Where does your cooperation stand? Every collaboration passes through situations in which different questions matter. Someone still weighing whether to cooperate at all needs different advice from someone negotiating a contract or trying to settle a dispute.
The twelve phases give these situations an order. Each phase page names the guiding question of the phase, what helps now, the typical mistake, what is different online and which law comes into play.
The numbers show a typical sequence, not a timetable. Most phases follow one another. Support, development and dealing with conflict, by contrast, run alongside the work and can arise in any situation, a conflict even in the first conversation. So do not look for the next stage; look for the situation you are in now. Often it is two at once.
Initiating
- 1. Need: Whether your goal needs the goals of others or only their performance.
- 2. Decision: Which of your own goals you are willing to let others shape, and who has to agree internally.
- 3. Search: How the ability to cooperate shows itself before there is a contract.
- 4. Contact: A first conversation that leaves both sides free and yet already creates duties.
Agreeing
- 5. Design: How the partners record what is settled and what is still open.
- 6. Agreement: A contract that governs the relationship, not just the performance.
Working together
- 7. Start: Shaping the move from agreement to joint work so that everyone notices: this is it now.
- 8. Carrying out: How the agreement is lived day to day rather than merely performed.
All along
- 9. Support: Who keeps the cooperation as a whole in view alongside the work.
- 10. Development: When goals and circumstances have changed and the basis of the cooperation has to follow.
- 11. Dealing with conflict: Treating conflict as the normal state of a living cooperation and finding the right kind of resolution for each one.
Ending
- 12. Ending: Winding up a cooperation in good order and keeping what has grown in mutual recognition.
Not a one-way street
Cooperations return to earlier stages: a conflict leads to a new agreement, a development to a new search for partners. Sometimes phases merge, as when contact and design happen in a single good conversation.
The law sees it the same way. Duties of consideration arise as soon as negotiations begin (section 311(2) BGB). Adjustment to changed circumstances (section 313 BGB) and termination for good cause (section 314 BGB) remain available throughout, not only in a late phase.
The phases also apply to cooperation within companies and other organisations. Founding one passes through design and agreement, a dispute among shareholders is a case for dealing with conflict, and the departure of a shareholder is an ending while the company itself continues.
How the law supports each of these situations is set out under Law.