(a) Tweak the environment
Contract automation requires a tweaked environment. Leaders can help people make changes by providing clear direction. Helping the rider or motivating the elephant make the journey easier by tweaking the environment. An optimised environment makes the right behaviour easier to perform and the wrong behaviours a lot tougher to go for. Chip and Dan Heath observed that when the environment changes the behaviour changes. So, change the environment; build habits.
Emphasise ‘tweak’. You don’t need to rearrange the walls in your offices. You don’t need to change the compensation-structure of your business. Which one thing can you shift to make the right behaviours more likely?
Model contracts on mdlcntrcts.com. Most legal professionals struggle with the same problem: good model contracts are hard to find; good clauses almost impossible. How much time do you spend finding a good model contract, a sample contract clause, or a simple checklist for your contract? Of course, the Weagree Wizard comes with an abundance of models. Weagree also built Mdlcntrcts.com an online platform where legal professionals (can) share their model contracts, model clauses and contract checklists, for free.
Share one model contract. If everyone shares, we will have an open source with all types of templates. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could find top-quality model contracts easily? …in one place, a free, open source? …just because we all shared one of our models? …and that you know that it is of high quality, thanks to a smart tag-and-search functionality?
Choose the right people to drive your change. According to John Kotter (author of Leading change, the standard work on change management, and along the lines of which book Weagree published another eBook on upgrading model contracts), you should take on your ambassadors, and in relation to those who basically always say ‘no, no’ his advice is: “get them out of the way (no matter who they are in terms of power or relationships to you)”. Never start with your laggards in a change leadership role.
Do alarm-training on your environment. People adopt change easier if their perceived hurdles are taken away. Try to figure out what is the biggest hurdle, by asking your team members what they think optimises the environment for implementing and adopting contract automation. A few examples:
- Delegate contract automation to the business (in case of hesitations: delegate at least the simple contracts).
- Allocate time to determine your own Contract drafting conventions.
- Allocate time to review and discuss boilerplate clauses and quasi-miscellaneous clauses
- Teach contract drafting (read Weagree’s book Drafting contracts with thousands of best practices, recommendations on contract drafting).
- Free time to create model contracts.
- Require everyone involved in model-contract-upgrading work (or in contracting generally) to join Weagree’s LinkedIn group Drafting contracts.
- Fill the clause library of the Weagree Wizard with good alternative clauses.
- Allow courses English language.
- Make sure that logging into the Weagree Wizard is easy.
You can see what type of person a laggard is here (they are the last to adopt a change):
Contract automation requires to change habits, to change behaviour. To change people, you must learn how to change their habits. If the right habits are in place, good behaviour follows and the driver does not have to take charge. In SWITCH, this is called the behavioural autopilot. SWITCH proposes two aspects to think about when building habits:
- the habit should serve and advance your mission,
- the habit needs to be relatively easy to embrace.
Chip and Dan Heath observed that when behaviour is habitual, it becomes almost careless (it does not ‘tax’ the driver).
Do a ‘motion study’. If you’re trying to make a behaviour easier, study it. Watch one person go through the process of reading a request for a contract, bouncing back for additional data and details, searching for a model clause or latest-deal sample, copy-pasting it into the contract-to-be-created, formatting the clauses, aligning the contract’s terminology, checking the definitions, checking cross-references, checking legal entity details, et cetera.
Optimise further down the road. It is important to note that inefficiencies related to not-contract automation may well be in the back-end of the contracting process, where a signed contract needs to be filed in the contract (lifecycle) management system (and where the data that had – at least largely – already been inserted during the questionnaire of the Weagree Wizard must be entered by hand). Since the Weagree Wizard can be integrated with external applications, the old-school way of contract creation inherently contains inefficiencies that will be caught by actually connecting the Weagree Wizard with those external applications. Note where there are bottlenecks and where performance may slip. Then try to rearrange the environment to remove those obstacles, by linking. Provide signposts that show people which way to turn (or that celebrate the progress they’ve made already). Eliminate steps. Shape the path.
Shut down access to the analogue era. Getting the elephant and the driver on track, requires that you tweak the environment: optimise or create the circumstances to actually upgrade model contracts, to work on the clause library (or contract know-how, to use contract automation. If you were a teacher and wanted students to show up on time for class, just lock the doors. Soon enough they will learn that if they want to be in, they have to be there in time. If you want your team members to create contracts ‘automatically’, shut down the folders in which model contracts were stored. If you want people in the business to use the latest templates only, launch an upgraded version and make the old ones inaccessible. This is a step not to take before mainstream users crossed the chasm.
