by Marie Jones
Negotiation is everywhere in our lives, from choosing your next vacation destination with our friends, to the resolution of global challenges during international conferences. Despite its prevalence in the workplace, as an engineer, I was never trained on negotiation techniques, and always saw it as something people are gifted with, or not. To remedy this gap in our education, Dr. Jack Williams, President of the Institute for Global Negotiation based in Zurich came to EPFL on October 17th 2024 to deliver a workshop on the basics of negotiation. This event was made possible thanks to the support of ACIDE, the political representation of PhDs, Postdocs and scientific staff of EPFL.
The first exercise seemed pretty straightforward: out of the 30 motivated students and postdocs from across all faculties, get to know someone you have never met before. Then, join another pair to introduce your new friend to them. Questioning someone on their interests, summarising and paraphrasing their answers to present them to a third party: that’s already a lot of useful skills in negotiation! It’s also surprising to see what people remember from what you told them. Perhaps something that seemed insignificant that I mentioned was actually the first thing that my partner repeated.
After this warm-up exercise, we worked on the definition of negotiation, first alone with a pen and paper, then in pairs. Once we had 15 versions of the definition, the room was split in two groups with 18 minutes to reach a common definition per group. One group claimed the blackboard and soon had a chair writing key words. Jack named this approach the “Power of the Pen” when the chair can filter out what is relevant to them. Asked at the end if voting on the final definition took place, the “Pen master” nodded while the rest of the group didn’t agree with this statement. What happened was a choice by negative consent: the chair asked his group whether they had any objection to his proposition on the board, instead of asking for a direct approval.
Without a clear chair (and a blackboard), the approach of the other group was much less structured and led to stronger internal disagreement as one half was quicker to agree on a common definition, trying to impose it on the other half who was still brainstorming. Jack highlighted that the part of the group who was not involved in writing this version of the definition will never accept it without any modification because they don’t feel ownership of it. This is a common mistake of drafting a new proposal independently and presenting it to the group as THE perfect solution: it will be met with more resistance.
So what is negotiation? It involves different parties, with divergences but a shared interest, who will exchange to reach a common agreement. Without a shared interest, a negotiation cannot be successful, and this aspect is oftentimes forgotten by members whilst negotiating. Framing the purpose of the negotiation around this shared interest will increase its chances of success. In a negotiation, the actors have much more autonomy than in a court for example, and this should be used to their advantage. Time pressure is the main driver to close a round of negotiation, so be sure to resist stress well!
As we moved on to the second exercise, Jack emphasised the importance of collaboration, curiosity and creativity. This bilateral negotiation simulation saw pairs of sellers and buyers negotiating over the price of a diesel generator. Finding the zone of possible agreement between the seller’s price range and that of the buyer was not an easy task. In the majority of cases, the first offer shaped the rest of the negotiation. This is the so-called anchoring effect. The last part of the workshop focused on analysing the different arguments, whether objective or subjective, used by the pairs and deriving general learnings from the simulation.
Dinner was the occasion to share our personal successes and failures in negotiating (who else ended up giving away their fridge for free on Facebook Marketplace? Or bought a 5000 CHF race bike for only 1000 CHF?). The speaker also told us about anecdotes from his experience moderating debates over Brexit in pubs, or his last workshop with UN officials.
My personal take away from this workshop is the importance of asking questions, the more we know about the other party’s intentions and motivations, the less anchoring power they have on you and the more quickly a suitable resolution can be discovered!