Contracting and recontracting

A lot of relationship friction comes from faulty assumptions: two (or more) people each operating on their own mental model of what was agreed, who’s responsible for what, and what counts as acceptable, without ever actually comparing notes. Contracting is the practice of surfacing those assumptions before they become problems.

We contract with people all the time, and not always with a handshake or a signed document. More often we contract through a casual chat over coffee, a WhatsApp message or a quick check in on Slack or Teams. We contract with our window cleaner about when they’ll come and how they want paying, with a colleague about who owns which part of a shared project and with a friend about what time to arrive for a group trip.

Tom and Jade smiling and working with laptop

The word “contract” has been around for centuries. English contract law traces its roots to ancient Greek and Roman legal traditions, and the concept of binding agreements between parties is as old as organised society. But the idea of contracting as a tool for everyday human interaction – something we might use not just in legal or business agreements, but in conversations, relationships and all kinds of workplaces – owes a great deal to Eric Berne.

Berne, the psychiatrist who developed Transactional Analysis (TA) in the 1950s and 60s, gave us a definition that captures a lot. Berne saw a contract as:

“an explicit bilateral commitment to a well-defined course of action” (Berne, 1966).

Each word in this does important work:

Explicit: This doesn’t necessarily mean contracts have to be written, but what is agreed does need to be spoken or articulated in some clear way. Not assumed and not implied.

Bilateral: As in – both people need to agree on this (we’ll come to multilateral contracts later). And we need to commit to them, which requires opting into an agreement.

Well-defined: The course of action that we agree to should be well-defined; we should strive to be as clear as possible about what we’re going to do.

Crucially, a contract is future focused – it’s about what we will do together, to move forwards.

Berne also identified three levels at which an effective contract operates:

Administrative – the practical logistics of how we work together
Professional – our roles, responsibilities and boundaries
Psychological – the expectations, needs and assumptions each party brings

When I trained as a coach, these three layers became the architecture of every new working relationship. At the start of a coaching engagement, you’d sit down with the other person and work through them together. How do we contact each other? What’s in scope and what isn’t? What does each of us need for this to work?

It sounds quite formal when it’s written out like that. But in practice, it’s a really good, honest conversation, where the administrative, professional and psychological layers naturally overlap and support one another. After a good contracting conversation, both sides leave feeling clearer and happier about how we’re going to work together.

Recontracting

During my training and subsequent coaching, I noticed again and again that most coaching relationships difficulties weren’t really about the work. They were about something that either hadn’t been contracted properly at the start, or a contracting agreement that somewhere down the line had fallen through. It might be a misaligned expectation, an assumption that turned out to be wrong or a boundary that was unhelpfully fuzzy.

The fix, almost always, was to go back to the contract. Not to start over, but to revisit and to either make explicit what had been left implicit, or to revisit the original agreement and see whether it was still working for us both. We called it recontracting.

This might look administrative on the surface: “You’ve cancelled the last two sessions without much notice. Could we agree a cancellation window – two days, say?” Or it might look more psychological: “I notice you seem a bit distracted. Is there anything that would help this time work better for you?”

Either way, the move is the same. We name the thing, agree something new and move forward with greater clarity.

People Problems

In coaching we used to say that most problems could be solved by recontracting, and this is likely true of many, if not most, “people problems” too.

It might sound like a sweeping statement, but think about the difficulties that tend to simmer in teams and relationships: the colleague who’s making unreasonable demands; the friend whose version of “being on time” bears no resemblance to yours; the family childcare arrangement that worked brilliantly until it didn’t, and nobody has quite been able to say so. In most of these cases, something was never properly agreed in the first place, or was agreed and then outgrown. Very often, the gap between what each person expected and what actually happened is the source of the friction, not some deep incompatibility between the individuals involved.

Contracting resolves conflict by surfacing it early enough to actually work with; it’s the opposite of an “avoid it and hope it goes away” approach. The initial discomfort of an honest, respectful conversation (what TA would describe as adult-to-adult) is almost always preferable to the ongoing frustration of unmet expectations.

But what about when we need to agree on a way of working with more than one person? In that case, it’s not just a bilateral agreement that’s needed but a multilateral one. In the workshops and programmes we run, we always use a group social contract. We’d recommend the same for any meeting or group that spends time together. It’s a brilliant way of clarifying, from the start, what we can expect of each other.

Our typical social contract includes administrative elements (“we’ll finish on time”), professional elements (the Chatham House Rule, which sets the terms for what can and can’t be shared beyond the room), and psychological elements (“all questions are welcome”). Some elements sit across multiple layers. “We have a car park” for example is partly administrative, as it’s about how we organise the session, but it’s also psychological, as it signals that even if we can’t follow the thread of a question in the moment, we still value it being asked.

For a longer-term contract we might co-create it with the team, but even in a shorter session, we can suggest one and invite improvements. Once we have an agreed version, we explicitly check that people are happy to commit to it, maybe by asking for a thumbs up. People know what to expect of the space, and what’s expected of them, and that helps us all feel safer.

I saw a great example of this in a workshop recently – the facilitator shared a social contract with the group, and asked whether anyone in the group wanted anything added. Someone raised their hand: “Should we have something about phones?” The facilitator replied, “What would you like?” to which the participant replied “We don’t use them?” The facilitator checked in with the group – someone else suggested adding the acknowledgement that taking emergency calls was fine – and the group agreed and carried on.

People are far more likely to speak up, take interpersonal risks and ask questions in environments where they feel it is genuinely safe to do so. Clear contracting is one of the most practical mechanisms for building that kind of environment. When people understand how a space works, what kind of participation is expected, what happens we disagree and where the boundaries are, the uncertainty and ambiguity that so often produces silence starts to lift.

Contracts as living things

Berne’s three-layer model has been developed extensively by later practitioners, helping remind us that contracting is an ongoing and dynamic process rather than a one-time event. That’s the part that tends to get missed. We too often treat contracts as something you establish at the start and then put away, but relationships change and contexts shift. What worked well six months ago may not serve either party now.

Recontracting then is less a corrective measure than a regular practice. Good working relationships are living things, and the agreements that support them need to be alive too.

Ask for what you need

There’s something that can feel almost radical about taking contracting seriously in our day-to-day relationships. Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward took the definition a little further and put it as:

“A contract is an Adult commitment to one’s self and/ or someone else to make a change.”

The point about commitment to yourself is important here. The practice of contracting asks us to state clearly what we need, and then to check whether we’re actually aligned with the person opposite us, rather than assuming we are. Crucially, it requires us to be honest about our needs, and not hide behind a covert agenda.

When we do that well, contracting creates the conditions for both of us to do our best work, without the accumulated resentment of a hundred unspoken, then broken, expectations. We tend to reserve that level of explicitness for high-stakes or formal contexts, but it belongs in the everyday too.