The vocabulary
Every word here is one people already use loosely, so each entry says what it is being distinguished from. That is the whole value of a vocabulary like this: not new words, but sharper edges on the ones already in the room.
The shape
Commitment
A promise between exactly two people, with terms. Not a task, not an intention, and not a document — though it usually leaves a document behind.
Loop
One commitment drawn as a cycle of four moments, running clockwise from nine o'clock. It is finished only when it returns to where it started.
Customer
The party the work is for, who opens the loop and is the only one who can close it. A role in one conversation, not a job title — most people are the customer of some loops and the performer of others.
Performer
The party who undertakes the work. Named as a person: teams do not promise, and a promise nobody can be named for is a wish.
Conditions of satisfaction
What would have to be true for the customer to say yes, that was it. Agreed when the promise is made, not discovered at the end. The substance of the commitment; everything else is scheduling.
The four moments
Preparation
Before anything is said: noticing that something is needed and working out who to ask. Invisible in most systems, and where a surprising number of failures start.
Negotiation
From the asking to the answer. The stretch where terms are actually settled — and where a counter-offer belongs, rather than being treated as friction.
Performance
From the agreement to the report. The only quarter most software tracks, and the only one where nothing is being coordinated.
Acceptance
From the report to the customer's verdict. Routinely skipped, which is why teams can be busy for years without learning anything.
The acts
Request
The customer asks for something, with terms. Opens the loop from the customer's side.
Offer
The performer proposes to do something, with terms, and waits for it to be taken up. The same loop opened from the other side — every price and delivery date a company publishes is one of these.
Agree
The performer takes the terms on. Only meaningful if declining was available; otherwise it is compliance in a promise's clothing.
Counter-offer
Not that, but this — or not then, but then. The most under-used act in professional life, and the one that keeps plans honest.
Decline
A clean no. It closes the conversation and frees the customer to ask elsewhere, which makes it a service rather than a failure.
Report complete
The performer says the work is done. A claim, not a conclusion: it starts the acceptance, it does not end the loop.
Cancel
The customer calls off a commitment already agreed. Their side of the withdrawal.
Revoke
The performer withdraws from a promise they made. Costly, sometimes right, and far better said than quietly not done.
Declare satisfaction
The customer says the conditions were met. The only act that closes a loop.
Declare dissatisfaction
The customer says they were not. A real act with a drawn path, not an escalation — the loop stays open, because it is.
Silence
Having been asked and saying nothing. The commonest failure in every organisation, and the one thing here with no act at all. Deliberately: it is not an answer.
Reading a network
Network of commitments
Loops connected to loops: a promise that can only be kept by getting other promises first. What an organisation is, under the chart.
Missing moment
A moment that never happens — nobody asks, nobody answers, nobody accepts. Drawn as a dashed quarter, because the work carries on regardless and the absence is the finding.
Automatic
A moment a rule performs rather than a person: the threshold clears it, the job fires. Not a failing — but nobody promised anything, and it should be possible to see that at a glance.
Breakdown
The moment coordination stops being invisible, because something has gone wrong with it. Not a disaster: the ordinary occasion on which the structure of work becomes available to be looked at.
Work inbox
The same network read from one person's side: what is on your plate, and what is waiting on somebody else. A network is a diagram; an inbox is a day.
Names you will meet elsewhere
Speech act
A sentence that does something rather than describing something. Austin, 1962; Searle after him. The idea the whole tradition rests on.
Language/action perspective
The name for treating organisations as networks of speech acts. Winograd and Flores, from 1986; a workshop series ran under the name from the mid-1990s.
Conversation for action
The canonical name for the loop: the four-moment structure of a request through to its acceptance.
ActionWorkflow
The early-1990s notation that first drew the loop as four quarters with two roles. The company is long gone; the picture is the one this editor draws.
DEMO
Jan Dietz's method for modelling an organisation as actor-to-actor transactions, separating the acts that coordinate from the acts that produce.
Reliable promising
The practice, in Last Planner and lean construction, of only committing to work you can actually do — and saying so when you cannot. Same distinctions, different vocabulary, and a field where it demonstrably works.
Where they came from
The lineage, the books and the objection worth taking seriously are in Language is how commitments get made. If you would rather see the words used than defined, run the example network: every word above happens in it, one act at a time, with the name of the act on the screen as it goes.