Getting to Yes (part 2 of 4)
Wed, May 4, 2011Here was the negotiation exercise for this week. Our team, as a group of doctors, had to choose 3 out of 7 patients to receive the H2N2 vaccine. The others would die. We prioritized those seven people based on the following criteria: what influence he/she had on the society and well being of other people, and how importantly his/her life related to others. The challenge was not from the other team but actually from ours. I was unsure of whether we didn’t have the same objective criteria in our minds or we were too stubborn to compromise, but one member disagreed with the rest on the choices despite how hard we tried to persuade her.
After I read more on GTY, I learned a technique that I wished I had known at the moment. It was called “Negotiation Jujitsu”. In a nutshell, if the other side announced a firm position, I might be tempted to criticize and reject it. If she criticized my proposal, I might be tempted to defend it and dig myself in. If she attacked me, I might be tempted to defend myself and counterattack. And by doing these things, I would end up playing the positional bargaining game. What “Negotiation Jujitsu” suggested was:
1) Don’t attack her position, look behind it
2) Don’t defend my ideas, invite criticism and advice
3) Recast an attack on me as an attack on the problem
4) Ask questions and pause
Unaware of the above tactic, we actually use a classic yet unsatisfactory policy, “majority wins”, to end our discussion.
On the contrary, the other team was very cooperative. They listened to our arguments and vice versa. Though both teams didn’t have the same choices of whom to be saved, we had great discussions. In fact, we had one choice in common. After our team persuaded them to save one more person from our choices, we were stuck at the last one. However, the negotiation session ended gracefully after our team went for the one they suggested. It was not because they let us save one person from our proposal but because: the last person we saved was the best to fulfill the criteria established during our discussion. Consequently, both parties were pleased with final outcomes without giving in any kind of benefits.
I truly love the idea of separating the people from the problem in negotiation. I myself value long-term relationship and would like to always have win-win situation. From my observation, yet many out there want to take advantages of others as long as they get as much as they want. If only they considered the benefits of long-term relationships, they would do something different and make it easier for everyone.
Last year, I worked as an intern for an Australian company; let’s just call it ABC. One-year internship was a mandatory part of my university program at RMIT. For that whole year, ABC managed to squeezed as much as possible out of interns like me, because they knew we couldn’t quit and must finish internships. Finding new companies for interns was hard and we had to present legitimate reasons to quit. Moreover, Vietnam labor laws stand against employees and for employers. What I was able to do at that moment was to work like a dog hoping days would pass by as fast as possible. There was almost nothing to negotiate. Even if there was a chance to negotiate, I had a very weak BATNA: stop working, inform RMIT of the situation, have 3-way discussion (RMIT, ABC, and me), and restart the internship all over again with a new company, if any.
Fortunately, those horrible days finally ended and now I have another job in a good company. They understand I sometimes have classes during working hours, and together we work out my schedule. This is a great example of how people collaborate to solve a problem.