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) and governing system 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 “Balancing Risks and Harms” and “Many Forms of Value.” 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.
We note that the Many-to-Many System focusses on, and therefore shares, infrastructural and process aids for these challenges. We recognise other critical facets including but not limited to relational holding, tending to power, team-building, facilitation and practice development could and should play a role in solving the challenges.
Tools and Examples linked to this Challenge
Creating enabling legal structures is a specialised but critical task. The tools and examples below offer insights into designing contracts that foster trust and provide clear pathways for collaborative problem-solving, rather than reinforcing adversarial dynamics.
Many-to-Many Agreement
Showcases the contracting approach, the deep code shifts and the legal commitments made in our Proof of Possibility.
Open details →Legal Architecture Experiment Log
An experimenter’s log showing the key legal areas we explored and how these connect to deep code shifts.
Open details →
Charting risk flows
A snapshot of how we mapped and understood risk flows.
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 social agreements a group makes are overridden by misaligned legal agreements, group dynamics can be disrupted, hindering collaboration.
It can help early on to assess what scope exists to align legal relationships and forms to the mission. Once you understand what is possible, you can reassess how far these conditions will undermine the aims and what is worth trying.
Ignoring group dynamics
Group dynamics strongly influence what a group can achieve together. Ignoring these dynamics can create a false economy, where actions taken fall short of their potential.
Insights
Insights are the key discoveries that emerged from our work and point to promising pathways and core principles.
Stewardship needs some systemic design
Good intentions alone are normally insufficient for good collaboration. We need to nurture a system that notices perverse incentives and externalities and accounts for them.
This is rarely something that can be done long-term by relational tending alone - some form of active systemic design is likely to be needed. This design can aim to create progressively better incentives and more capable deterrents for the behaviours, cultures and norms that the work needs.
Legal Architecture
Complex collaborations bring together various institutions and individuals through diverse legal forms, roles, and relationships into what we call Legal Architecture.
Many readily available legal forms and relationships impose ‘deep codes’ that misalign with a collaboration's intended governance, particularly concerning risk and power.
We can analyse our context to sense how far it is possible and desirable to invest into addressing this; if not, we can surface this tension and ways to work with it.