Agreements Come Before Collaboration…maybe.

I recently had a discussion with my brother on agreements and collaboration in relationships. He posed that collaboration came first and I posited that agreements did.

In the end he did concede that in order to have explicit collaboration we are going to need explicit agreements. But granted to be able to get such explicit agreements we are going to need a high level of explicit collaboration.

They seem to feed upon each other and indicate to me that not only may we not be using all of our vast wealth of brain capacity but also not using our vast ability to explicitly agree and collaborate.

My theory is that relationships, both personal and business are agreement machines and the quality of the agreements can be confirmed through the collaboration.  So, the greater the suite of tools and process for getting our explicit agreements (our collaboration), means we should end up with better and more explicit collaboration and vice versa.

What was your last explicit agreement and how did it effect your collaboration?