On every meaningful contract being executed today, regardless of sector or geography, the same observation has come to apply. Whatever was signed, something nobody anticipated has come along to disturb its execution. Five years of evidence have made the pattern hard to argue with.
COVID closed factories and froze supply chains overnight. The war in Ukraine reordered energy markets and exposed the fragility of just-in-time logistics. The second Trump administration turned tariff policy into a moving target, with rates announced, paused, raised, and renegotiated in cycles measured in weeks rather than years. The conflict in the Middle East has done the same for shipping lanes and insurance markets.
The temptation, as a practitioner, is to treat each of these as a discrete crisis. To process it, absorb the impact, and return to normal. But there is no normal to return to. The pattern itself has become the operating environment. Uncertainty is no longer the exception that interrupts a stable world; it is the baseline against which every contract is now being executed.
Most contracts in force today were not built with that assumption. They were drafted in calmer years, by lawyers and contract managers who treated risk allocation as a marginal exercise. Force majeure clauses copied from one template to the next. Hardship clauses left vague enough to be unenforceable. Change-in-law provisions written as if change in law were rare. The text was perfectly defensible in the conditions it was written for. Those conditions no longer exist, this is where the contract manager’s job has quietly but profoundly shifted.
The contract lifecycle, redrawn around disruption
It used to be possible, even reasonable, to think of risk events as edge cases. The contract anticipated them at a high level, the parties hoped they would not occur, and when they did, lawyers were called in to interpret what had been written years earlier. That sequence still happens, of course. But it has stopped being the dominant mode of operation.
Today, somewhere in the lifecycle of every significant contract, something will go wrong that nobody planned for at signature. A supplier will default. A subcontractor will not start working. Raw material indexes will spike thirty percent in a quarter. A new sanctions regime will make a previously routine flow of goods illegal. A counterparty will quietly enter administration and stop responding to emails. None of these are exotic scenarios anymore. They are the texture of the work.
What this means for the contract manager is that the lifecycle has to be redrawn around that reality. The negotiation phase is no longer the moment to settle risk allocation in principle; it is the moment to design the operational machinery that will be activated when, not if, disruption hits. The execution phase is no longer the patient monitoring of a stable plan; it is the continuous management of deviations against a contract that needs to remain workable through them. And the closeout phase, increasingly, is the moment when the quality of everything done upstream becomes financially visible.
A practitioner who still treats risk events as occasional interruptions to normal execution is, quite simply, working with a model that no longer matches reality.
Contract managers should stop deferring to lawyers
This is the part where I want to be direct, because it touches a question that contract managers and legal teams rarely arbitrate cleanly.
There is a long tradition in contract drafting of leaving risk allocation clauses in the hands of legal counsel. Force majeure, hardship, change in law, modification clauses, price adjustment mechanisms, suspension and termination triggers. Lawyers draft them, contract managers inherit them, and operations live with the consequences. In a stable world, that division of labour was (more or less) workable. In the current one, it has become the source of a very specific category of operational pain.
The typical legal definition of force majeure, for example, is generic by design. It lists categories of events (natural disasters, acts of war, governmental action) and leaves the operational interpretation to whoever will eventually have to apply it. That generic framing was a feature when force majeure events were rare. It has become a liability now that they are frequent. When something happens, parties spend weeks debating whether the event qualifies, what the consequences should be, who bears what, and how the contract should be adjusted. The dispute is rarely about the underlying event. It is about the absence of any pre-agreed operational logic to handle it.
The contract manager’s job, here, is to refuse the generic. We have lived through enough disruption in the last five years to know what categories of events are likely to recur, what they look like operationally, and how they cascade through a project or a supply relationship. That knowledge has to make its way into the contract itself. Not as legalese, but as operational definitions.
The contract manager must therefore ask himself: what counts as a triggering event in this specific contract, in this specific sector, between these specific parties? What happens to delivery dates? What happens to prices? What happens to obligations that have become impossible versus obligations that have only become harder? What evidence each party will need to produce, in what timeframe, in what form ? etc.
That is not legal work. It is contract management work. And the more precisely it is done at the negotiation phase, the less it has to be improvised under stress later.
Designing for resolution, not deadlock
There is a second piece that gets too little attention, and it is just as important. Most risk allocation clauses are written as if the only question were how to assign liability. They specify what each party owes when something goes wrong. They are silent, or close to silent, on what the parties should actually do together when something goes wrong. The result, in practice, is that disruption produces deadlock. Each side retreats to its contractual position, claims protection, and waits for the other to move first. Operations grind to a halt while the relationship deteriorates.
A contract designed for the current environment has to do better than that. It has to assume that the parties will need to talk, recalibrate, and find a path forward. That means building in mechanisms that favour the relationship over the impasse. Joint review meetings on a defined cadence when triggering events occur. Pre-agreed methods for valuing the financial impact of a disruption, so that the conversation does not start from zero each time. Escalation paths that move the discussion to the right level of seniority before positions harden. Documentation requirements that protect each party’s rights without making cooperation more costly than confrontation.
“Draft the contract to serve the relationship, and performance will follow.”
— Pierre Marchès
None of this is romantic. It is operational architecture. And it is the kind of architecture that, in my experience, distinguishes contracts that survive disruption from contracts that collapse under it.
What this asks of the contract manager
The conclusion, if there is one, is uncomfortable for a profession that still partly defines itself through its proximity to the legal function. Working through permanent uncertainty is not a legal skill. It is an operational one. It requires knowing how the project actually runs, where the friction points are, how the counterparty’s organisation behaves under stress, what evidence will be available when it matters, and what the cost of a frozen relationship really looks like on a delivery schedule.
This is why I keep coming back to the same conviction. The contract manager who waits for the legal team to update the templates, or who treats risk allocation as someone else’s problem, will keep being surprised by events that, at this point, should no longer surprise anyone. The one who takes ownership of the operational logic of risk, contract by contract, will not eliminate uncertainty. But they will give their organisation something more useful than a defensible legal position. They will give it a way to keep operating when the next disruption arrives.
And the next disruption will arrive. That much, at least, is certain.
