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.

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.