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: Tomas is Priya's performer and Sofia's customer at the same time.
Performer
The party who undertakes the work. Named as a person — Sofia, not "concrete" — because teams do not promise, and a promise nobody can be named for is a wish.
Conditions of satisfaction
Slab cured hard enough to take the rig, conduit run and tested, bay clear. What would have to be true for Priya 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
Hand bay 3 over ready for fit-out, by the 14th. Priya asks, with terms, and the loop opens from her side.
Offer
I can pour that slab Thursday, if the conduit is in. Sofia proposes, with terms, and waits for it to be taken up — the same loop opened from the performer's side. Every price and delivery date a company publishes is one of these.
Agree
Yes. The 14th. Tomas takes the terms on. Only meaningful if declining was available; otherwise it is compliance in a promise's clothing.
Counter-offer
Not the 14th. The 17th, and I do the conduit first. 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
No — ask Aran, he has the rig this week. A clean no. It closes the conversation and frees Priya to ask elsewhere, which is what makes it a service rather than a failure.
Report complete
Bay 3 is ready. Tomas says the work is done — a claim, not a conclusion. It starts the acceptance; it does not end the loop.
Cancel
Leave it — the fit-out has moved to bay 5. Priya calls off a commitment already agreed. Her side of the withdrawal.
Revoke
I cannot get the slab poured by the 14th after all. Tomas withdraws from a promise he made. Costly, sometimes right, and far better said than quietly not done.
Revoke & new offer
I cannot make the 14th, but I can do the 18th. Tomas gives up the promise he made and makes another in its place. One act to say, two things on the drawing: this loop ends, and a new one starts from where it ended. That is what has actually happened, and a notation that let the loop quietly go round again would hide that a second promise had been given, with its own date and its own conditions.
Cancel & new request
Not that — this. Priya calls off what she asked for and asks for something else. The customer's version of the same move.
Renegotiate
The word everybody uses for the two above. Worth keeping in mind that it names a pair of acts rather than a single one, because what it hides is the thing worth seeing: the first promise is over. It is also why saying it out loud costs less than people fear. The alternative is not the original promise kept, it is the same withdrawal with nobody told.
A counter-offer is this move before anybody has agreed. These two are it afterwards.
Declare satisfaction
Yes, that was it. Priya says the conditions were met. The only act that closes a loop.
Declare dissatisfaction
No — the conduit runs where my bench goes. Priya 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.
Commit to commit
What to say when none of agree, counter-offer or decline is yet honest: I cannot answer today, and I will answer by Thursday. Flores names it as the move that silence stands in for, and it is not a fifth act — it is an ordinary promise about the answer, with its own conditions of satisfaction and its own date. Draw it as a small loop hanging off the agreement moment, and the wait for the answer starts counting like any other work.
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 the network is designed to have a system perform on behalf of one of the two parties: the threshold clears it, the job fires, the approval goes through under the limit. Nobody has left the loop. The person it acts for still asked, or still owes it, and is still the one answerable — what they have done is delegate that one act. Automating it is usually right, and drawing it differently is not a warning. It is so the design can be asked the two questions delegation makes worth asking: could the person it acts for have stepped in here, and who accepts what comes out.
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.
Mood
The predisposition a conversation is held in — resignation, ambition, distrust, resolve. Not how somebody happens to feel that morning, and not a fact about their character: it is the ground the asking and the answering stand on, and it settles which answers are available before anybody speaks. A request made in distrust and the same request made in resolve are not the same request, and the second one can be declined.
Assessment
A judgement, as against an assertion. The slab is cured is an assertion: it can be checked, and it is true or false. Tomas is unreliable cannot be checked and is neither — it is grounded or ungrounded. Most of what gets said about people at work is an assessment wearing an assertion's clothes, and an ungrounded one is a common reason a commitment was never offered to somebody in the first place.
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.
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.