Mutual Benefit Contracts
This post is in response to a question about contracts in a comment to my article The Customer Drives the Car . The text is an excerpt from a book I am writing about Clarity, a software development method based on systems thinking. This book is on the back burner at the moment. I am currently writing a book about strategy and organization with Strategic Navigation. This book will stand on its own, but it will also provide a much needed framework for the Clarity book. The reason is that originally, Clarity, like other agile methodologies, took a bottoms up approach to methodology development. Partly because of my work on Clarity, partly because of my involvement with The Theory Of constraints, Strategic Navigation, and Systems Thinking, I have become convinced that a top down approach will work better. Therefore, Clarity will be redesigned, and thoroughly tested, before I publish a book about the method as a whole. Here is Clarity's (current) take on contracts: A contract is an ag