for assuming responsibility for a proposed action.” Allison, Graham., Zelikow, Philip. (1999) Essence of Decision. 2nd Edition. Footnote, p. 270. Longman, New York.
Cultures that deny that there is a process for assuming responsibility inevitably fail. They collapse because over the course of enough iterations, people learn, with great precision and accuracy, how much trust to extend to different people and processes. It’s, perhaps, through this process of iterative learning that networks may start off relatively tight, then edges weaken, fray, and disappear.
Maybe all human networks have a natural lifecycle of simplicity, complexity, then collapse into simplicity?
It would certainly seem as though it’s in the firms best interest to nurture networks within a barrier (markov-blanketing) to mark an insider-outsider distinction. It lowers information transaction costs. Otherwise, what would be the point? You may as well sub-contract every strategic process away. And so, it is awfully mysterious how some cultures seemingly self-destruct from within, deliberately, targeting and eroding the valuable edges that enable value creation and competitive differentation.
Misunderstandings about commissives may not be the root cause of such behaviour, but it’s surely an indicator that something has fundamentally gone wrong.
Rhetorical Tools
A commissive is a set of words. Words are tools. Commissives are rhetorical tools.
The most valuable way to generate value from a commissive is to act deliberately, with intention, upon issuing one. This is just a rebottling of the old wine from Voss and Raz (2016). When you run the truth table on multiple interactions, in other words, when you think beyond the current ten minutes to the next ten hours, ten days, ten months or ten years, the power of the commissives you get to issue in the future accrue more power.
And as such, they have significant predictive value in such cultures.
References
Komori, S. (2015). Innovating out of crisis: How Fujifilm survived (and Thrived) as its core business was vanishing. Stone Bridge Press.
Trott, D. (2013). Predatory thinking: A Masterclass in out-thinking the competition. Pan Macmillan.
Liubertė, I., & Dimov, D. (2021). “One tiny drop changes everything”: Constructing opportunity with words. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 15.
Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage.
Voss, C., & Raz, T. (2016). Never split the difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it. Random House.