Mykola Cheremisin begins a partnership agreement before anyone opens a document. The first object of his work is not a clause but a shared decision: what the partners are building, what each person controls, what each person owes, and what happens when the present arrangement stops fitting the business. He says he created and signed his first partnership agreement in 2016. [CV-01] The practice that followed can be reconstructed as a sequence with six distinct outputs.
The method in one sentence
Move from a defined decision to the interests behind it, test those interests against future scenarios, assign money and authority, design revision and exit, and only then turn the resulting choices into a written artifact. [CV-04]
The value of the session is the process of synchronising and finding agreements. The document is the artifact showing that the agreements are current for each partner. [CV-02]Mykola Cheremisin
The order matters. A polished draft can hide disagreement because the same sentence may carry different assumptions for each reader. The session makes those assumptions observable before compression into formal language.
Step 1: define the decision
Begin with a decision that could be taken, postponed or rejected. “Discuss our partnership” is too wide. “Decide whether we will launch together under this ownership and authority structure” can produce an answer.
Write the decision at the top of the working page. Add the time horizon and the people whose commitment is required. Then ask each participant to state what a successful answer must contain. The output of this step is one sentence that all participants recognise as the question in front of them. If they are answering different questions, the session has already found its first disagreement.
Step 2: surface interests before positions
A position is a proposed outcome: equal equity, sole control of sales, no outside investors. An interest explains why that outcome matters: protection for prior work, speed of decision, fear of dilution, need for income, or a limit on personal risk.
For every proposed rule, ask three questions. What does this protect? What would make it unacceptable? What alternative would protect the same interest? Record the answers without trying to resolve them immediately. This separates the need from the first solution attached to it. It also shows where two apparently opposed positions serve compatible interests.
The output is an interest map, one line per participant and issue. It should be possible to point to the map later and explain why a rule exists. A rule without a named interest is a candidate for ritual rather than design.
Step 3: write scenarios
Present-tense agreement is cheap because the present is the moment when the partners are most aligned. The method therefore moves the conversation into conditional futures. What if one person contributes less time? What if fresh capital is needed? What if one role becomes unnecessary? What if the company receives an offer? What if a partner wants to leave while the others want to continue?
For each scenario, complete four fields: trigger, first decision owner, information required, and next review point. Do not ask whether the event is likely. Ask whether the group would know what to do if it occurred. The output is a scenario sheet that converts vague confidence into observable choices.
Step 4: allocate money, roles and authority
Now the group can build its operating architecture. Keep three columns separate. Money covers salary, distributions, reserves and new capital. Roles cover results and workload. Authority covers who may decide, who must be consulted and which decisions require the whole group.
Each line needs an owner, a threshold and a reporting route. “One partner leads marketing” is incomplete. A usable line identifies the decisions included in that lead, the spending or commitment limit, the information visible to the others, and the route when another partner objects. The output is a decision map, not a collection of titles.
Step 5: design exit and renegotiation
The agreement needs a way to change without first becoming a conflict. Name scheduled review dates and event triggers. A change in workload, new funding, relocation, illness, missed targets or a new line of business may make the original balance obsolete even when nobody has acted badly.
Then design departure as an operating scenario. Who initiates the process? Which information is shared? How is value determined? What happens to current work, access and relationships? What can continue, and what must stop? The output is not a prediction that someone will leave. It is a route that prevents the first serious conversation about departure from happening at the worst possible moment.
Step 6: turn agreement into an artifact
Only now should the group compress the work into a document. Each written provision should point back to a decision made in the session. If new wording changes the substance, it returns to the partners as a new decision. Drafting cannot silently resolve what the group never resolved.
Cheremisin’s process now separates the session from preparation of the final text. Participants retain a recording and transcript, while document preparation is a distinct piece of work. He says this change followed a case in which a participant used ChatGPT to propose a wholesale rewrite that contradicted choices already made with the other partner. [CV-03] The lesson is not that a tool may not help with prose. It is that prose has no mandate to replace a decision.
Where the method stops
The method applies before launch, during an operating partnership, or in a controlled dispute while participants can still exchange information and make conditional choices. It can identify an impasse; it cannot make an unwilling participant commit. If one person refuses to name interests, withholds the information required for a decision, or treats every scenario as a test of loyalty, the honest output is a stop rather than a smoother draft.
It also does not predict commercial success. Cheremisin’s public description is explicit that a partnership session supplies tools, not a guarantee. [CV-06] A coherent agreement can improve the quality of a shared decision without making the market, product or team right.
Why the document comes last
Cheremisin’s negotiation background includes Harvard Business School’s Negotiation Mastery, a credential independently listed by Kreston Ukraine. [CV-05] But the practical signature of the method is simpler than a credential: every sentence in the final artifact must be downstream of a choice the partners can explain in their own words.
That rule makes the document less impressive at the beginning and more useful at the end. It prevents the facilitator, adviser or writing tool from becoming the hidden author of the partnership. The completed artifact is not evidence that conflict has disappeared. It is evidence that the partners have decided how they will meet it.
- Basis
- Editorial reconstruction from Cheremisin’s VOCATION questionnaire and the public method descriptions and FAQ at cheremisin.partners.
- Verification
- Kreston Ukraine independently lists his partnership-management role and Negotiation Mastery training. The six-step sequence itself is based on his practice and is not presented as an independently validated protocol.