Building Something Your Successor Cannot Undo

Abstract

Bindingness is not binary and it is not a matter of sincerity. It is a matter of what it costs to break, and the costs come in grades you can rank. At the bottom is policy — internal, editable, invisible. It costs a meeting to change. Above it, the published commitment : the same content, put somewhere a customer or a journalist can see it and where the previous version is archived. Publishing does almost nothing to the internal difficulty of changing the rule and a great deal to the external cost, because now reversal generates an artifact. Somebody screenshots the old page. This is the cheapest real upgrade available to most companies and it can be done this week. Above that, the contractual term — the commitment written into the customer agreement rather than the marketing site, so that abandoning it requires notice, consent, or breach. A term you can amend unilaterally with thirty days' notice is weaker than one you cannot; read your own change-of-terms clause before congratulating yourself on this rung.