Why Interest-Based Negotiation Will Get You What You Really Want
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Negotiation is part of life. Whether we're talking about something as grandiose as healthcare or as personal as buying a car, we often spend the vast majority of the negotiation process haggling over the numbers. This is often a bad way to look at it, says Dan Shapiro. And he should know: he's head of the Harvard International Negotiation Project and knows an awful lot about getting two opposing sides to see eye to eye. So what's the best way to do so? Perhaps talking about why each party wants what they want and negotiating from there. When polarized debates come to a head over "use vs them" mentalities, looking at it from this angle—i.e. the nuts and bolts of a position and less so the end result—can humanize each side to the other. Dan Shapiro's latest book is
"Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts".
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DAN SHAPIRO:
Daniel Shapiro, Ph.D., is a world-renowned expert on negotiation and conflict resolution. He founded and directs the Harvard International Negotiation Program, which has pioneered innovative strategies and teaching methodologies to address the human dimensions of conflict resolution. Dr. Shapiro also is an associate professor in psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital and affiliated faculty at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, where he serves as the associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. For three years, he chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Conflict Prevention.Â
He has launched back-channel negotiations to help revitalize formal peace negotiations in a major Middle East conflict, and regularly conducts negotiation trainings for government leaders around the world—including Middle East negotiators, Chinese officials, Serbian members of parliament, and senior U.S. officials. Through nonprofit funding, he developed a conflict management program that now reaches one million youth across more than thirty countries.
He has appeared on dozens of radio and television shows and has contributed to The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and other popular publications. Dr. Shapiro is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award and the Cloke-Millen Peacemaker of the Year Award. The World Economic Forum named him a “Young Global Leader.” In his spare time, he plays blues guitar and enjoys playing baseball with his three sports-loving sons.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Dan Shapiro:Â So the classic approach to negotiation is positional bargaining. In positional bargaining I have a position, you have a position, and we each haggle over those positions.Â
Now the rules to positional bargaining are very clear: You start with an extreme demand but not so extreme that the other side thinks that you’re crazy or bluffing. You can concede stubbornly, and you demonstrate a greater willingness in the other side to walk away from the negotiation table.Â
So you go to the car dealer. You want to buy a Corvette. The car salesperson says, “$80,000 take it or leave it.”Â
You say “80? I’ll tell you what: 40, take it or leave it.”Â
And you start arguing and haggling, crossing your arms. Threatening to leave. An hour later the car salesperson brings that number down to 70. You’ve gone up to 50. You each then demonstrate a greater willingness to walk away from the negotiation table. You say, “You know what? There’s actually another Corvette dealer down the street. Maybe I’ll just go there.”
And the car dealer says, “Well, you know what. You see all these people standing in line here. They all want to buy this Corvette.” You each threaten to walk. But if you don’t walk you might end up typically somewhere in the middle of those two other numbers: 40, 80, you might end up around 60.Â
However, this probably isn’t the best agreement that you could have come to. All this is doing is arguing over one single factor: a number. And that’s the problem of positional bargaining, is that I might have a lot of other interests at stake but none of them are getting shared within this very strict form of positional bargaining.Â
There’s another form of negotiation that at the Harvard Negotiation Project some of my colleagues have developed, we call it “Interest Based” negotiation. The idea here is let’s not argue over positions, let’s argue over underlying interests....