Why your working agreement is useless under pressure?
How Mature Agile Teams Handle Pressure? (Part-1)
Let me tell you something about working agreements that nobody wants to admit.
THEY ARE USELESS.
Why?
Because 99% of teams build them wrong. They write them like mission statements full of aspirational garbage that sounds great when they are first written, but means nothing when things go sideways.
Every team I worked with had one. Most teams ignored theirs. And the pattern of ignoring it right when they needed it most revealed the gap that answers how groups actually make decisions under pressure.
This post explains the reasons behind that gap.
It’s a two-part series.
This is Part 1 of “How Mature Agile Teams Handle Pressure?”
Part-1: Why your working agreement is useless under pressure? ← this post
Part-2: How to transform a working agreement into an operating protocol?
Let’s get started.
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Reason#1: Your Agreement Is Full of Values, Not Instructions
Yep.
Your Working Agreement sounds like the Agile Manifesto:
"We communicate openly." "We respect each other." "We assume positive intent."
Cool. Now what?
These are values. They tell you what to care about. They don’t tell you what to do. And when you’re in the middle of a production incident or a stakeholder is screaming about a Friday deadline, your brain doesn’t need philosophy. It needs a decision tree.
Something that can help your team make decisions like:
“Who makes the call right now?”
“What do we do when we disagree?”
“What happens when someone goes around the process?”
“How do we stop this from turning into a two-hour argument?”
If your agreement doesn’t answer these questions specifically, it won't be used. Period.
Your brain can’t execute “be respectful” under cognitive load. It needs: “When we disagree on priority, the PO makes the final call. If the team thinks it’s a technical risk issue, we escalate to the CTO within 24 hours.”
That’s a protocol, and it is SUPER usable.