Making New Agreements

It has been our consistent observation that many leaders in organizational and community life feel constrained by norms and systems that do not reflect their deeper values but which they feel helpless to change.

We ask our clients to reconsider their capacity to influence their organizations and communities. We help them to uncover both the conscious and hidden agreements that underlie great successes and intransigent problems. We then guide them in creating new agreements that more truthfully support their deeper intentions.

Our foundational belief is that all social, cultural, business and political systems and structures are based upon human agreements and can therefore be re-negotiated. Even elaborate systems, such as the global money system, are complex agreements made over long periods of time in many stages and for a variety of reasons.

We have designed systemic processes that enable us to help our clients unravel the sets of complex agreements that underlie their internal work and their interface with the larger world. Once the strings of agreements are understood, it becomes possible to forge new, intentional agreements that are deeply aligned with articulated values of the organization and the individuals in it.

We work first in one-on-one coaching sessions with a cross-section of leaders before moving to dialogue within multi-stakeholder groups. Our findings are carefully mapped so that clients can see a systemic view of the pattern of agreements from the vantage point of each stakeholder, as well as of the larger goal of the system. We explore:

What are the current agreements? How are they contributing to the successes and the problems of the organization or the larger system?
What if? What if we could make agreements that are truly in alignment with our higher values? What would those agreements be? What will it take for all parties to make them? What support will be needed to follow through on these new agreements?

The What if? conversations have the capacity to unlock unexpected creative possibilities, which we then help clients to turn into realities.