Conflict skill #2: Principled negotiation

We all negotiate every day. We come in three basic models.

Some of us are Minnesota Friendly soft accommodaters who give in so that we can (we think) preserve our great relationships (OK, so Jesse Ventura and Michelle Bachmann have destroyed that image). We surrender to make nice.

Some of us are Louisville Sluggers who regard anything other than ultimata to be clear and present danger signs of weakness. We get elected to Congress nowadays and grind the economy and the government to a dead halt. No deals! Our way or the (rapidly crumbling) highway.

Some of us strive for an alternative to either of these styles. Fortunately, these bookending dysfunctional approaches of negotiation have been easily and blessedly surpassed by Principled Negotiation, the heart of a little book first published in 1981called Getting to Yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in, by Roger Fisher and William Ury.


The method is four basic parts:

• Separate the people from the problem.
• Focus on interests, not positions.
• Invent options for mutual gain.
• Insist on using objective criteria.

Try it. Next time you are in a conflict, instead of emulating Caveman Obama (caving every time the Republicans shout 'Shut It Down!'), be assertive. Or, instead copying Dubya the Decider by telling your opponent that he's either with you or with the terrorists, see if you can reframe the conflict as a problem for both of you, which should be easy, since that's exactly what it is.

Then let your opponent know what you really want, not your unalterable position ("It's not that I want your people to die, I just want my people protected"). A position is "Kill them." An interest is "Protect my children from danger." Find out what your opponent's actual interest is ("It's not that I want your people to die, I just want my people protected"). Sometimes it's a radically different position but a very closely related interest.

Then find options for mutual gain--this is actually a much longer process than a Quick Fixer might like. Take a bit of time and actually explore, brainstorm, see about all the wild ideas and then evaluate them by two criteria, fairness and practicality.

When you seek fair independent standards you do so together. The law, a mutually respected authority, or some negotiated standard is the filter through which all solutions must successfully pass.

Really. This stuff works. Give it a go. It works on the street and it works in the suites. Some say principled negotiation is a conflict causation theory in competition with other theories, and that is one helpful view, but in fact principled negotiation can help us in conflicts with very different etiologies.

When they suprise you

Many of those who challenge nonviolence assume that one is startled and threatened and one must either react with violence or be vulnerable. This assumption is often quite false and it is likely that those who are untrained in either violence or nonviolence will be the most vulnerable. Those trained in violence or nonviolence are most likely to prevail in the moment, and those trained in nonviolence can expect to do better in the long term.

Some claim to have a martial art that is nonviolent, and some individuals may well be quite adept at that. Some get your attention by claiming nonviolence and then you discover them tossing others to the ground, inflicting pain, and even hitting others in the face. Not exactly nonviolent.

Psychological defense is the best with humans. The closer we can come to matching the cultural make-up of the attacker, the more effective we can tailor our response. When we speak the same language in every respect, we can disarm another with relative ease--if we decide that is our goal.

In a negotiation--and that is what most attacks are, in a sense--using the same principles as those martial arts are the psychological equivalent to the principle of using the force of the attacker to de-escalate instead of escalate the conflict. Roger Fisher, Bill Ury and Bruce Patton have now given us the third edition of Getting to Yes and it polishes these ideas. They advise three tactics.

Look behind the attack to find the interests the attacker is attempting to satisfy.

Don't attack back. Invite criticism and ask advice. I accidentally used this once in an actual mugging in Roxbury, Massachusetts. I was surrounded by three young men late at night and they told me to give them money. Rather than meekly do so, and rather than risk a beating for not having any, I shot back, "Do I look like someone with money? I mean, you can have it, but you guys need to know that I have two kids and no money!" I gave them literally all I had on me, less than $2. They let me go, almost shamefaced.

Recast an attack on you as an attack on the problem. I could have said to those young men, "I know what you mean. I have a family and no money."

Asking questions helps guide attackers away from you, especially if the attack is not about resource capture but is rather about defending personal pride in some way. They may not be articulate or they may believe that you aren't listening. But if you ask and then actually prove you are listening, hearing, and able to reflect their assertions or even demands accurately, they will be less likely to be motivated to take it to the next step, the physical attack.

Nonviolence works and violence works. But when your weapons are your mind and your communicative abilities you tend to stay well armed and prepared to respond to attack at any time.

References
Fisher, Roger, & Ury, William (2011). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. (3rd ed.). New York: Penguin.

How to neutralize Wikileaks

The US government is suffering from a rash of Wikileaks embarrassment, with many of our most unsavory bad manners revealed for the whole world to see. The US mainstream media has joined the howling mob of corporate and political forces eager to lock up Julian Assange or even kidnap him and render him over to the torture fiends in Hosni Mubarak's basement. What should we do about this if we like the idea of nonviolence and good government but not the idea of a clumsy, red-faced America barging around on everyone's bad side all the time?

The little book Getting to Yes with its method of principled negotiation would help us strategize a way forward, I believe. We could think about that method, which eschews the hard edged positional stance all dug in like we see Hillary Clinton, and it also rejects the abject surrender of accommodation. Instead, advises negotiators Roger Fisher, Bill Ury and Bruce Patton, let's assess this conflict and find a way out of it so that everyone gets quite a bit of what they want.

What if a good mediator could arrange for frank and safe talks with Assange? What would he want? What do we want? Some possible outcomes from the two sides:

• Good government
• Secure communication
• Nonviolence
• Enhanced security for the American people
• Enhanced security for all people
• An end to war
• An end to corruption
• Cessation of embarrassing leaks

Why would any of this be a problem for our government? Why would any of this be a problem for Julian Assange? There are many possible outcome paths that would meet all these conditions and gain all these results. The easiest would be for us to hire Assange and clear him to access all government and corporate records and ferret out corruption so that we could quietly fix it before it became embarrassing. Yes, some of it might be so egregious that it would require public announcements of apology and policy change. For example, shooting unarmed journalists should not be swept under the rug. We should be grateful to Assange for uncovering this and we should instantly release Bradley Manning with a letter of commendation, as we compensate the families of the murdered newsgatherers and other Iraqis. We should regard this as a prompt to pull out of Iraq completely and simply offer aid through the UN, Mercy Corps and other agencies with zero US military presence.

Assange is giving us the chance to reinvigorate our democracy and reset our relationships in the world. Let us get to yes and work with him. His efforts are heroic and helpful. Why do we wish to make enemies of someone who is trying to help us become a better nation? He is acting in the interests of truth and transparency, two of the strongest pillars of real democracy. If our diplomats can't handle revelations calling Putin and Medvedev 'Batman and Robin,' tough. The real services of Wikileaks are way past that minor silliness and into the basics of good governance and integrity.

Thank you, Julian Assange.

Getting to whatever

Roger Fisher and Bill Ury are part of the Harvard Negotiation Project. They devised a system of negotiating that is based upon a sort of collaborative learning and they called it principled negotiation. They wrote a little book called Getting to yes that describes their technique. It is a four-part method.

First, separate the people from the problem. They suggest this for two reasons. One, if we can shift the identification of the issue from the other person to a mutual problem, it will not be perceived as readily as disrespectful—and disrespecting anyone is a great way to make sure that they will oppose you in turn no matter how impeccable your logic. Two, separating the people from the problem enables the former enemies to be collaborative problem-solvers.

The second part of the principled negotiation model is to separate interests from positions. By this, they mean that our stated positions may be quite opposite sounding, but underneath you can almost always find similar over overlapping interests, and therefore potentially a way to construct a workable solution that achieves those ends satisfactorily for all.

Hence, if I love nuclear power and you want solar power, the good principled negotiation expert will interview us both and find out that we both want lights and radio and refrigeration. How we get them is all that separates us and now we have that common set of goals that unite our collaborative search for a workable plan to achieve that electrical power generation.

Or, if we are partners in a melting down marriage, I want to save it and you want a divorce and our principled negotiation expert can help us work beyond these positions to our common interests, which may include, for instance, that you want happiness and I want happiness. That common interest is more important than marital status and it opens up some daylight toward manageable resolution, or at least the discussion becomes a bit more possible—especially when we are careful to follow the first guideline of continuing to separate the people from the problem.

The third piece of this puzzle is to invent options for mutual gain. The best way to do this is to take the time to brainstorm what the elements of potentially satisfactory solutions might be for each of the parties. A classic brainstorm is a process of uncritically generating ideas from all the parties, avoiding all evaluation—not even, “That’s a great idea,” until there is some saturation of possible items. All ideas are welcome except for those that even ‘humorously’ eliminate, exile, imprison, hospitalize, incapacitate or kill any of the parties. The best mediators simply take notes, preferably on a medium visible to all parties—e.g., chalkboard, whiteboard, projected screen of text being typed out, large paper—and moderate against evaluation and in favor of all suggestions, even those that sound somewhat selfish or unrealistic. The most seemingly harebrained options can often contain usable components that end up as some piece of the final unique synthesis that was not remotely obvious to anyone before the free input began in a moderated environment free from interruption and dismissal.

The fourth and final piece of the principled negotiation model to insist on objective criteria. Thus, if I want students to read 1,000 pages of text in a 10-week term in a four credit class, plus write a 100-page paper, those students will very reasonably seek an objective criterion of what most institutions would consider a fair amount of time that the average student should devote to a four-credit class in the quarter system, and then honestly discuss what that might mean. So, if an undergraduate student is considered full-time taking 12 credits, that translates into approximately one-third of a 40-hour work week, or a bit more than 12 hours of work per week. If four of those hours are spent in class and the remaining hours are spent reading and writing, and I can admit that it takes about 10-30 minutes to properly read and understand each page of the academic text, plus another 90 minutes to adequately write a good academic page, I can soon see that I have dramatically overassigned work to these poor students and I’m much more prepared to propose an alternative, reasonable workload.

If, on the other hand, I devise all these assignments only thinking of producing the smartest and most accomplished students on Earth, without considering what a fair work week might be, I will naturally overload them and engender a legitimate rebellion. There are discussions that can help establish fair standards in almost all negotiations, and the first question to ask of ourselves and all parties—a question that really demands a yes—is, “Can we all agree that we want a resolution to our problem that is fair to everyone?”

It turns out that this method does also take some fallback techniques to prevent powerful parties from dominating in asymmetric conflict. So, if one party is trying to run rough over everyone else, it is helpful to all parties to understand and, if necessary, default to the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. This BATNA is in some ways the natural consequence if negotiation fails. For instance, if I am trying to dicker with an airlines over price, they have a BATNA which is to find another passenger to take my place if I walk out of the negotiation, or settle for some loss of income. My BATNA is to find another airline, take a train or boat or car or bike, or just stay home. It is not good negotiating to fail to think about my BATNA or the BATNA of all parties. These will be crucial to rational negotiation.

If the advantage I stand to gain is not much better than defaulting to my BATNA, I have little motivation to negotiate, let alone make concessions to anyone. If, on the other hand, I can gain a lot by negotiating, or I will lose a lot with all possible BATNAs, I am very motivated to continue to try.

Which brings us to the most dangerous party, the conflict industry. If a party actually gains by continuing, ongoing conflict, negotiations are window-dressing, a mask to fool everyone into thinking the party is trying for peace and justice. If, for example, I am in peace talks and I profit highly from the sales of weapons and other military purchases, I am only mouthing concern about peace and am actually subverting it. Or, if my status and political power is dependent upon being the adversarial leader in a conflict, I am more threatened by peace that makes me irrelevant and unemployed that by continued conflict, where I am the champion. This is one reason to keep the charismatic leadership out of the negotiating room and to make sure that all citizens know that the costs of war are far higher than the costs of peace.

Teaching nonviolence: Nonviolence is negotiation

Some say the field of conflict resolution depends upon negotiation. True. Then they teach that civil resistance is what civil society does when unjust rulers refuse to negotiate. True. They teach that therefore teaching from a conflict resolution perspective is mutually exclusive from teaching from the civil resistance perspective. False.

Here is an excerpt from what Dr. King wrote in response to white clergy who criticized him for committing civil resistance in Birmingham in 1963:

"You may well ask: 'Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?' You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word 'tension.' I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth."

In our Conflict Resolution studies we learn from the Harvard Negotiation Project about the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, the BATNA. This is exactly what civil resistance is. Not only do ordinary citizens have the power to change their BATNA during a conflict, good campaigners are as transparent about it as possible, so that the BATNA can be, in some cases, nonviolent deterrent power. A transparent campaign with a robust civil resistance component or potential will also change the BATNA for the ruler, which alters all conflict calculations.

Principled negotiation consists of four basic principles:

~Separate the people from the problem
~Focus on interests, not positions
~Invent options for mutual gain
~Insist on using objective criteria

Principled negotiation, which is one core method we teach in Conflict Resolution, is precisely what a good civil society campaigner incorporates into any civil resistance strategy. While Saul Alinsky may have advocated calling some of the people the problem, Gandhi would not have done so, nor did King, nor Cesar Chavez. OK, Serb nonviolence is an exception, with Otpur youth chanting for Slobodan Milosevic to "Save Serbia: kill yourself!" They used it to emphasize their determination to separate Milosevic from nationalism, and from national pride, and from Serbian self-interest. It seemed to work there.

Focusing on interests rather than positions leaves room for satyagraha but not for duragraha, that is, remaining open to good ideas for collaborative agreements that benefit everyone rather than squatting obdurately on one fixed position is stronger conflict resolution and more adaptive civil resistance. Roger Fisher and Bill Ury are careful to advise against compromising on principle and preparing to collaborate on practically anything else.

This leads to inventing options for mutual gain, and if we ever see peace in Palestine Israel, that is how it will happen. Indeed, that is how almost every successful civil resistance is concluded and how every successful mediation happens. The overlap is tremendous. When civil society is successful at isolating the dictator from his own armed forces, nonviolence can actually be seen not as negotiating with the dictator, but rather with other constituencies, and when all are satisfied that they will gain more than they will lose by working together, change happens.

Insisting on using objective criteria is precisely how recruitment in civil resistance campaigns happens. When police dogs bit African American children in Birmingham, or when the fire department blasted children with firehoses so powerful they would strip the bark off trees, most Americans were galvanized to support the minority struggling with dignity and nonviolence for basic human and civil rights. When nonviolence is the only tactic, it is much easier to frame all campaigns in this exact fashion, a search for what is fair.

So teaching civil resistance can be regarded as a component of teaching conflict resolution, or conflict resolution can be seen as an element in the civil resistance body of theory and set of tools.

Constructive conflict v war

My students read my lugubrious litanies of conflict causes, casus belli, and they often conclude, well, we will never stop having wars.

Yes we will.

But we will never stop having conflict.

We will either learn to handle our increasingly difficult resource conflict with nonviolent methods or we will cease to inhabit this Earth. It is war that is unsustainable. If we cannot stop having wars, we are therefore unsustainable and this wondrous evolutionary experiment of humanity is finished.

Can we honestly face that choice and fail to learn how to manage our conflicts without violence?

There is a great deal of hope that we in fact can learn to transform our inevitable conflicts into constructive events and processes. A great deal of peace research has been done and more is underway to reveal to us how we can have that level of human agency. We may never negotiate with an earthquake, but we can learn to negotiate our way out of violence and into conflict that is waged without the tremendous ecological and economic costs that produce so much misery.

Basic conflict analysis, principled negotiation, strategic nonviolence and intercultural conflict competencies can take us the first 90 yards toward the goal line. Unique conflict iterative management and creativity will bring us the rest of the way over the line into the means-and-endzone.

Social conflict analysis is complex and required. It may take 100 professional conflict analysts, for example, to deconstruct the contextual elements of a gnarly destructive conflict, another 100 professional conflict analysts to work out a strong and positive set of steps to produce a constructive conflict management plan, and perhaps 200 professional conflict managers to put that plan into action. While these are obviously round estimate numbers, I believe they are quite generous and I believe all the rest of the players in the constructive conflict are people who would have been involved in any event. Constrast these estimated numbers with the hundreds of thousands of warriors and the rampant ecological destruction involved in war.

Principled negotiation is a basic method of managing conflict that eschews both the aggressive, violent, hard, positional strategies that have brought us war as well as the soft, yielding, appeasing tactics that bring us surrender. It is described in the simple Getting to Yes popular little book by some of the members of the Harvard Negotiating Project and remains quite valuable. It recommends a method that begins by separating the people from the problem, focusing on interests rather than positions, then brainstorming possible solutions, and adhering to fair standards. It continues to reset the conflict toward progress in the face of destructive responses, much like a self-correcting gyroscope to address the inevitable imbalances of a flying machine.

Strategic nonviolence is how civil society can take back the conflict management process from a dysfunctional government. It requires massive grassroots involvement and is how you remove power from any malfunctioning ruler, no matter how violent. You shut him down by organizing mass opposition, including defections from his armed forces and police. This has been accomplished in many cases and research is not only documenting that it has happened, but is beginning to explain the conflict dynamics and mechanics so that our constructive approach is becoming more technically proficient.

Finally, intercultural conflict management research and application is key to resolving conflicts with people who don't understand each other but who can learn that very different cultures can each work to the benefit of their respective peoples and to devise systems of interconnection that retain those benefits. It's a bit like building a series of conflict adapters that can allow a metric system of plumbing to interface with an American inches system. It's awkward but the adapters work. We can use them to make negotiation possible where it looks impossible now.

Part of our challenge is to begin to look for new leadership, for those who can approach a problem from the standpoint of the principled negotiator rather than the simple champion role. We need people who can face unreasonable opponents and discuss the conflict in blunt but openly collaborative terms. Further, those leaders need to understand the difference between compromising on what each side needs to do and compromising on principle.

If, for example, we elect a leader who, refreshingly, can appoint a true diversity of federal judges and not just mostly white men, and who can do excellent outreach to various Muslim constituencies, but who also fails to protect the average person from massive predation by war profiteers, bankers and Wall Street greedheads, that leader is failing to engage in principled negotiation because that leader is compromising basic principles. Clearly, we need to convince the leader to learn or we need to find another leader.

All peoples except the 'conflict industry'--the elite few who profit from bloody conflict--
will benefit from this approach and as complex as this approach is on the surface, it is much simpler in the long run than the simple decision to go to war, which introduces a blindingly complex welter of short and long term problems. Humanity will end war or war will end humanity. That simple fact is challenging us to work to change our norms and perspectives. The race is on the human race is at stake.