IDEAS

But I Meant To…

I say “I meant to” more often than I’d like to admit. I meant to call, send that, check in, get back to you. And the irritating thing is, I did mean to. Like most of us, I give myself more credit for that than is deserved.

We, as humans, judge ourselves by our intentions and everyone else by their behavior. I know why I didn’t call. Fourteen things blew up that day, I had a deadline, and you crossed my mind three different times. You simply know I didn’t call.

Yikes.

We make little promises all the time. I’ll send that tomorrow. I’ll check on it and get back to you. Let’s get something on the calendar. We mean them when we say them.

Then life happens. Something more urgent shows up. The email gets buried. The note we wrote to ourselves disappears under six other notes. Three weeks later, we remember the thing we were absolutely going to do Tuesday. The person on the other end doesn’t get to see any of that. They experience what we did.

This gets especially interesting in business because companies make promises, too. We’ll keep you informed. We’ll make this easy. We’ll take care of you. Our people are our greatest asset. Relationships matter here. Again, I think they mean them when they say them. We’re remarkably good at building systems around the things we know we can’t afford to forget.

We have a system for billing, for tracking sales, for processing orders, for measuring performance. If something affects revenue this month, there’s a pretty good chance we’ve figured out who owns it, when it happens and how we know it got done.

“Check in with Mary because her husband was having surgery” is considerably more likely to be living in somebody’s head. And memory is not a particularly reliable operating system. I had a Team Leader once, Tony, who said “The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest mind.”

I can care deeply about someone and still forget to call. I can genuinely want a client to feel informed and still get busy enough that three days go by without an update. Caring and consistently demonstrating that I care aren’t the same thing. Which is probably why I keep coming back to systems.

Not systems that turn people into tasks. Lord knows we have enough of those. I mean systems that make it easier for us to do the things we said mattered. Put the reminder somewhere I’ll see it. Decide who owns the follow-up. Make the update part of the process instead of something to remember when I have time. Let technology remember what technology can remember so the human can do the part that requires being human.

There’s a little humility in that, I think. I have to admit that Future Pam is not going to be less busy, more organized or magically better at remembering things than Current Pam. If something matters, perhaps I shouldn’t make her responsible for remembering it all by herself. Because the intention does matter. It tells us something about what we value and who we want to be.

The other person still has to live with our behavior. “I meant to” may explain why I broke the promise. It doesn’t keep it.