Years back IBM sent me to a 3 week intensive consulting course in Palisades, NY and in that class there was a 3 day even more intensive mini-course on negotiation given by the Harvard Negotiation Project (HNP). These are the guys behind the book Getting to Yes, Getting Past No, Beyond Reason, etc. I remember sitting looking at the 3 week calendar and seeing a 3 day block for this and thinking HOW can we spend 3 days on negotiation, this is really going to blow. However, shockingly, it turned out to be one the most insightful and applicable courses I have ever done. For one, (ok, you know this) we are negotiating constantly, with our families, with our friends, with our partners, with our colleagues, with our bosses. Where to have lunch, who picks up the kids, our life and relationships involve a constant stream of negotiations. Second, we tend to think of negotiation all wrong. We think of winning and losing, of getting our position accepted, and, this approach to negotiation causes all kinds of problems. Not only does it really mess with your relationships, it is inefficient and doesn’t even lead to the optimal solution that you pre-ordained going in to the "negotiation".
Maybe I can save you some of the gazillions of dollars IBM must have spent on my seminar since the basic idea idea is really straight forward. Overall you can call it a non-positional approach to negotiation. In classic positional negotiation you go into the negotiation with a position, which will be countered with an alternative position, with jockeying back and forth until a compromise position is arrived at. This is like the classic bartering with a vendor who marks their goods high, you state a price, the vendor responds with a price, and so forth until you arrive at a position. Generally, this leads to a sub-optimal conclusion for both parties (or at best a WIN/LOSE situation which I posit is a sub-optimal solution). Contrast this with non-positional negotiation. With this approach, rather than focusing on positions, your focus is on what the underlying issues you are trying to address by the negotiation, your interests. In the vendor negotiation I just mentioned you might think, ok, I want the highest quality, best price, shipped home, one of these colors, etc. Then, rather than starting with a position you strive to learn what the other parties’ interests are and then work together to find the agreement that optimizes each of your set of interests. This doesn’t mean compromising. Each party has a BATNA (whether stated or not) which stands for Best Approach to a Negotiated Agreement. It only makes sense to take an option that is better than your BATNA, otherwise you either keep at generating or options or step out of the negotiation.
Getting to Yes, and the other HNP books provide strategies for developing alternatives, surfacing alternatives, testing options for legitimacy and value, but the most important thing is the understanding that that your focus is on solving a problem and to understand when you are in solution space versus problem space. In problem space you’re mind set is on understanding the underlying issues. In solution space you are generating options, testing options against each other and ultimately choosing an option is the overall best for both parties (or many in a multi-party negotiation).
In software development this is analogous to the stages of analysis versus design. In the analysis phase you are working to deeply understand the problem and you are consciously being careful not to venture too far into design until you understand the problem. Similar to the "agile software development" approach, in negotiation, you can slide between these mindsets fluidly, the key is to differentiate between when you are better defining the problem (for example, discovering an interest of your negotiating partner or fleshing out an option) or concluding an option is the optimal agreement/solution. As I matter of fact, it isn’t just analogous, it is exactly the same thing. A software system is the result of a negotiation, a set of requirements from various parties (interests), a set of design decisions (options), and the final system represents the solution (agreement).
Most of the 3 day HNP course I took involved interactive, videoed, role play negotiations with the lawyers pushing every button they could find to try to get you out of non-positional negotiation and into positional negotiation. Of course there are wide variety of ways to sabotage a negotiation but the main strategy on the student’s part was continuously steer the discussion towards discovering the interests of each party, generating options, comparing options, and agreeing on a solution. When a position was proposed the trick was to acknowledge the position as a possible option and use it as a tool for discovering the underlying interests of the other party. For example, someone might say to you, I will give you $25 for that shirt (a position). Rather than responding with a counter position, $10, you might say, how did you come up with $25? Which might lead to an explanation of how much money that person has in their pocket, or how much he or she spent for a similar shirt. No matter how belligerent, or quiet, or scary, or passive aggressive, your goal is to move the discussion back to understanding the underlying problem and, ideally together, finding a solution that meets both party’s needs.
So your wife says to you. "I want you to make dinner tonight", in a frustrated tone. Where is she? Problem space or solution space? Solution space, of course, she has started a negotiation (of a type) kicking it off with a position. You might choose to say yes right way, start an argument responding to her tone, or you might instead try to move the discussion to problem space. This is where the creativity comes in. One approach, might be something like "Ok. That could make sense (making her a position a legitimate option). What makes you say that?". You might find that she doesn’t think you are pitching in enough, or that she will be late on Thursdays, or a whole variety of possibilities. If you had immediately just said "Yes" you might not have known this and left a lot of value on the table. Perhaps it isn’t dinner tonight that is the solution at all, it is picking up the kids more often, or working together on weekends to make meals for the week, or .. who knows? This is another premise of the HNP approach, in most positional negotiations, there is value left on the table. By taking this approach you can actually create super optimal (I made that term up) agreements which not only optimizes the interests each party hoped to achieve in the negotiation but even interests unknown or seemingly beyond the boundaries of the negotiation. In large part this is because this negotiation style is about building stronger relationships based on common understanding and mutual problem solving. If you have a good relationship with some that you are effectively problem solving with is it a surprise that you might find opportunities well beyond the original negotiation?
There are a lot of similarities between these concepts and Stephen Covey’s Habit 4, Win Win or No Deal, of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In Getting to Yes speak this means, even if the party you are negotiating with would take an option that is worse then their BATNA, do not take that agreement yourself! Or in other words invoke the mutual BATNA philosophy – if there is not an option better than both of our BATNAs then there is no agreement. Win/Lose is an illusion.
If you combine these two ideas get a tremendous set of professional and personal tools for dealing with everyday life from personal to professional, interpersonal to inter-department, inter-company, even inter-cultural relations. Give it a try. Believe me, you will find lots of opportunities.
Rem
, straight copy*) likely tended towards a technical field like software development. Companies providing developer software and developer experience need to pay attention here. There is a new generation that works differently, learns differently, plays differently – and writes software differently. If you don’t know what I mean look to the Ruby community. Witness the success of 
