Negotiating an agreement without giving in
The Problem:
Don’t bargain over positions
- Arguing over positions produces unwise outcomes
- Arguing over positions is inefficient
- Arguing over positions endangers an ongoing relationship
- When there are many parties, positional bargaining is even worse
- Being nice is no answer
The Method:
Separate the people from the problem
- Negotiators are people first
- Every negotiator has two kinds of interests: in the substance and in the relationship
- The relationship tends to become entangled with the problem
- Positional bargaining puts relationship and substance in conflict
- Disentangle the relationship from the substance; deal directly with the people problem
- Perception
- Put yourself in their shoes
- Don’t deduce their intentios from your fears
- Don’t blame them for your problem
- Discuss each other’s perceptions
- Look for opportunities to act inconsistently with their perceptions
- Give them a stake in the outcome by making sure they participate in the process
- Face-saving: Make your proposals consistent with their values
- Emotion
- First recognize and understand emotions, theirs and yours
- Pay attention to core concerns
- Consider the role of identity
- Make emotions explicit and acknowledge them as legitimate
- Allow the other side to let off steam
- Don’t react to emotional outbursts
- Use symbolic gestures
- Communication
- Listen activey and acknowledge what is being said
- Speak to be understood
- Speak about yourself, not about them
- Speak for a purpose
- Prevention works best
- Build a working relationship
- Face the problem, not the people
Focus on interests, not positions
- For a wise solution reconcile interests, not positions
- Interests define the problem
- Behind opposed positions lie shared and compatible interests, as well as conflicting ones
Invent options for mutual gain
- Diagnosis
- Premature judgment
- Searching for the single answer
- The assumption of a fixed pie
- Thinking that solving their problem is their problem
- Prescription
- Separate inventing from deciding
- Broaden your options
- Look for mutual gain
- Make their decision easy
Insist on using objective criteria
- Deciding on the basis of will is costly
- The case for using objective criteria
- Principled negotiation produces wise agreements amicably and efficiently
- Developing objective criteria
- Fair standards
- Fair procedures
- Negotiating with objective criteria
- Frame each issue as a joint search for objective criteria
- Reason and be open to reason
- Never yield to pressure
