Glossary

Promise Drift

Promise drift is the gap between what a company promises and what its customers actually experience. It grows quietly, through marketing claims, sales commitments, AI-generated answers, and documentation that no longer matches reality. It surfaces as churn, mistrust, and rework.

Promise Alignment System (PAS)

The Promise Alignment System is the method, from the book Promise Drift, for finding, organizing, and governing every promise a company makes. Five parts work together: the Core Promise, the Promise Stack, the Promise Gate, the Alignment Rhythm, and the Alignment Network.

Core Promise

The Core Promise is the one outcome a company commits to delivering every time, without heroics. It anchors the Promise Stack: every other promise either strengthens it, conditions it, or competes with it.

Promise Stack

The Promise Stack is the contract at the center of the Promise Alignment platform. Every promise a company makes, intentionally or accidentally, belongs in one of five layers (Core, Supporting, Conditional, Experimental, Legacy). The Stack is machine-readable, versioned, and governed: the single source of truth every other part of the platform reads from.

• Core Promise: The one promise kept every time, the anchor of the Stack
• Supporting Promises: The operational commitments that keep the Core Promise standing; when one breaks, so does the Core Promise
• Conditional Promises: Real commitments that hold only under stated conditions, and have to be labeled that way, internally and externally
• Experimental Promises: Betas, pilots, and ideas still being tested, not yet for customers to rely on
• Legacy Promises: Commitments from an earlier version of the company that keep resurfacing after they should have been retired

Promise Gate

The Promise Gate is governance over the Promise Stack. Anything that could become a promise (marketing claims, sales commitments, product roadmap statements, support scripts, AI training datasets, investor language) passes through three questions on Feasibility, Alignment, and Commitment before it reaches the Stack.

• Can we do this? Feasibility: Deliverable today, in the normal run of business
• Should we do this? Alignment: Strengthens the Core Promise and the Stack rather than pulling against them
• Will we do this? Commitment: An owner, a plan, and the resources to keep it

Alignment Rhythm

The Alignment Rhythm is the four-cadence operating tempo that keeps promise drift from returning: a Weekly Promise Standup, a Monthly Stack Review, a Quarterly Gate Calibration, and an Annual Promise Reset. Without cadence the Promise Stack and Promise Gate are static; the Rhythm is what keeps them alive.

• Weekly Promise Standup: A short weekly check that catches promise drift early
• Monthly Stack Review: Keeps the Promise Stack current as the business moves
• Quarterly Gate Calibration: Adjusts the Promise Gate to match operational reality
• Annual Promise Reset: Re-tests every promise against who the company has become

Alignment Network

The Alignment Network is every person, system, and AI that makes or keeps a promise on a company's behalf. It is the umbrella under which every Promise Keeper (human, software, or agent) operates from the same Promise Stack across the five Drift Zones (Sales & Marketing, Product & Capability, Delivery & Support, Documentation & Knowledge, AI & Automation).

Promise Keeper

A Promise Keeper is any person or system that makes or keeps promises on the company’s behalf: departments, partners, AI agents, documentation, and leadership. Every Keeper works from the same published Promise Stack, so a customer hears one answer no matter who or what they ask.

PAS standard

The PAS standard is the five-part test a promise is scored against in the Promise Alignment System. A promise that meets all five is one a company can publish, defend, and govern.

• Reality: What the company delivers today, not an ambition
• No heroics: Keepable in the normal run of business, without exceptional effort propping it up
• Alignment Network consistency: Read the same way by every team, system, and AI that touches it
• Outcome clarity: A specific outcome a customer can hold the company to, not a slogan or a feature list
• Decision filter: Strong enough to settle decisions across the company

PAS score

The PAS score rates a promise 1 to 5 against the five PAS standards: 5 meets all five, 1 fails nearly all of them. The Promise Audit scores both the Core Promise a company publishes and the one its evidence actually supports.

Promise Audit

The Promise Audit is the free report the platform starts with. It finds the promises a company has put in front of customers from public data, organizes them into the five layers of the Promise Stack, and scores them against the PAS standard, in about five minutes, with no setup.

AIdvisor

The AIdvisor is the Promise Alignment System companion, available on every page of the platform as a persistent panel and as a full conversation. It reads a company’s own analysis (the promises it makes, where delivery drifts from them, and what that drift costs) and answers questions about it in context, so the findings can be interrogated rather than only read.

Cost of Drift

The Cost of Drift is the platform’s estimate of what promise drift costs a company in churned revenue each year: revenue × churn rate × the share of churn that traces to promise drift. The share is a conservative assumption you can edit, grounded in the promises the evidence shows breaking, and the total splits across the five Drift Zones.

Drift Zones

Drift Zones are the five areas of a business where promise drift is measured, each with its own drift score and revenue at risk: Sales & Marketing, Product Capability, Delivery & Support, Documentation & Knowledge, and AI & Automation.

Action Items

Action Items are assignable fixes tied to specific drift risks. Each one names the work, the team member who owns it, and what closing it is worth, so reducing promise drift runs as a tracked board.

Hidden promises

Hidden promises are promises made to customers and prospects in proposals, contracts, CRM notes, and sales conversations, without ever appearing on public surfaces. They drift like any other promise; they are just harder to see. Connecting internal sources brings them into the Promise Stack beside the public ones.