The Negotiation Process

Before, During, and After You Close a Deal

Eliane Karsaklian

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645752783
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

This book will change your life! It will give you a brand-new perspective to negotiation. It will take you from stressful, unpleasant, confrontational situations to a world of stressless, enjoyable, and collaborative ways of conducting business. It will also help you to shape the future of your business with a clearer vision of what you want it to be. All books and theories about negotiation stop at when you close a deal. But this is a very short-termed vision of negotiation. If you want your business to survive the upcoming waves of mergers and acquisitions, digital revolutions, and international trade, you need to add sustainability to your negotiations. This book will show you how to get there.

Part I
Before the Negotiation

“Failing to prepare is preparing to failing.”

Franklin

Not finding evidence of something doesn’t mean it

didn’t occur.

Chapter 1: International
Negotiation and Physics – Two
Parallel Worlds

After spending most of my career in international negotiation, I’ve noticed there’s a parallel here. Businesspeople have been taught to view negotiation as a competition. This is akin to the classical physics approach of determinism. If you look at the groups involved in a negotiation and the resources at their disposal, you can determine which will be the winners and which the losers.

Newton stated that an object will stay at rest or continue moving toward the ground at the same speed unless it encounters an outside force. The same thing happens when you are negotiating. You can keep going with your strategy, ideas, and propositions until they hit someone’s objections. Then your offers either change their trajectories to adjust to the objections or stop as if they had hit a wall. Just as with energy, your propositions are not created or destroyed during a negotiation; they are transformed.

But I believe negotiation has moved beyond this model, with its roots in the western world. Increasing numbers of businesspeople are coming from the Asian, the Middle-Eastern, and South American cultures. Their viewpoints are different. They operate more often with the quantum physics approach of probabilities. This means they can hold what appears to be opposing viewpoints at the same time.

That is why they look unpredictable to most westerners. Their thinking patterns and their behaviors are not linear and can surprise others by bending around obstacles until they reach their goals. There is no clear-cut position in these cultures as opposed to the American culture, for instance. It is a waste of time to try to determine their trajectory. We can only talk about probabilities of future behaviors.

If American and Western-European businesspeople want to remain relevant in the global marketplace, they need to move beyond the classical model of negotiation.

Indeed, contemporary ideas about negotiation can be traced back to 1981. This is when members of the Harvard Negotiation Project wrote Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. This book is one of the longest running business paperback bestsellers. They applied a deterministic approach to negotiation. If you knew the exact position of your partners and how their minds worked, you could predict their future behavior and would have no surprises when negotiating with them. The outcome of your negotiation would only depend on the consistency of your own strategy and the way you manage the information you have about your partners.

Their book also incorporated some negotiating strategy ideas from game theory that are still accepted today: win-win and win-lose.

Win-win strategy has become the norm because it’s politically correct. A negotiator’s goal is to arrive at beneficial outcomes for all parties. Negotiators search for collaboration and are more likely to make concessions and avoid conflicts. It also means that you want to create good relationships with the other side, even if you don’t get as much as you could out of that specific business. The strategy has a long-term orientation.

Win-win tries to be an integrative approach. Objectives, constraints, and the needs of all parties are factored into the process. It also means that one party’s problems become all parties’ problems, to which a common solution should be found. Working together to find solutions to all of these issues means the global gains are bigger and shared by everybody. Negotiators believe that the process and outcomes must be fair for both sides–for the length of the agreement.

Win-lose strategy is used when negotiators don’t believe all parties can win. Their aim becomes protecting their own interests. The rationale is that other people’s problems are not their problems. In this approach, people aren’t interested in being transparent and sharing gains. However, the result doesn’t always look aggressive and can be very subtle. In addition, negotiators may announce win-win intentions but get into a win-lose strategy as the talks progress.

Another possibility is that the negotiation starts with a win-win or a win-lose strategy and turns into a lose-lose one. Several factors can lead to confrontation, so each party says to the other, “If you don’t give me what I want, I won’t give anything to you.” The one who adjusts the most is seen as needing the other more–and losing.

I consider these ideas classical negotiation. My concern is that these–like classical physics–can no longer explain the negotiating universe. Newton’s ideas worked fine with the behavior of larger bodies, but other theories and equipment were needed to deal with subatomic particles. We can parallel classical physics with what we can see, and quantum physics with what exists but we can’t see.

Here is the parallel with people. We can see what they do through their behavior, but we can’t see the underlying reasons for their behavior. We need tools that enable us to identify what is influencing their actions. That means understanding attitudes, opinions, motivations, fears, and culture. When you work mainly with people from other cultures, you can only think about probabilities.

Change Is a Chance

People in high positions in companies feel like they have all figured out; otherwise they wouldn’t be in such positions. They also think that showing that they can still learn or have hesitations about some topics is a sign of weakness. It is also a matter of pride. The truth is that they are insecure and fearful people. And what if they were wrong? Well, they are already wrong because they are narrow-minded and refuse to see beyond the commonplace. If we settle for the obvious, we’ll never see what’s beyond it.

Reluctance to change is caused by social pressure and the status quo created around what is obvious and shallow to rule out those who see further than the average person. Is it because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily, but it is certainly because they are curious and dare contesting the well-settled mediocre standards to look out for better options. Curiosity lies at the heart of science.

Aristotle, to whom the loss of curiosity equaled death, stated, “All men by nature desire to know.” Aristotle spent his whole life learning and teaching. As a natural philosopher and a lover of wisdom, he focused on logic – how we can think more clearly.

Indeed, there is a risk of being discriminated and excluded from the mainstream system when thinking differently. This happened to Galileo, Copernicus, and so many other thinkers and scientists, thanks to whom we learned and are less ignorant today. But in their time, they were persecuted, although what they discovered was accurate. Luckier than Copernicus, Galileo was helped by the use of scientific method. We would think that showing evidence through empirical observation and mathematical demonstration was harder to contest. And yet, it was contested. The same thing happens in companies and societies today. You’d better fit in or you’re out.

Trust, innovation, and inspiration are values written in all companies’ charts, but reality is that you are welcome if you comply with the status quo instead of suggesting something too different. Something that requires effort and reviewing what has been done for decades is not welcome, even if the current results are not satisfactory.

You can also blame others for what happens to you, but you need to take responsibility because what happens to you is the result of what you think and what you do. Remember that all scientific discoveries and revelations came from curiosity and from asking questions about what we could see and what we couldn’t see. You have the power of changing the direction of your life and of your company. You do that by asking yourself the right questions. It is not because we all use technology that we have an innovative mindset. We use it because it provides us comfort.

If we had all figured out and if asking new questions was not a real need, researchers and scientists would be unemployed. Their job is precisely to ask questions and to challenge what we think we already know. Isaac Newton thought he had it all figured out. Two centuries later, modern physicists showed that there was much more in nature than what Newton could see. And today, scientists know that what we don’t know far exceeds what we know.

Other than lack of curiosity, it is intriguing that people wouldn’t feel that excitement of not knowing. Every new discovery is exciting. Every new concept, idea, and experience should get people excited and wanting to know more. What, why, and how are good questions but ‘because this is the way it is,’ conformity is a bad answer.

In the seventeenth century, the French Philosopher and Mathematician René Descartes stated that body and mind were two separate and unrelated things: “There is nothing in the concept of body that belongs to the mind and nothing in that of the mind that belongs to the body.” Descartes rejected the idea that spirit and science could co-exist, although he believed that both mind and matter were created by God. To him, the human body was a machine and the human brain was the center of intelligence and reason.

By that time, it was believed that the universe and people were made of physical matters until scientists from the twentieth century started to dig deeper on the matters of universe and discovered that there were more than physical matters in the universe. But Galileo had already suggested that universe is not all material. Au contraire, it is essentially non-physical. We know today that the universe arises from a field that is even more subtle than energy, a field that looks more like information, intelligence, or consciousness than matter.

Greek Philosopher Democritus said, “Nothing exists but atoms and empty space. Everything else is opinion.” This might come as a brutal statement but it leads to possible interpretations. Some will say that opinions are not real and accurate, so let’s just stick with the atoms while others could be interested in what opinions would say about these atoms and the empty space in order to have a better understanding of them.

In the eighteenth century, German Philosopher Emmanuel Kant pointed out that human beings can never truly know the nature of reality as it is. Our investigations only provide answers to the questions we ask, which are based on the capabilities and limitations of our minds. Our perception of the world is fundamentally dependent on the filters of our consciousness.

This makes me think of a company I worked with right after they went through a big crisis. Their chairman had made discriminatory statements during an interview with a journalist and his company suffered from boycotts, bad brand reputation, and loss of market share in several countries. Then, I had the opportunity of meeting some of the people who worked in key positions in the company. During our interviews, I made it clear that I would write a case study based on their story. They all told me how much effort their leaders had made to recover from the crisis and how genuinely non-exclusionary their intentions and actions were.

Then I wrote the case study citing their own words, which I had recorded during the interviews and showed to them prior to publication. They wanted to change everything. The mirror-effect made them realize that although all they had told me was very positive towards their leaders, they were not allowed to speak on behalf of the company. They also realized, without saying it, that the story was too perfect to be credible by others. In other words, they couldn’t believe their own words at such a point that they questioned what they knew I had recorded. They had created their own reality during the interviews.

This is how much of a filter perception can be. When seen from the inside, their role was to protect their company and leadership by telling and showing how perfect the company had learned to be as a consequence of the crisis. But when the same story was reflected back to them, they had an external vision of it which was inconsistent with their consciousness.

Perception is what makes us think what reality is like. But we don’t have the same perception of the same things. These differences have to do with imagination, background, curiosity, and so forth. And because not everything can be measured, perception has more to do with creating reality than putting up with it.

Don’t Live on Illusions

We need to drop the concept that any side ‘wins.’ Negotiation isn’t a win-lose boxing match in which one party is the victor and the other leaves the arena in an ambulance. What incentive does the ‘defeated’ group have in continuing to work with the winner? Frankly, they have more reason to do as little as possible, or perhaps even scuttle the agreement later (particularly if a better opportunity comes along).

Although this idea might sound shocking to you, it is imperative that we stop believing in win-win negotiation strategies, because it’s an illusion. You can’t have two winners. Winning has to do with competition as in games, sports, or fights. Instead, we need to move to sustainable negotiation, a term I recently coined. In most parts of the world, you no longer do a deal and then leave. Each side has something the other needs, and they must work together to achieve their goals. To do this, you engage in a collaboration that continues to evolve. This leads to repeated contact, discussions and negotiations, constant adjustments...