working-agreements

Working Agreements Skill

Teams run on invisible rules — response-time expectations, camera norms, how decisions happen, whether 6pm messages demand answers — and every clash between two people's invisible rules gets misread as a character flaw ("he's unresponsive," "she's pushy"). Working agreements make the rules visible: a small set (6–10, not a constitution), derived from the team's actual frictions (not copied from a blog), phrased as observable behaviors ("we respond to non-urgent messages within one working day" — checkable) rather than values ("we communicate respectfully" — vibes), and revisited quarterly, because teams change and dead agreements poison live ones.

What This Skill Produces

• The agreement set — 6–10 norms across the friction zones: communication, meetings, decisions, availability, conflict
• The friction derivation — each agreement traces to a real clash it resolves (the trace is what makes it stick)
• The disagreement protocol — the one agreement every set needs: how we disagree, escalate, and commit
• The living rules — where the set lives, how newcomers meet it, and the quarterly revisit

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The frictions, honestly — the recurring clashes ("half the team answers at 10pm and expects the same," "decisions reopen weekly," "meetings start five minutes late, always") — agreements are friction-shaped or they're decoration
• The team's shape — size, time zones, remote/hybrid, the seniority spread; norms about availability and meetings are geometry-dependent
• What's already tacit-and-working — the good invisible rules worth writing down before someone violates them innocently
• The authority reality — is the lead imposing this or the team building it? (Built beats imposed by miles; the skill's process assumes a session, and the [workshop-designer](../workshop-designer/SKILL.md) silent-first mechanics run it)

Framework: The Agreement Rules

1. Derive from friction, not from ideals: each candidate agreement answers "which real clash does this resolve?" — the 10pm-message norm exists because of the 10pm-message resentment. Agreement sets copied from elsewhere describe someone else's frictions and get politely ignored.
2. Phrase as observable behavior: "we respond to non-urgent asks within one working day; urgent is marked 🔴 and means today" is checkable; "we respect each other's time" is unfalsifiable. The test: could a newcomer tell whether the team kept the agreement this week?
3. Small set, ranked frictions: 6–10 agreements maximum — the set covers the top frictions, and the rest stay unlegislated on purpose. Twenty agreements is a policy manual nobody consults; the small set gets memorized by osmosis.
4. The disagreement protocol is the keystone: every set includes how conflict runs — "disagree openly in the room/thread, not after it · escalate to [lead] when stuck after one real attempt · once decided, commit outwardly" ([decision-meeting-format](../decision-meeting-format/SKILL.md) dissent rules, socialized). Teams with this one agreement survive the failure of the others.
5. Living or dead: the set lives where work happens (pinned, in the handbook page), newcomers get walked through it in week one (it's the [onboarding-buddy-plan](../onboarding-buddy-plan/SKILL.md)'s best artifact), and the quarterly revisit asks two questions — which agreement did we break most (fix it or change it), and which friction is new (draft for it). An agreement violated freely for a quarter must be amended or re-committed; enforced-nowhere sets teach that all norms are theater.

Output Format

Working Agreements: [team] — v[N], next review [date]

The Set

| # | Agreement (observable) | The friction it resolves |

|---|---|---|

[6–10 · the disagreement protocol among them, always]

The Disagreement Protocol (spelled out)

[Openly, where · the escalation path · the commit norm]

Living Rules

[Where it's pinned · the newcomer walkthrough · the quarterly two-question revisit, calendared]

Quality Checks

• [ ] Every agreement traces to a named real friction
• [ ] Every agreement passes the newcomer-could-check test
• [ ] The set is ≤10 with the disagreement protocol included
• [ ] The team built it (or amended it) rather than receiving it
• [ ] The revisit is calendared with its two questions

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not copy another team's agreements — their frictions, their fixes
• [ ] Do not write values — behaviors check; values decorate
• [ ] Do not legislate everything — the small set governs; the constitution gathers dust
• [ ] Do not skip the conflict agreement — it's the one that carries the team when the others crack
• [ ] Do not let violations ride silently — amend it or recommit to it; a dead agreement infects the set