Underpromise, Overdeliver: The Greatest Lie a Business Consultant Ever Told

There’s a “best practice” that we’re all taught.

It constantly shows up in just about every “life pro tip” and “how to be successful” list out there.

And I hate it.

It’s this toxic idea:

Underpromise, overdeliver.

It runs rampant. I spy pages of Google search results for articles with headings like…

• Life pro tip: always under-promise and over-deliver
• The Art of Under-Promise and Over-Deliver
• How to Underpromise and Overdeliver
• Underpromise & Overdeliver – All You Need To Know

…that contain passages like…

a strategy that businesses use to generate high customer satisfaction

…and…

a good surprise is much better than a bad surprise

As far as I can tell, the idea was introduced in 1987 by business management author Tom Peters in his article Under Promise, Over Deliver. The idea fits under the umbrella term of expectation management, a crucial idea in the field of client service.

The premise is simple: clients and customers have expectations. The more your exceed those expectations, the happier the customer. The more you fall short, the more trust you lose. For example, you tell your client or manager that a design you’re working on will be done by 5pm today. If you finish by 3pm (2 hours early), they’ll be happy. If you finish by 7pm (2 hours late), they’ll be upset.

So, the logic here seems easy enough: if you can move the level of expectations down further, that gives you more room to go above and beyond, to overdeliver.

The trap of underpromising and overdelivering

In our previous example, you could tell them to expect a delivery at 5pm and deliver it at 3pm.

Can you spot the trap?

In order to underpromise, you have to know what you can promise, and then intentional set expectations lower than that.

In our example, even though you know you can deliver at 3pm, you tell your client to expect 5pm so that you can deliver at 3pm and “exceed expectations.”

That, my friend, is called lying.

The farther apart what you promise and what you deliver, the bigger the lie.

Those who regularly practice underpromising and overdelivering regularly engage in lying to people. I try hard not to do that to my clients, and I recommend that you do the same.

But even if we put the lying issue aside, there are still a lot of problems with this technique of underpromising and overdelivering.

The irritation of surprise

As a culture, we tend to value surprise, at least in the U.S. We love surprising our love ones with gifts and throwing surprise parties. The idea of surprise often goes hand-in-hand with pleasure and delight.

But for whom?

Surprise parties are usually fun for the people throwing them and the people involved in keeping the secret. What about for the person being celebrated? It’s hit or miss. Some people are delighted by the idea that their friends and family successfully conspired together to hide something from them for a long period of time. For others, even the moment of “Surprise!” being hurled at them is filled with shock, startle, embarrassment, and many more conflicting emotions.

Surprises hijack our cognitive resources. It’s a quick way to get someone’s full attention. That’s exciting for some, which is why it makes sense as a well-intentioned thing to do for a client.

But, in a society where the new etiquette is to text before you call, not all surprises are good. As many who work from home can identify with, there are only a few things more annoying that getting a 11am–4pm window for service from a repairperson and them showing up at 10am while I’m on a Zoom meeting. And they have the nerve to be annoyed because they “overdelivered” by showing up early!

Even some of the most heralded companies in the world are guilty of this sin. I’ve bought more than a few expensive things from Apple, from phones to laptops, all to be delivered to my house. In my experience, Apple never delivers on the date they initially said they would; it’s always been anywhere from a few days to a week early for me. While it’s great that I get my item sooner than I expected, it’s equally problematic. I can’t set a time that I know I can be home to collect an expensive item that might otherwise be sitting unattended on my porch for hours.

You’re showing them who you are

Like the famous quote from Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Each of your actions trains a client to see who you are. When you underpromise and overdeliver—especially if you keep doing this—you train a client to not believe you. I think Apple products are great, and I also don’t believe them when they tell me when to expect a delivery. If you constantly tell your client 5pm and keep delivering at 3pm, your client may be puzzled that they’ve learned you can deliver at 3pm but you haven’t seemed to learn that yet. That’s the kind of small thought that erodes your brand and reputation over time as it grows.

Again, underpromising is about lowering expectations. The more you do this, you’re literally training your client to expect less of you. That probably doesn’t lead to the outcome you want. I want clients and customers to have high expectations of me that I can deliver on. I want the bar to be high, not low.

Better than underpromising and overdelivering

What’s better than underpromising and overdelivering?

Promising and delivering.

In other words: doing what you said you would.

Do this consistently and you’ll be someone that everyone wants to work with, because they’ll have proof that they can trust and depend on you. That’s how you build accountability.

—Dan