No Surprises: Creating the Catch-All to Team Alignment

I think most team process agreements fail, sparking minor spats, not because people disagree with the goal, but because teams never agree on how breaches of the agreement will be recognised and addressed.

Take a simple agreement like:
“From now on, any change that affects timelines, workload, or priorities must be flagged early.”

Everyone nods.
The meeting ends.
Life resumes.

A week later, a deadline quietly moves.
A dependency appears late.
A request lands with one day’s notice and an unspoken trade-off.

Someone raises it: “This feels like the goalposts moved.”
The response comes back: “That’s just how work goes.”

At that moment, the disagreement is no longer about timelines or priorities.
It is about whether a surprise breach even occurred.

One person is naming the surprise.
The other is deflecting by normalising and defending it.

This seems to me to be where minor spats in the workplace actually begin.

When the person responsible deflects — “That’s normal,” “We couldn’t have known,” “Everyone does this” — the issue shifts again. The conversation stops being about the change itself and becomes about accountability. The person raising the issue is forced to justify their reaction. The person responsible avoids owning the breach by reframing it as inevitable.

Collaboration ruptures not because work is complex, but because the rules are no longer shared.

Over time, this pattern teaches people to stop speaking up. They learn that raising issues leads to justification, not correction. Misalignment accumulates quietly until a small incident triggers a larger conflict.

This is why “no surprises” works as a catch-all. It operates above individual agreements. It captures late changes, missing information, hidden costs, unstated assumptions, and last-minute pressure without arguing intent.

If someone feels surprised, and the team has agreed to use Spatz.AI, they can object using an initial verbal caution or escalate using the SpatzChat app. If that objection is challenged, it can be ultimately reviewed by the team and their Spatz AI agent.

Agreement is what happens in meetings.
Alignment is what holds when pressure hits.
A “no surprises” catch-all is how teams keep the two connected.