I believe that some people (myself included, at first) feel that A.I. threatened the craftsmanship and hard-fought-and-won understanding that comes from engineering software over time, without A.I.
Exactly. I wrote in the article: "If a company stops paying you, you'll stop showing up. If you stop showing up, they'll stop paying you. That's the core exchange. Everything else, the speeches, the slogans, the faux loyalty, the theater, is dressing on top of a fundamentally transactional relationship."
A couple of things: The knee-jerk reaction is to think CBC and bi-directional accountability must be some movement or uprising led by subordinates in an attempt to check/curtail the control of their superiors, or to at least balance the scales a bit.
In reality, I see CBC being deployed by leadership (i.e., by leaders, top-down) as a way of holding subordinates accountable more objectively. As a means of enabling meritocracy. As a signaling device to show credibility and fairness. As a management system that reduces politics and favoritism by forcing clarity. And as a cultural foundation that says: what matters here is outcomes, not optics (or theater).
It just so happens to apply equally to leadership also, because every leader is also a subordinate to someone, whether it’s a board, investors, customers, or the market itself. Most leaders aren't a god-emperor.
I understand the sentiment. That's the current status quo: keep things verbal, keep them fuzzy, keep an escape hatch handy (i.e., plausible deniability). The whole point of bi-directional accountability (via CBC) is to shut those doors up front. Once you (two or more parties, e.g., leader/report) agree to "do" CBC, you're immediately bound by the methodology, which essentially means a work contract you negotiate and sign off on. Escape hatch removed. The system makes deviations visible, costly, and merit-eroding.
"Collaborate by Contract" (CBC) is my framework; it's new, and I'm publishing it piece by piece. It's not an "industry standard" yet, but it's more than theory: it's how I've learned to get execution discipline in teams where vague goals and shifting priorities are the default. It doesn't need to be practiced by the entire org; as with any other type of agreement, you just need two willing participants.
At the simplest level:
A CBC agreement is a short written contract between leaders and reports. Ideally, person to person, but leader and team is fine too. It defines the objective, deliverables, dependencies, expectations, and outcomes (i.e., success criteria). Work doesn't start until all parties agree.
A journal of contracts is just the running log of those agreements. Think of it as the team/dept/org's public ledger, what was agreed, by whom, when, and why, and ideally the artifact captures the negotiations and tradeoffs made to arrive at the final agreement. Patterns show up quickly (who delivers, who misses, where scope creep hides). This makes performance reviews objective and enables meritocracy.
Okay, things change, and sometimes new info emerges: agreements aren't stone tablets. So, agreements might include predefined checkpoints or "if/then" clauses. Instead of pretending we never change, CBC forces us to renegotiate in daylight, with both sides explicit about the cost of changing.
What leaders commit to: clarity, timely decisions, and removing dependencies. If a leader misses their side, say they don't secure the promised resource or they blow their own deadline, that's a contract miss just like an IC failing to deliver code. Also, by signing the agreement, the leader is sayin,g "I agree with this plan/strategy." In CBC, credibility runs both ways.
It's early, and I'm still publishing examples and tooling. But the premise is simple: if you can't write it down, negotiate it, and sign it, it's not really a commitment, it's just vibes.
Also, no, it's not Waterfall, because it's more about documenting "expectations" and "outcomes" than about specifying particular work activities.
I'm curious about it and your thinking on how to track things over time and see what has surprised us since we got started. It is useful to note down every time you (or your team) sets an expectation with someone (or another team) and then make sure you don't forget about that. It's also useful to be deliberate when setting expectations.
Having a public journal could well work for noting down when expectations are set and whenever there is a meeting of minds. I've found when tracking things like this that the amount of data can quickly grow to the point where you can no longer quickly and easily reason about it. The success seems to live and die on the data visualization or UI/UX.
Most orgs don’t actually have (or want) accountability symmetry because they’d have to give up the comfort of ambiguity. There's rarely a mechanism to audit past decisions, objectively assess people or projects, or enforce meritocracy. Performance reviews (for people and projects) are usually narrative-driven theater: selective memory, flattery, politics and spin, and a lot of “effort counts” rationalizations. Almost no one asks the simple questions (of a person or a project): Did what we expected to happen, actually happen? If not, what went wrong?
That’s what led to Collaborate by Contract (CBC). A desire to create a hierarchical map of decisions and commitments, and to force the hard questions and clarity upfront, and leave a record behind. Everyone in the org should be able to answer, at any moment: What are we doing, and why, and how, and with whom. Ideally, everyone in the org should be able to point to some artifact that can answer those questions. Without that agreement, you’re not managing execution, you’re managing stories (i.e., it's just theater IMHO).
You’re right about the root cause: power asymmetry exists. Leaders usually hold the levers, and without checks, accountability flows one way.
The point of CBC (and bi-directional accountability) isn’t to "arrest the King." It’s to remove the cover of ambiguity that power relies on. In most orgs, leaders escape accountability not because they’re inherently unassailable, but because commitments are vague, undocumented, or endlessly reframed. CBC closes that escape hatch.
Nobody in a position of power can be forced or even meaningfully incentivised to put checks on themselves so that their less powerful underlings can put their feet to the fire. This just doesn't happen. Saying that "CBC closes that escape hatch" is wishful thinking.
The hard part isn't specifying or documenting management's commitments. That already happens with, for example, politicians.
The effectively impossible part is enforcement and incentives. As in: there isn't any of either, and leadership holds all of the power, essentially by definition.
This CBC concept reads like one of those Web 3.0 fantasies where some kids whipping up Ethereum logic think that this somehow will force the real world into alignment with their code.
This. Just. Doesn't. Happen.
It never has and never will, because the status quo is fundamental human nature and a game-theoretically local optimum.
Feel free to propose how you intend to simultaneously fix our biological heritage and imbalanced power. But do please show your work instead of just waving your hands in the direction of some unenforceable paperwork that will certainly be ignored as soon as it is inconvenient for those in charge.
The point isn't that people in power will suddenly volunteer to be "checked." It's that CBC allows leaders to "put their money where their mouth is". Leaders who claim to want ownership cultures, meritocracy, and outcomes over optics (i.e., performance without the theater) cannot continue to hide behind vague goals once commitments are documented, falsifiable, and visible.
That's the incentive: CBC makes actual objective performance evaluation possible (i.e., performance evaluation for people and projects). And if a leader resists that? That's telling. It signals something about their leadership and the actual culture they're fostering. CBC is for leaders who claim to want meritocracy and are willing to prove it.
History gives us examples. Andy Grove at Intel famously institutionalized "constructive confrontation" and rigorous OKRs, explicitly binding executives, including himself, to objective measures of performance. It wasn't a loss of power; it was the foundation of Intel's execution culture and competitive edge.
CBC is cut from the same cloth. It doesn't magically enforce itself; it makes accountability legible, so leaders either live their stated values or reveal that they don't.
> CBC is cut from the same cloth. It doesn't magically enforce itself;
True, it doesn't, then what enforces it?
> Andy Grove & Intel's execution culture
Great example, and what happened next with his culture, him personally and why?
> it makes accountability legible, so leaders either live their stated values or reveal that they don't.
It could make a lot of good things happen... if it was somehow enforced, if it was implemented properly and supplied with adequate resources. None of these issues have been resolved, the rest is a pie in the sky.
You're asking the right question: what enforces it?
Think about how societies enforce contracts in general. Governments could, in theory, just stop enforcing citizen/property rights or contracts. But they don't, because if they did, trust collapses, citizens revolt, and the system breaks down. Enforcement isn't about perfection; it's about enough stability that the system holds together.
CBC operates similarly. It doesn't create a new enforcement mechanism out of thin air, but it gives existing ones (boards, investors, regulators, peers, employees) something concrete to hold leaders to. Without CBC, there's no "thing" to point to when accountability is challenged. With it, there is.
And just like with governments, the possibility of negative consequences (talent attrition, investor pressure, loss of credibility) is what incentivizes leaders to treat the agreement seriously. CBC isn't pie in the sky; it's infrastructure for accountability. Enforcement comes from the same place it always has: the need for trust and legitimacy to keep the system functioning.
