Most of the commitments leaders track in their organizations fail at the same five places. Not at the moment they get made - that moment typically looks fine. Heads nod. Agreement appears. Notes get taken.
The failure shows up later, when the commitment is supposed to produce work and something in its structure has not been right since the meeting. I have spent enough time leading teams and watching commitments collapse to notice the collapse has a pattern, and the pattern lives at five specific points.
The five failure points
The first is clarity. A commitment that nobody could repeat back accurately a week later was never actually a commitment. It was an agreement-shaped object that the room treated as a commitment. The action it produced was vague enough that anyone executing against it had to fill in their own interpretation.
A commitment that nobody could repeat back accurately a week later was never actually a commitment.
The second is ownership. A commitment with no specific human attached to it has no owner. A commitment with multiple owners has no owner. The team that thinks both situations are fine is the team that watches the work not happen.
The third is measurability. A commitment with no way to assess whether it succeeded is a commitment that never finishes. It just slowly stops being talked about. The people responsible cannot tell whether they did it. The people relying on it cannot tell whether to trust it next time.
The fourth is an explicit date. A commitment without a specific deadline drifts. The work that was supposed to be done by next quarter quietly becomes the work that is being done now, or might be done soon, or is going to be revisited when timing works out.
The fifth is tracking. A commitment that exists in someone's head, or in a meeting note nobody opens again, is a commitment the organization has lost track of. The tracking does not have to be elaborate. It does have to be visible to more than one person and reviewed on a real cadence.
COMET
When all five are present - clarity, ownership, measurability, an explicit date, and consistent tracking - commitments behave differently in organizations. They produce work. They get reviewed. They land or they fail visibly. They do not slowly evaporate.
A useful shorthand for this is the COMET standard, which I built as the backbone of The Execution Standard: Clear. Owner. Measurable. Explicit date. Tracked. Five letters that describe what every commitment in a leadership team needs to be, if the team intends to operate against its own decisions.
Where is your execution architecture leaking?
The Execution Drift Diagnostic scores your leadership team against the five drift patterns in about four minutes - including which of the five commitment points your team most often misses.
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