(2 day version available)

At its core, any negotiation is a series of cycles of interactive decision-making and interactive persuasion. Each party decides what it wants from an agreement, and then tries to persuade the other party to agree. This cycle may be repeated many times as each side adjusts its decisions and persuasion strategies to the actions of the other party and to other changes in the situation.

Because these component processes are present in every negotiation, this program dedicates considerable time to teaching participants:

1) how to make rational decisions about goals and strategies, starting with decisions required in simple negotiations and progressing toward those that are part and parcel of complex multi-party, multi-issue negotiations; and

2) how to communicate persuasively with the other side, constituencies and relevant third parties, about goals, views, and solutions.

Neither process is easy because human nature is full of choice-making biases that limit people’s abilities to make rational decisions in modern contexts. Human nature makes us more prone to stubborn, over-confident, often self-righteous assertion than to truly effective persuasion.  Because we tend to over-estimate our own knowledge and position and usually fail to take the other party into full account, the most common form of negotiation is very inefficient “haggling.” 

Maximizing value in negotiations generally means not only “claiming the biggest piece of the pie” (distributive negotiating, seen in pure form in haggling) but also learning how to “expand the pie” or engage in integrative negotiating in which parties collaborate to increase the total amount of value that they can then share.  Integrative negotiation requires that we incorporate a third basic process into our negotiations, in addition to deciding and persuading:

so our process “3)” is gathering the right information about the parties, their interests, and relationships so that addition value can be generated and claimed.

Most “interest-based” negotiation stops at that point, but there are two final basic processes, either or both of which can make the difference between mediocre and spectacularly successful negotiations:

4) innovating – that is discovering or inventing creative solutions to break out of positional bargaining stalemates and find new ways to collaborate to create value; and

5) using one's operational capacities to directly and unilaterally generate consequences rather than just talking about producing results through.

This last process, called “operating” or “shaping” can be crucial in a variety of situations. First, it is only because each party is seen a capable of operating effectively to deliver certain kinds of consequences or results that the negotiation occurs in the first place. Second, in addition to talking about the consequences desired from a possible agreement, the negotiation is often “shaped” when one side or the other unilaterally rewards behaviour to strengthen it, or punishes undesired behaviour to decrease it.

Such operations at or beyond the table often change the negotiation agenda dramatically. In addition, good negotiators know that their goal is not merely to reach a verbal agreement: Their real goal is to make sure that the results that they bargained are achieved in reality. Therefore they plan and arrange for operations that will effectively implement and enforce the agreement. Thus, this program covers all five of the major skills that may be required to build successful agreements:

1)            Information-gathering

2)            Deciding

3)            Persuading

4)            Innovating and

5)            Operating. 

In short, the program teaches you to gain control over all of the determinants of success.