How Analysis Can Help

One of the things that we do is to make an outline of how analysis can help.

We ask a number of questions to prepare for negotiations and then generate proper ideas. What happens if you don’t come to an agreement? What are the other alternatives? It isn’t so easy to identify the alternatives and cost them out. What is the best alternative to a negotiated agreement? What are some of your aspirations in these negotiations? How do you project yourself into the position of the other party? What are their opportunities? What is their best alternative to a negotiated agreement? What can we find out about how they negotiate, about their responsibility, etc.? What are the conventions for this type of negotiation? How honest are they? How open are they? How adversarial? Can negotiation be done in stage? Does it have to be done all at once? How credible are commitments? Do they say this is the bottom line and then back down?

Various elements can be discussed: opening gambits, the dynamics of the negotiation dance, closing the deal, etc.

In this case there was a seller and a buyer, and if the seller gets more, the buyer gets less. So the number of a one issue problem is that if one side wins more, the other side wins less. But, of course, both sides can lose if there is a zone of agreement and they cannot identify it or agree where to settle it.

Interests and Positions. People do not often tell you about their interests, but you can guess if you put yourself to their shoes. In fact, a mediator gets his power by having an ingenious solution, figuring out and knowing the interests of both sides and making them dovetail. So does the negotiator. A lot of brainstorming work, a lot of good ideas, can pay off and can lead to a well-crafted option taking the interest of the other side into account.

We should Generate More Theory. The kind of hard thinking about negotiation that has been missing is theoretical thinking. It is not just collecting anecdotes or data about how negotiators in fact negotiate. We need to sort those facts into useful categories. We need some hypotheses about cause and effect. We need to go back and forth between facts and generalizations, constantly refining the generalizations and testing them against experience.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20