Introduction

Most working agreements end up as wall decoration. Teams spend an hour writing platitudes like "be respectful" and "communicate openly," print them on a poster, stick them on a wall, and never look at them again.
Three months later, people still show up late to meetings. Decisions still get made without the right people. Messages still go unanswered for days. The team burns energy on preventable friction because the agreements they created don't actually guide behavior.
The problem isn't the intention. But as Jeff Bezos famously noted, "Good intentions don't work, mechanisms do." Most teams rely on the good intention of "being respectful," but fail to build the mechanism that defines what that looks like. They skip the hard parts: making agreements specific enough to be actionable, dealing with genuine disagreement about priorities, and building in enforcement protocols that make violations addressable rather than awkward.
This matters because unclear expectations compound. Every time someone shows up late, every time a response takes three days, every time a decision gets made without input, the team loses a little momentum. Working agreements eliminate this friction, but only if they're concrete, consensual, and enforceable.
This guide provides a process that produces agreements teams actually follow because they created them, debated them, and committed to enforcing them together. It's built around three facilitation principles: generate ideas individually before group discussion, consolidate efficiently without endless debate, and surface disagreement explicitly so it can be resolved.