Behind the idea: the Self-Management Network
Week 2 at the Lead Wise Academy, Practical Self Management Intensive: the Social Contract.
I first encountered the “social contract” concept in sociology class. We learned that social contract referred to to the explicit voluntary agreement an individual makes to the institution (i.e. king, government, rule of the majority). Read more on that here. This concept has been theorized and effected in history as a constitution wherein individuals give up and exercise rights within its bounds.
In self-management, a social contract is infinitely simpler. Susan Basterfield defined the social contract as an agreement of “how we ‘want to be’ with each other.” It outlines our expectations of ourselves and our peers.
This week’s project was to create a social contract with our team members.
My team mate, Yves Cavarec had an awesome idea. Why not ship out our social contract to a wider network and see who responds? So we decided to make a website and a video to carry our social contract out in to the world. We will post an update in a few days to share what happens.
Making a Social Contract:
Step 1: We created guide questions to get us thinking. We answered them separately.
- What is important to you?
- What enables you to do your best work?
- How do we want to work together?
- What behaviour do we expect from one another?
- Who do I want to be?
- How do we want to be related to each other?
- What am I willing to let go of?
- What learning edge am I willing to explore this week?
- What do we want to deal with conflict?
- How do we want decisions to be made?
Step 2: Read everyone’s answers and discuss to curate.
For this social contract, 80% of each person’s answers flowed from the same vein. 20% needed clarification.
One lesson I learned: Word choice affects understanding. Thus, discuss before you dismiss. Get to the heart of things — and wordsmith from there.
Something for the future: Our group’s experience was pretty smooth primarily because want to implement self-management for ourselves and our own organizations. It won’t be like this outside the class. Self-management is scary.
Step 3: Sleep On It.
Personal Realization: When it comes to personal decision making, I take my time to discern and see how things play out. At work, I don’t. I’m very action oriented and prefer to make decisions faster. I realize though that the personal benefits I get by letting things percolate is also possible in an organization.
Social Contract as a Dynamic Living Document
At first blush a social contract may seem like a typical mission, vision, values document. It is and it’s not. While the output may be similar (values statements, documents, videos), the creator, creation process and remaking process is not.


