Defaulting to the Contract
Our sense of partnership evaporated when a disagreement led us to the contract, which only pushed us further apart.
Instead of having a difficult but collaborative conversation about our different views on project direction, someone pulled out the legal agreement to see who had the authority to make the final call. Instantly, the dynamic shifted. The contract wasn't written to help partners solve problems; it was a standard agreement focused on liability and individual interests. We were no longer collaborators seeking a mutual solution; we were potential adversaries in a dispute. Everyone retreated to protect their own organisation, and the spirit of the collaboration was broken. How do we create legal agreements that serve as a foundation for trust, not a trigger for division?
Connecting Learnings to this Challenge
This challenge highlights a critical failure point: when a collaboration's formal legal structures are misaligned with its relational intent. A contract should be a safety net for mutualism, not a trigger for adversarialism.
Areas of the Many-to-Many System that aim to address this challenge
"Defaulting to the Contract" is a direct result of an Infrastructure Model that lacks the right 'deep codes.' The following areas are essential for preventing this:
- Infrastructure Model: This is the core area to address this problem. The goal is to design a legal architecture (like a multi-party contract) that explicitly prioritises mission alignment and mutual resolution over individual authority.
- Deep Code Shifts: This challenge is a classic example of a failure to embed the shifts around "Accountability to Mission" and "Multi-Capital Risk." The legal agreement defaulted to old codes of financial risk and individual liability.
- Governance System: The governance process for resolving disputes must be designed to be collaborative before it escalates to a legalistic interpretation.
- Stewardship Approaches: Stewards play a key role in mediating disputes and reminding participants of their shared commitments, preventing a premature and damaging retreat to the contract.
Tools and Examples linked to this Challenge
Moving from a powerful vision to a shared, actionable plan requires more than just good intentions—it requires practical scaffolding. The tools and examples below are designed to help with this critical transition. They offer tangible starting points for co-creating your initial strategy, defining roles, and building the momentum needed to move forward together.
Legal Scope Sensing
A simple flow chart to help analyse the legal scope for innovation in your context.
Open details →Deeply coding governance structures: a flow map tool
A tool showing how assumptions are deeply coded into governance structures.
Open details →
Structuring a ‘mission space’
An overview showing how we structured and created a legal and governance ‘mission space’ that could facilitate unfurling.
Open details →Alerts
Alerts are the critical 'watch-outs'—the common challenges, tensions, complexities, and areas where we learned special attention is required.
Misaligned legal relationships to social agreements
If the agreements that you make in conversation together are then overridden by misaligned legal agreements, the group dynamics can be effected to the point of hindering effective collaboration.
Not inspecting the relational capacity of the system
Beware of going too hard and fast into polarising topics such as money before there is the relational capacity across the group to hold them.
Insights
Insights are the key discoveries that emerged from our work and point to promising pathways and core principles.
Stewardship Assumptions
We need to nurture a system that notices perverse incentives and externalities and accounts for them to create progressively better incentives and more capable deterrents, which in turn can better align different people with the whole.
Stewardship Assumptions
We need to nurture a system that notices perverse incentives and externalities and accounts for them to create progressively better incentives and more capable deterrents, which in turn can better align different people with the whole.