Negotiating Strategy Principled Negotiation and Cooperation According

Negotiating Strategy

Principled Negotiation and Cooperation

According to an article provided by the Conflict Research Consortium (CRC)(1998), one style of negotiation that has achieved favor in modern business practice is Principled Negotiation. This calls for an interest in achieving a meaningful compromise in which both parties have cause to accept the terms of an agreement. According to the article William Ury and Roger Fisher first advocated this form of negotiation as a means to reaching shared objectives even in the face of apparently divergent interests. In principled negotiation, Ury and Fisher would argue, it is important to separate one's neogiation objectives from one's personal feelings. Accordingly, the CRC reports that "negotiating about interests means negotiating about things that people really want and need, not what they say that want or need. Often, these are not the same. People tend to take extreme positions that are designed to counter their opponents' positions. . . By focusing on interests, disputing parties can more easily fulfill the third principle -- invent options for mutual gain. This means negotiators should look for new solutions to the problem that will allow both sides to win, not just fight over the original positions which assume that for one side to win, the other side must lose." (CRC, p. 1)

Accordingly, Ury and Fischer offer instructions for maintaining principle in the context of hostile negotiations. Thus, in principled negotiation, the text explains, there is a great importance for a negotiating party to recognize the tactics that have created an impasse. In his own text, Ury (1993) refers to impasses as stalemates derived from an irrational lack of latitude provided by either side. Ury labels three causing artifices as stonewalls, attacks and tricks. (p. 89)

All of these methods of negotiation, he says, must be recognized by successful negotiators and disarmed by an appeal to more practical measures. He asserts that one will only suffer the consequences of these tactics if one is unable to detect their implementation. Many of his directives focus on exacting internal control for the sake of fortitude in negotiating. He offers ways in which one can avoid defensiveness. Advising the use of silence, demands for the repetition of questionable arguments, a willful control of real negotiation time and a resistance to forcefulness, the article primarily seeks to equip the negotiator with the equanimity to handle intense negotiations. This is a set of skills that I have found extraordinarily useful in my own work. On a day-to-day basis, differing interests can lead to workplace tension and divergent views on how best to accomplish certain tasks or projects. Many of the tactics that Ury and Fisher describe in their article and text, particularly the removal of one's self from the personal realities of a negotiation in order to focus on the primary business interests at hand, have allowed me to bring objectivity to the proceedings both for myself and my negotiating partners.

As I have found, once a party has taken itself out of the defensive position, it may be more capable of reframing the negotiations. By returning rationality to a discourse at first governed by the aforementioned tactics, a negotiator can begin to reframe the conflict, creating the appearance or even actuality of a negotiating partnership.

Principled negotiation is similar in nature but not identical to Cooperation, a mode of negotiation described in an array of research as a way of bypassing differing priorities to realize a common interest in simply achieving harmonious resolution. Accordingly, in Henry Peelle's (2006) study on the topic, the context of effective negotiation methodology provides a sensible framework for understanding and appealing to the motives which tend to stimulate willing cooperation. In lieu of a supposedly mutual achievement of goals such as sought in principled negotiation, whether they be profit or survival, the emphasis on balance indicates that cooperation can be conduced by an implementation of what the sociologist describes as 'discursive synchronization.' (Peelle, 1) This term refers to the effectiveness of negotiations as a way of bringing congruity between the two competing sets of interest. The mutuality here is based in a congruity of conversational exchange which, while not founded necessarily upon agreement, is geared toward achieving a circumstance of reciprocity, in which the attainment of one party's goals is balanced by the concession to a second party's goals and vice versa.

In my personal experience, cooperation is irreplaceable in the workplace. Even where competing interests may govern the interaction of two organizations, for instance, it would be challenging for either side to achieve its intended goals without first creating amenable terms to which a negotiation partner will be inclined to agree. Certainly, this is an experience which is commonplace in an era where companies are constantly merging and expanding. At a key decision-making level, negotiating partners will be inclined to push toward a discursive synchronicity in which both sides have cause to enter into a more permanent partnership.