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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 2 2009, 3:40 AM EST (current) | mikicesari | 1996 words added |
| Jan 2 2009, 3:32 AM EST | mikicesari |
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| Purpose: | To have participants process the content interactively. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Time: | 20-30 inutes or more, depending on the content to be processed. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Participants: | At least 4-5 participants. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Materials: |
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| Process: | I) Before the workshop, divide your lecture/content into 4-6 chunks. Prepare a handout for each chunk. It is important that you do not specify the order of these (what comes first, second, third, …). II) During the workshop, divide the plenary into groups of 4-6 people – depending on the number of chunks you have prepared. Distribute a different handout to each group. Assign a few minutes for reading and digest the content. III) Form new groups with one person from each of the previous groups in each new group. The purpose is to have people who read all the chunks in each group. IV) Assign the task. Tell participants that their task is to share what they know of the lecture and put it together. They should be able to present the whole content to the plenary. Assign sufficient time. V) Ask one group to volunteer delivering the presentation to the plenary. Invite participants to participate with additions or questions if needed. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Example: | You are designing a workshop on “Cooperation and Competition” and you wish to process the following content with participants. Consider this lecture and see how it has been divided. Each chunk is contained between horizontal line breaks. Participants are given a single chunk without knowing what comes before and after what they read. Negotiation is an essential component of your life. Weather you deal with your spouse over issues of common concern, you discuss with your children over were to go on holidays, you bargain at the fruit market for a kilogram of beans - you are always negotiating. You negotiate also when you ask for a salary raise to your boss and when you are trying to settle a dispute with your neighbour. Guerrilla leaders are negotiating when they sit at the table with representatives of the State, so does a community leader that is discussing with an international NGO over what to do in his community – and the NGO representative too is negotiating. Whenever you communicate with other people in order to get what you want – and the other has both opposing and shared interest – you negotiate. Negotiation is a fact of life: like it or not, you do it every day. Have a look at this interaction between a customer and a shopkeeper:
What happens here? How would you define what Sasa and Selma are doing? Similarly, look at what happens between Michele and his wife, Anne:
These two interactions between individuals are similar, in that each side takes a position, argues and defends it; eventually each side makes concessions to the other in order to reach a compromise. Roger Fisher and William Ury[1], and generations of negotiators with them, call this style of negotiation positional bargaining. Any way or method of negotiation could be judged by three criteria:
For Fisher and Ury positional bargaining is likely to score poorly on all three. When people argue over positions they have a tendency to dig in, or radicalise their position, to become defensive and identify themselves with their position. The more they do this, the more it is difficult to change their positions, at the risk of “loosing face”. By paying primary attention to their – and the other side’s – position they tend to overlook the underlined concerns of the parties, their interests or needs. Thus, producing a wise agreement can become very difficult. Positional bargaining can be very inefficient too. Consider the example of Sasa and Selma: each of them has started from extremely low (Sasa) or high (Selma) offers, knowing that if they will have to make concessions to the other side in order to reach agreement, starting extreme will increase the possibility of having a final price closer to their satisfaction - e.g. if I am Selma and my first offer is 2.000 I am more likely to reach agreement around 1.000 than if I start from 1.200. In other terms, you are likely to start from a position extremely favourable to you, you will stubbornly hold to it and try to deceive the other as to what you really want by making small concessions. This is inefficient and it will probably take a lot of time and effort to reach agreement. Consider now the second example with Anne and Michele. This bargain over when to go to visit Anne’s family can easily embitter them, it looks like a contest of will and each of them reiterates what he/she will or won’t do. It doesn’t look like they are looking for a solution that is good for both of them; it looks more like a battle. Anger and resentment is likely to generate from such interaction. Probably it will not make their relationship better, it can rather make it worse. We have considered two-party situations. Consider now situations where there are many parties like the General Assembly of Caritas Internationalis. Delegates from over 160 Countries are gathered in one system and discuss issues of common concern for a few days. If each – or just some - of them digs into positions, reaching agreement over the issues at stake becomes impossible. In a simpler example, consider the situation of 4 house-mates in their thirties. They share the house, thus they have to make decisions over a number of issues of common concern on a day-to-day basis: what colours to paint the walls; what Internet connection to buy; when to organise a party and who to invite; which bedroom goes to whom, and so on. When these house-mates turn to positional bargaining it can become very difficult to do what’s needed – it can also become unpleasant to live together. Many people tend to polarise positional bargaining over two extremes. They recognise the cost of playing a hard game with the other party – mainly on their relationship – thus believe that playing soft will be better. The following table illustrates the characteristics of these two extremes:
* Adapted from Fisher, R., Ury, W., Getting to Yes – Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, NY: Penguin, 1991. Decades of experience of the Harvard Negotiation Project suggest that there is an alternative to positional bargaining. Rather than choosing between being soft or hard you can change the game. Every negotiation takes place at two levels: at the level of the substance at stake and at that of the process for dealing with that substance. The first level is about what you negotiate, the second is about how you do it. People frequently do not think of how they negotiate, they rather focus on what they want by it. Harvard Negotiation Project suggests a different way of going, which they called principled negotiation. The method is articulated in four points:
[1] Founders of the Harvard Negotiation Project and authors of Getting to Yes *** and other influential texts on negotiation. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
