Reinventing Contracts

Contracts have traditionally been written to sit in a drawer until they’re needed as a weapon in a dispute. A wave of experimentation is reinventing contracts as living, relational documents meant to be read, understood, and actually used to sustain a relationship — not just to allocate blame when things go wrong.

Featured Practioner

J. Kim Wright

One of the co-creators of Conscious Contracts Process. Currently the community manager.

Conscious Contracts®

Conscious Contracts®, was co-created by Kim Wright and Linda Alvarez (now Alala Linda) from a number of different influences.

The approach draws on business consultants Maureen McCarthy and Zelle Nelson’s “State of Grace Document” — a tool for capturing the story of a relationship while it’s healthy, each party’s working styles and warning signs under stress, and a long-term commitment to do no harm even if things fall apart — as well as attorney Stewart Levine’s “Agreements for Results,” a ten-element framework (intent and vision, roles, promises, time and value, measures of satisfaction, concerns and fears, renegotiation, consequences, conflict resolution, and the final question of trust) that reframes a contract around the results the parties want to create together, rather than only the protections each side wants if things go wrong.

Both Alala and Kim were trained in Restorative Justice practices. Kim brought the work of Barrett Values Centre, Appreciative Inquiry, and a number of other tools.

What if a contract could say, “I commit to your success. You can count on me. And I trust you to be committed to my success”? The process begins with a conversation about why the parties are entering the agreement and what they each truly want, and the resulting document opens with a recitation of those shared values and goals before it moves into legal terms.

The Touchstone

A touchstone was originally a small, dark stone that goldsmiths used to test precious metals: they would rub a piece of gold across its surface and read the streak it left behind to tell real gold from fake. Over time, the word came to mean any standard we return to when we need to know whether something is true to itself.

In the Conscious Contracts process, the Touchstone is a co-created statement of the partners’ shared vision, mission, values, and guiding principles, written in their own words rather than borrowed boilerplate. It is not a slogan for the website but a working tool, the place the partners go back to when a tempting opportunity, a hard decision, or a disagreement tests what they said they cared about. Like the goldsmith’s stone, it doesn’t make the decision for them; it shows them what they are holding, so they can tell whether a choice is the real thing or only looks like it.

ACED — Addressing Change and Engaging Disagreement

A key piece of the Conscious Contracts process is the ACED — Addressing Change and Engaging Disagreement (also called a Peace Pact or Harmony Clause): a bespoke, pre-litigation system the parties design for themselves, tailored to their own values, for handling change and disagreement as they arise. Fulfilling the ACED becomes a precondition to ever filing a lawsuit — for two Buddhist organizations Kim once worked with, the first step of their ACED was simply sitting in meditation together.

Living Agreements

As Kim puts it, these contracts are meant to work more like living constitutions that get amended as circumstances change, not documents thrown in a drawer until someone is angry. For a deeper treatment of this approach, see Linda Graham Alvarez’s Discovering Agreement: Contracts that Turn Conflict into Creativity (ABA, 2016).

Related Resource

Vested® Relational Contracting

A related approach, Vested® relational contracting, was developed by Kate Vitasek and colleagues at the University of Tennessee. Vested contracts are relational. They shift the focus of negotiation from “the deal” to “the relationship,” building formal agreements around shared vision, outcome-based economics, and a genuine “what’s-in-it-for-we” mindset rather than a win-lose posture. It has been adopted by organizations including Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, and McDonald’s.