The Book of Agreement

10 Essential Elements for Getting the Results You Want

Stewart Levine

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781609943226
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Negociación

Crafting agreements with others is a fundamental life skill. Unfortunately, we were never taught how to do it. The agreements most people make are incomplete and ineffective-they usually focus on protecting against what might go wrong instead of figuring out how to make things go right. The Book of Agreement offers a new approach. Stewart Levine demonstrates the superiority of "agreements for results" versus "agreements for protection" and outlines ten principles for creating agreements that explicitly articulate desired outcomes and provide a roadmap to achieving them. He includes over thirty specific templates that can be used to create this new type of agreement for results in a variety of organizational and personal contexts.

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PART I
THE FOUNDATION:
LAW, PRINCIPLES, ELEMENTS, AND
TEMPLATES

My personal mission is to help create cultures of agreement and resolution—places where people create agreements for results as part of the environment in which they live and work. A key driver for having people adopt any new set of practices is a solid foundation of principles that engage the participants and guide behavior. Chapter 1 explains and illustrates the Law of Agreement and the principles that flow from it. These are simple, undeniable truths about the way things are. Chapter 2 sets out the Ten Essential Elements that make up an effective agreement for results. Chapter 3 explains the three facets of agreement. Chapter 4 analyzes agreements for results and compares them to agreements for protection. That leads to the questions addressed in Chapter 5: What is the legal effect of agreements for results? Are they contracts? Do they work? Do they replace standard legal agreements? Chapter 6 provides an overview of the Resolutionary Model, for when the inevitable conflicts do arise.

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CHAPTER 1
THE LAW OF AGREEMENT

Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

—Thomas Paine

Although it was almost fifteen years ago, it seems that it was yesterday when I articulated the Law and Principles of Agreement for the first time. I was so excited, you would think I had discovered a new planet or hit a lottery jackpot. I was ecstatic because I realized how fundamental agreements were to all aspects of life and how much suffering good agreements could alleviate. I also knew I would spend a good portion of the rest of my life teaching, facilitating, and writing about agreement and resolution.

I think of laws and principles as universal truths that are very difficult to refute or disprove. The Law of Agreement and the Principles of Agreement are the foundational truths on which this book is based. Like gravity, they are simple and obvious truisms that, although usually unspoken, are always present. The challenge is to stay mindful of them and to live by them. It is very important to remember that although the Law and Principles are simple to understand, they are not always easy to live by.

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LAW OF AGREEMENT

Collaboration is established in language by making
implicit (talking to yourself about what you think
the agreement is) and explicit (discussing the
agreement with others) agreements.

PRINCIPLES OF AGREEMENT

1. The source of productivity and fulfillment in personal and professional relationships is effective collaboration. The more seamless the collaboration, the stronger the results.
2. We work and live in a “sea” (context) of agreements.
3. We never learned the essential elements of an effective agreement.
4. Clear agreements are empowering. They express a shared vision and a road map to desired results.
5. Clear agreements improve the chances for satisfaction. They set up the conditions that produce delighted clients, customers, teammates, colleagues, vendors, and family members.
6. Practice enables you to craft masterful agreements.
7. Collaboration and agreement for results is simple, but it is not easy. It requires thoughtfulness and clear thinking on the front end, before you move into action, and a commitment to get through conflicts.
8. No matter how clear and complete the agreement, everything will not be addressed—conflicts and differences will arise that you must be prepared to resolve.
9. Breakdowns are not a cause for alarm; they are to-be-expected opportunities for creativity.17
10. Resolving conflicts leads to new agreements.

Understanding the Law and Principles

THE BASIC LAW

Collaboration is established in language by making implicit (talking to yourself about what you think the agreement is) and explicit (discussing the agreement with others) agreements.

When we work with someone, take a job with a large organization, get married, buy someone’s product, or go out for the evening with a friend, it involves coordination. Sometimes we craft long and detailed agreements with other people, such as professional sports contracts, business partnerships, or executive compensation agreements. People hire high-powered lawyers to conjure up all the things that might go wrong and all the contingencies the future might bring. They do their best to protect us from the “what ifs”—what if this goes wrong or what if that goes wrong. They try to make explicit all that they know. Unfortunately, in the name of protection, they are fostering an adversarial relationship. That is the opposite of what a new venture needs!

It takes some experience to realize that much more important than the clarity of the agreement is the quality of the relationship that develops out of reaching and working within the context of the agreement. As long as the relationship remains functional, 18people work things out, and the legal agreement stays in the bottom of your file drawer. The real key to the success of the collaboration is the development of relationship and trust. It’s essential to make sure that everyone has the same picture, the same vision of the desired result, so that everyone is working toward making that vision the reality.

When we don’t discuss the specific understanding we have with the other person or group, the agreement is implicit. The potential for difficulty here is that different people will have a different implicit understanding of what the agreement is. This is usually the cause of conflict.

It is an interesting phenomenon that as lawyers get older, their agreements get longer. The reason is that as lawyers becomes more experienced, the catalogue of things they have seen go wrong expands. Let’s look at the principles, one by one.

1. The source of productivity and fulfillment in personal and professional relationships is effective collaboration. The more seamless the collaboration, the stronger the results.

When you look at your life and the culture you live in, evidence abounds of this truth. You can’t have an organization without the collaborative efforts of many. The arts of management and leadership are about marshaling and coordinating others’ efforts. It is like conducting a great symphony. This is also true for marriages, friendships, and families. Think of the importance of effective coordination between yourself and your spouse in a highly functional marriage. Imagine that same level of collaboration in a business partnership, work team, department, or branch of an organization. When you have effective coordination, you can feel the quadratic expansion of productivity. This is called synergy. In any collaboration, effective end results flow from tight coordination that produces high levels of synergy. Synergy is dependent on the clarity of the shared vision and agreements we have with others.

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The other critical aspect of agreements is their impact on both personal and professional relationships. Most of the satisfaction we derive in life depends on the quality of our interpersonal relationships, at home and at work. The clearer the agreement, the more satisfying the relationship. Everyone knows where they are going—no one is holding back. All of their energy is in the “game” of producing results, not fighting insignificant battles. Clearly, the opposite is also true. When the agreement is unclear, coordination is missing, productivity is greatly limited, and suffering and conflict pervade. The challenge is to be clear on the vision and desired results without needing to be specific about every facet of the project.

Aside from personal difficulties between people, much of my consulting work involves making sure everyone is operating under the same vision. Recently I helped take care of the conflict between a private agency and a department of state government. The only thing missing was a shared vision of what they were supposed to accomplish together! Conflict developed because this was not put in place at the beginning of the project. Instead, I had to do it after the fact. You can also think of an agreement as the vehicle that creates the container in which activity happens.

2. We work and live in a “sea” (context) of agreements.

You can view your life as a series of agreements. As you go through your day, try viewing your life through the “lens of agreement.” From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep your life is governed by the set of expectations you have as a result of the explicit and implicit agreements between you and others. You have agreements with all of the following:

• The husband or wife you share your life with
• The soldiers that protect your national borders
• The utility that supplies electricity, water, gas
• The market that sells you breakfast food
• The manufacturer of your clothing20
• The municipality that provides police protection and picks up your trash
• The day care center where you leave your youngest child
• The station that services your car and sells you gasoline
• The school board that educates your children
• The company that pays your salary
• The boss you work for
• The company that services your computer
• The restaurant where you eat your lunch
• The garage where you park your car all day
• The babysitter who takes care of your kids
• The pizza shop that delivers your dinner

3. We never learned the essential elements of an effective agreement.

Although it is hard to believe, because collaboration is such a fundamental life skill, our early schooling did not include a course in effective collaboration. We never learned how to construct an effective agreement. The only way most of us get better at expressing agreements is because we suffered in the past because one of our agreements was insufficient. This makes us cautious, and sometimes mistrustful, about future collaborations, so we try to get clarity around the things that caused us trouble in the past. Unfortunately, unless we shift our way of thinking as a result of our learning or experience, we just get more paranoid and protective as time goes by.

4. Clear agreements are empowering. They express a shared vision and a road map to desired results.

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When an agreement incorporates the needs, desires, and vision that each of the people involved is concerned about, you have the opportunity to express a powerful shared vision for the project. What is this collaboration about? What is the detailed picture of the result that will make everyone pleased with the outcome? It’s not about you or me; it’s about you and me! A clear agreement provides a road map to that vision. It details what everyone promises to do to achieve the desired result. The agreement functions to manage the project as a map that empowers and enrolls everyone in producing the joint vision. Think of the joint vision as a composite of everyone’s individual vision—the vision is a “them and me,” not a “them or me.”

5. Clear agreements improve the chances for satisfaction. They set up the conditions that produce delighted clients, customers, teammates, colleagues, vendors, and family members.

A huge amount of the suffering in this world takes place because of unclear, unarticulated, implicit agreements. In unclear situations, people don’t know what to do because they don’t know the results expected of them and what they can expect of others. This causes fear and anxiety. If we took the time at the beginning to express exactly where we were headed and the route of travel, everyone could rest confident, knowing the value they were expected to deliver and that the value others would deliver would take care of their needs. Everyone would know exactly what to do to fulfill their responsibilities for producing the desired end result.

Can you recall the Quaker State motor oil commercial: “You can pay me now and have your oil changed, or you can pay me much more later for costly engine repairs!” It’s the same way with agreements—you can take the time at the beginning and prevent the potential of a costly hassle later on. It is that simple! Nevertheless, it is hard work to change lifelong thinking and behavioral habits.

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6. Practice enables you to craft masterful agreements.

Working with any new model is...