From Brian Ganson:
I taught negotiation and didn’t mention “The Seven Elements.” Am I going to hell?
Brian Ganson, Senior Researcher
Africa Centre for Dispute Settlement, University of Stellenbosch Business School
Having had the great pleasure of teaching, writing and consulting with Roger Fisher, the Seven Elements were part of my DNA. But as of an executive education programme this month delivered some 23 years after my first stint as Teaching Fellow for Roger, they have disappeared entirely from my negotiation teaching.
I’m working to better meet the needs of my students and clients who have, in various ways, asked for two things: (1) a framework that more easily incorporates critical issues such as narratives, framing, readiness to negotiate, status and power, conflicting understandings of justice, and willingness to confront the status quo, and (2) more concrete guidance on the steps of an effective negotiation. Over the years, The Seven Elements felt increasingly strained to me on both fronts.
So what do I use instead? Perhaps because I was first trained as a family mediator, my starting point is the Venn diagram of Problem, People and Process, reminding students that we are negotiating all three. These are placed within a larger circle of Parameters, which represent various constraints that parties use as boundaries for the negotiation.
Moving to a framework for action, I am informed by our teaching of mediation, where we are happy to teach steps of a mediation, even though it is in practice rarely a linear process. I’ve found it useful to divide the negotiation process into four phases: joint framing; exploration; deciding; and implementation.
In teaching this framework, I have found better student satisfaction, more thoughtful understanding of why particular negotiations may not working, and better application of creative thinking to the negotiation challenges both seemingly overwhelming and more mundane that students bring to the classroom and confront in the field. All the same, as someone who spent an inordinate amount of time at the Harvard Negotiation Project, I’m worried that I’m going to hell for this.
I welcome feedback on this work in progress, and would be very interested in hearing others’ experience working with, around and without The Seven Elements. A somewhat more detailed reflection, as well as a presentation of the evolving framework, are linked [here].
I’m often amazed at the variety of tools used effectively by trainers. The Harvard tools are good if trainers use them wisely, but I’ve seen trainers use an entirely different set of tools and facilitate deep learning as well.
Something trainers have to increasingly think about as well is how to incorporate online learning as an auxiliary to classroom learning. Facetime is precious and limited and can be enriched with preparatory online work.
We’ve designed an online conflict style inventory with accompanying self-guided tutorial that learners can do on their own before class, and trainers can then focus in close on indepth joint reflection exercises in this area. I’ll send a free review copy to anyone interested if you email me at bernstein at riverhouseepress dot com.