Contracting Wants and Offers

Definition

Contracting is the explicit, mutual exchange of what each party wants from the other and what each is prepared to offer, done before the substantive work begins. Block's claim is that consultants routinely understate their own wants and clients understate their offers, and that anything left unstated at this stage doesn't disappear — it resurfaces later as friction that looks like something else entirely.

In the Book

Chapter 4 lays out the "elements of a contract": the boundaries of the analysis (what's in scope and explicitly what isn't), the objectives (solving a problem, building a new possibility, teaching the client to solve it themselves next time, or improving how the organization manages itself), the kind of information the consultant needs access to, and — critically — a stated description of the consultant's intended role (expert, pair of hands, or collaborator). Block gives sample contract language throughout: "Our goal is to increase the responsiveness of the marketing department... we particularly expect to develop ways to reduce the time it takes to introduce a new product by six weeks." Chapter 3 gives the underlying mechanism a concrete cost: if a consultant fails to negotiate that the client manager will publicly support the project and tell people about it, and that want was never surfaced during contracting, "you will feel undercut later" — the want doesn't vanish, it just goes unaddressed until it causes damage. Block also introduces triangular and rectangular contracts — accounting for the client's boss and the consultant's own boss as parties whose roles need acknowledging, even if they aren't formally "in the room."

Why It Matters

This reframes a large share of downstream relationship friction — feeling undercut, feeling scope-crept, feeling used — as a contracting failure rather than a character failure on the other side. Any working relationship with asymmetric formal authority (employee and manager, freelancer and client, new hire and team) has implicit wants on both sides that go unstated because naming them feels presumptuous or risky; the mechanism here is that surfacing them explicitly and early is cheaper than absorbing the cost of their staying hidden.