Later today we’ll be putting together the contract for a project for which we’re not getting paid.

Contracts are not about money. Contracts are about clarifying the communication.

If you’re creating a contract as a weapon for use in court when the other party defaults, you’re in trouble. Bad things happen when people think they’ve been diddled, and a court ruling in your favor doesn’t patch things up and restore the relationship.

People miscommunicate, though. We assume. We forget. We lose track and get confused and generally don’t use our brains as audio-visual recording units, which they’re not, anyway.

The act of putting the scope of work, dates, deliverables and responsible parties in writing forces us to think it all through much more clearly than the little chat on the phone you just had. And the act of reading what’s written uses different perception abilities and functions than the distracted half-listening most of us invest in business phone calls.

By all means, use contracts. But maybe we should start calling them ‘scope document’ or ‘agreement’ or something that clarifies that it’s about getting the details down in writing while we all remember, and before we’ve moved down divergent paths, assuming we’re all walking together.