Troubleshooting Your Agreements

Even the best agreements can drift. Use this matrix to diagnose and fix specific failure modes without restarting the whole process.

"People roll their eyes during the review."

The Diagnosis: Irrelevance. The agreements are too vague ("Be respectful") or too aspirational, so the team sees them as corporate fluff.

The Fix: Run a "Kill Session." In your next review, ask: "Which agreement have we not violated in 30 days?" If you never violate it, it's likely a platitude. Remove it.

"The manager violates agreements constantly."

The Diagnosis: Power Failure. The team has learned that agreements apply only to those without power.

The Fix: The "Exemption" Ask. The Facilitator must ask the manager privately: "Do you want to follow these, or do you want to be exempt? We can't have both." If they choose exemption, publish that explicitly.

"We have 15 agreements and follow none."

The Diagnosis: Cognitive Overload. Nobody can remember 15 behavioral changes. When everything is a rule, nothing is.

The Fix: The "Top 3" Reset. Wipe the board. Ask the team: "If we could only enforce three of these behaviors to save our sanity, which would they be?" Delete the rest.

"New hires ignore the rules."

The Diagnosis: Onboarding Gap. You are expecting osmosis to teach culture. It doesn't.

The Fix: The Handshake. Implement the "New Hire Handshake" mechanism immediately. Walk them through the list on Day 1 and ask for their explicit ratification.

"We argue about whether an agreement was violated."

The Diagnosis: Subjectivity. The agreement relies on adjectives ("Prompt", "Respectful") rather than observables.

The Fix: The "Video Camera" Test. Rewrite the agreement so a camera could verify it. Change "Be prompt" to "Log on 2 minutes before start time."

"Nobody calls out violations."

The Diagnosis: Fear of conflict. Enforcement requires courage the team doesn't have.

The Fix: Lower the stakes. Start with violations you can laugh about. Create a silly ritual (e.g., the violator puts a dollar in a jar, picks the next retro topic). Once small violations are normalized, larger ones become addressable.

"The agreements don't match how we actually work."

The Diagnosis: Aspiration over reality. The team created the agreements they wished they could follow, not the ones they actually will.

The Fix: Observe first, agree second. Have someone track actual behavior for a week before creating agreements. Base agreements on "what we can realistically do" not "what we think we should do."