Making Agreements Stick

You've spent time creating agreements. Creation is only the beginning. Agreements that stick require four ongoing practices.

1. Regular Inspection and Adaptation

Working agreements are hypotheses about what will reduce friction. Before leaving the room, pick a date 30 days out and send the calendar invite immediately.

At the 30-day review, run a simple retrospective:

• Keep: Which agreements have we followed and found valuable?
• Modify: Which agreements did we struggle to follow - can we adjust them to be more realistic?
• Kill: Which agreements did we ignore completely? Remove them.
• Add: What new friction has appeared?

2. The Enforcement Protocol

This is the conversation most facilitators skip. Ask the team directly: "When someone violates an agreement, what happens?"

Example Protocol:

"Anyone can point out a violation by saying 'working agreement check' and naming the specific agreement. The person explains their reasoning. If they can't follow the agreement given current constraints, we modify it at our next review."

This gives people a neutral phrase ("working agreement check") that refers to the system, not the person.

Facilitator Tip: Test the mechanism before leaving the room. Ask the team: "Imagine it's two weeks from now, I just violated this agreement, and you didn't say anything. Why didn't you?" This question surfaces the hidden fears (e.g., "I didn't want to interrupt") that will kill your mechanism if left unaddressed.

3. The New Hire Handshake

Agreements often die when a new person joins, violates them (because they don't know them), and nobody corrects them.

The Fix: When a new member joins, walk them through the agreements before their first sprint.

The Script: Ask them, "Do any of these seem impossible to you coming from your previous environment?" This explicitly ratifies the agreements for the new person and warns them about the culture.

4. Radical Visibility

If the agreements are hidden in a Drive folder, they don't exist. Memory is a terrible mechanism; visual cues are better.

• Digital: Pin them in your primary Slack/Teams channel with a title like "How We Work."
• Physical: Print them large on the wall.

The Mechanism: When a violation happens, you want to be able to point to the wall, not the person. Pointing to a document is neutral; pointing to a person is accusatory.