Part III:
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

A contract will probably save your company from bankruptcy someday

Yet treating the ways we work together as pacts signed in blood is painful and oppressive

Say, have you ever collaborated with someone under a Service-level agreement? (SLA) ?
(I'm not saying SLAs are bad here, nor contracts in general, I'm just illustrating with a caricature, bear with me)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement

If you have never seen it, a common SLA for example is when you have some people giving you a hotline to troubleshoot issues for example

commonly they will have some contract that will state that they have to answer you within X minutes and find a solution within Y time

Now what usually happens here is that as soon as you send some problem to them, they instantly answer "received"

and then it starts a ticking time bomb over their head

and they try their best to solve your problem before that ticking time bomb explodes

In order to feel a little safer what they will usually do is that they will ask you some question, you see?

if they ask you a question they can put your problem as "blocked" which pauses the ticking time bomb

they can then work on solving it without a time bomb

but as you receive a question and your incident ticket is marked as "blocked" waiting for answer you do not know if the other person is working to solve your problem or really blocked waiting for your answer do you? so what do you do?

You answer the question!

And what do they do? they ask another question! right?

it starts a ping pong

now I am being very caricatural here but do you see the ping pong I am talking about?

Maybe you have been in both sides of that interaction

You could describe the above ping pong by many adjectives

but not really by adjectives such as "pleasant" or "efficient" or "agile"

right?

Right.

And thing is, friends, you may ask yourself
"why does this happens? why we keep doing this to ourselves if it hurts everyone?"

and the answer is
Every big Corporation fetishises control and the fetishisation of control demands surveillance and punishment https://twitter.com/malk_zameth/status/1359864207462838273

But thing is, we have MANY contracts, as a matter of fact most contracts are informal
under a fetishisation of control:
Every email becomes a contract

In fact, friend, here is the kicker:
Under a fetishisation of control:
Every estimation becomes a promise,
Every promise becomes debt,
Every debt becomes a contract,
Every contract becomes a reason to punish people,
Every punishment breeds fear,
fear makes us see all as contract

You could ask yourself "what can I do about this?"
We could have the same contracts, without changing a single line in them and yet change the way we behave around them

IFF we find our collaboration to be more important than them

But that requires that when we see others and ourselves punishing on contracts that we pushback against punishment, that we try to create a space where is safer to fail, but people also need to feel safe on the other side right?

I mean the contract is already there to make someone feel safe? if you hire somebody to fix your bathroom, you want them to feel safe but you also want to feel safe yourself ? that your toilet will be fixed?

So we kinda need a model where our mutual safety is not a zero sum?

Even talking about it already tiptoes into someone's safety! and hence once you'll do it

you will be a pain in the ass

And you will find that your enemy will be productivism
whispering its song on the ears of people that running is better than changing https://twitter.com/malk_zameth/status/1359869975373176838

This was part III of: https://twitter.com/malk_zameth/status/1359823008601374721