Building Agreements, Not Assumptions

“Done meant something different to each of us.”

That sentence shows up everywhere once you start listening for it. In organizations. In partnerships. In relationships that seemed aligned until they weren’t.

Every collective effort runs on an invisible web of expectations: what we believe others will do, how we think decisions will be made, and what we assume matters most when trade-offs appear. When those expectations remain unspoken, disappointment and conflict are not anomalies. They are the predictable result.

Assumptions are like silent contracts. Everyone believes there is an agreement, but nothing has actually been said.

“I thought you were handling that.”
“I assumed we were aligned.”
“I figured you knew.”

This year, I am committing to building agreements, not assumptions. Replacing vague hope with explicit, human commitments with my team, with partners, and with clients.

Not because trust is broken, but because trust deserves structure.

The Pitch That Wasn’t an Agreement

This commitment was earned.

Years ago, I spent weeks pitching for what looked like a dream client project. They asked for a detailed deck with strategy, visuals, and sample deliverables. Then another round. Then a few more “exploratory” meetings, each with new stakeholders. Follow-up notes. Revised timelines. Draft language they could “react to.”

Each step felt like momentum. They spoke in the language of partnership.

“We really see you as a collaborator.”
“We’re almost there.”
“Can you bring two or three more options next time?”

So I did. I stayed up late refining concepts. I revised slides. I shaped their story. Somewhere along the way, my language shifted from they to we.

We’ll launch this in Q3.
We’ll navigate the politics.
We’ll make this a flagship project.

By the third or fourth meeting, it felt like we were already in a relationship. Co-creating. Whiteboarding. Exploring possibilities. I let myself believe that the energy in the room was the agreement.

Then the emails slowed. Meetings were “pushed.” A decision that was “days away” stretched into weeks. Eventually, there was a short note saying they were going in a different direction. Or worse, silence.

They walked away with a deck full of my best thinking, a clear internal storyline, and a list of ideas they could reuse with someone cheaper or already on payroll.

They got free ideation.
I got unbillable hours and a lesson.

It hurt, not just financially but emotionally. Because in my mind, we had an understanding. In reality, we had no agreement at all.

There was no shared clarity about what counted as pitching versus paid work. No agreement about how many rounds were reasonable. No agreement about what “moving forward” actually meant, or how a decision would be made.

I had mistaken momentum for commitment.

When Assumptions Become the Operating System

This pattern isn’t unusual. It shows up in client work, internal projects, and early partnerships all the time.

Excitement creates motion. Motion creates the illusion of alignment. And before anyone realizes it, people are operating as if they’re already in relationship while the other side is still collecting options.

No one is necessarily acting in bad faith, but power matters. The party with more leverage often benefits from ambiguity. The party eager to belong or prove value fills in the gaps with effort, generosity, and unspoken hope.

Assumptions quietly become the operating system.

You can hear them in everyday frustration:

“I thought you were responsible for that.”
“I assumed this was a priority.”
“I figured you knew.”

Over time, these assumptions harden into cultural rules no one remembers agreeing to:

Around here, speed matters more than thoughtfulness.
Real decisions happen in side conversations.
Questioning direction is risky.

No one wrote these rules down. No one consented to them. Yet they determine what feels safe, possible, or worth investing in.

When things break, we blame people. Rarely do we name the real issue: there was never a shared agreement to begin with.

Agreements as Quiet Infrastructure

An agreement is not just a contract or a policy. It is a shared understanding that lives in relationship.

It answers a few simple but consequential questions:

• What are we doing together?

• Why does it matter?

• How will we behave along the way?

• What will we do when things get difficult?

Real agreement exists when everyone involved can describe it in their own words, revisit it without defensiveness, and understands what happens if it isn’t met.

Assumptions live in the gaps. Agreements live in the open.

Each explicit agreement is a small act of care. It says: I respect you enough to name what matters to me, and to hear what matters to you.

In a moment marked by mistrust and fragmentation, agreements are quiet infrastructure. They don’t remove uncertainty, but they give us something solid to stand on together.

What Strong Agreements Actually Require

Building agreements can feel slow because it asks us to speak out loud about things we often treat as obvious: boundaries, definitions of “done,” decision rights, and timelines. What values actually look like in practice.

When urgency is high, this kind of conversation can feel like friction.

“Do we really need to spell this out?”
“Can’t we just get started?”

But skipping agreement-building doesn’t remove friction. It pushes it downstream, into moments when the stakes are higher, and repair is harder.

When I try to turn assumptions into agreements now, I return to a few practices.

I make the work concrete. I move from fuzzy labels to a visible scope. I name what is included, what is not, and how completion will be recognized.

I name the purpose clearly enough to guide trade-offs. A shared reason for the work becomes a compass when conditions change.

I translate values into observable behaviour. Not “respect,” but response times. Not “collaboration,” but how disagreement is handled.

And I decide in advance how strain will be addressed. Deadlines slip. Capacity changes. Feelings get bruised. Strong agreements do not pretend otherwise. They name the response before it is needed.

None of this prevents difficulty. It prevents confusion when difficulty arrives.

Choosing Care Over Drift

Let’s be honest. There is no way to eliminate assumptions. But we can decide what to do with them. We can let them run quietly in the background, shaping our work through projection and guesswork, or we can bring them into the open and do the slower, braver work of turning them into agreements. That work carries risk. Agreements ask us to name needs before we know if they will be met. Assumptions protect us from that exposure.

Still, I am choosing clarity over confusion. Care over assumption. Responsibility over drift.

In a time when so many working relationships are strained, agreement-building is not bureaucracy. It is a discipline of leadership.

Every clear agreement is a small refusal to operate on wishful thinking.
A small act of respect for the people you work with.
And a step away from silent contracts toward shared, deliberate choice.