Getting people to try CBC once is easy. Sustaining it is where most leaders fail. Anyone can draft an agreement, but keeping it alive as a working discipline requires consistency, not enthusiasm. CBC is not a campaign or initiative — it’s a standard. Once it slips, you’re back to vague promises, missed deadlines, and “we thought someone else owned that.”

Make CBC Non-Negotiable

• The rule is simple: no agreement, no work.
• If someone says “we’ll just start and figure it out later,” you’ve already lost. That’s how scope creep and blame games are born.
• CBC keeps everyone honest by locking in expectations before execution begins.

Example (1-1 with a direct report):
Your engineer wants to jump into a refactor “while they’re in the code.” You stop them: “No agreement, no work. Write down the objective, scope, and success criteria, and we’ll sign off. Otherwise, it’s just noise.”

Keep Agreements Lightweight but Concrete

• CBC doesn’t mean writing contracts like a lawyer. It means agreements that are short but enforceable.
• Success Criteria = how we’ll know it’s done. Not “make progress,” not “explore options” — but “API deployed, tested, and handling 1,000 RPS with <200ms latency.”
• A one-pager that’s clear beats a ten-page doc nobody reads.

Contrast with OKRs:
OKRs love aspirational fluff like “Delight the customer.” CBC forces you to say: “Ship feature X by date Y with adoption target Z.”

Normalize Review and Closure

• At the end of every agreement, close the loop.
• Did the work meet the success criteria? Yes = success. No = failure. There’s no “partial credit” for activity.
• Closing agreements creates a track record of execution, not just a backlog of half-finished promises.

Scenario (midsize company):
Instead of a quarterly OKR review full of hand-waving (“We made good progress”), a CBC review is blunt: “This contract called for migrating 50% of services by Q2. Only 30% migrated. That’s a miss. Let’s document why before we sign the next agreement.”

Enforce Dual Accountability

• Leaders own clarity. If agreements are vague, that’s on you.
• Operators own results. If agreements are clear but missed, that’s on them.
• CBC kills the corporate sport of finger-pointing by drawing a bright line of accountability.

Scenario (enterprise):
A VP complains about slow delivery. Under CBC, you can point to the signed agreement: “This is what we agreed to, these were the dependencies, and this is where execution failed.” No one escapes the paper trail.

Use CBC as a Coaching Tool

• Agreements expose whether someone struggles with clarity, ownership, or execution.
• If they fail, you know exactly where to coach:
  • Don’t understand objectives? Teach clarity.
  • Don’t meet deliverables? Coach execution.
  • Keep missing dependencies? Teach risk management.
• The “Three Gates” framework — desire, ability, applying guidance — lines up cleanly with CBC reviews.

The Takeaway

Sustaining CBC isn’t about pep talks or posters on the wall. It’s about discipline: every piece of work tied to a signed agreement, every outcome reviewed against success criteria, every failure traceable to a clear cause. Unlike OKRs or KPIs, CBC doesn’t care about how “aligned” or “motivated” you feel — it cares about whether you did what you said you’d do. And that’s the whole point.