Free · From the book
If you read to the back of the book, you were sent here. These are the working templates Bears & Mosquitoes points to — the one-page Culture Map, the Trusted Living Agent Manifest, the 15 Virtues diagnostic, and the build checklists.
They’re built to be used, not admired. Fill them in right here in your browser — your work saves to this device as you type — then print a clean one-pager or download the Markdown. Free, because the framework is only worth something if people use it.
01 · The Template
Imagine you’re hiring someone brilliant for a customer-facing role, and the only thing they’ll read before they start speaking for you is one document. What’s in it? Your agent is that new hire. This is that document.
Write the operational truth, not the marketing version. The seven prompts below are what an agent needs to represent your organization authentically.
Chapter 10 · Culture First
Not the line on the wall — the decision filter. Why does this organization exist? What would be lost if it disappeared tomorrow?
Every organization has declared values and practiced values. Encode the ones you actually live when the declared ones are inconvenient.
Not just the words — the register. Formal or casual? Warm or efficient? Do you use humor, and when? When a customer is frustrated, what does the first response sound like?
When two priorities collide — speed vs. thoroughness, the customer vs. the policy, this quarter vs. the relationship — which wins, under what conditions, and who decides?
Most organizations can describe failure. Far fewer can describe excellence. Name the thing that, when it happens, makes you think: that’s exactly how we do things here.
Not the legal lines — those are table stakes. The identity lines. The things you’d never do, that define who you are by defining what you refuse.
Customers, employees, partners, suppliers, the community. Not a stakeholder analysis — a relationship map. The quality and character of how you relate to each group you touch.
02 · The Template
A manifest is the document an agent carries with it — the answer to five questions that travels everywhere the agent goes. If the “organization” is just you, the manifest gets smaller, not different: a single page that says who your agent is when it acts under your name.
It’s meant to be portable, auditable, revocable, and versioned. Fill the five sections below.
Chapter 12 · The Trusted Living Agent Manifest
1 · Who is it?
Identity, in three layers: the virtues it carries, the role it plays, and the personality it shows.
Of the 15 Virtues, which ones is this agent built to embody? Not all fifteen apply to every agent. Name the ones that define this one. (Score an existing agent in tool 03 below.)
What was this agent built to do? Who does it serve? What decisions does it own, and what does it escalate?
Its tone, voice, and cadence with humans — so the working relationship is one people want to come back to.
2 · What can it do?
The authority map. What it can access, read, write, and decide on its own — and what needs a human first.
3 · Who authorized it?
The chain of accountability. Who approved it, who certified it ready, who answers for its behavior.
4 · What are its limits?
Not what it can do — what it must not. The prohibitions and the triggers that make it stop and ask. The sacred lines from your Culture Map, turned into constraints.
5 · What’s its history?
The audit trail. Every version, every change to its authority, every certification — added to, never overwritten.
03 · The Diagnostic
Take an agent you’ve already deployed and score it — honestly — against the fifteen virtues of a trusted living agent. Where does it excel? Where does it fall short? Where’s the gap between what it does and what a trusted colleague would do?
1 = absent · 5 = a trusted colleague would do exactly this. The gaps are your build list.
Chapter 11 · The 15 Virtues of Living Agents
Score each virtue to see where this agent stands.
04 · The Checklists
The book doesn’t hand you a single checklist — it hands you a sequence and a rhythm. Three of them, at three scales: how you stand an agent up, how you keep it honest day to day, and what every new agent passes through before it ships. Tick them off as you go.
Chapters 10, 14 & 15
The order matters. Skip a step and you’ll build it anyway — later, more expensively, after the first agent does something that makes a customer wonder if anyone there has ever met a human being.
Not a dashboard, and not the every-decision review. A fifteen-minute look at the patterns and the exceptions, coffee in hand. Consistent, honest, and brief — that’s where real-time visibility begins.
Governance as a design discipline, not a gate at the end. Every new agent starts here — these are the three things that must exist before it ships.