Improvisation and Negotiation: Expecting the Unexpected
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| La première sortie ( The first outing, 1876-1877) Pierre-Auguste Renoir |
Excerpts from Balachandra, Lakshmi, et al. "Improvisation and negotiation: Expecting the unexpected." Negotiation journal 21.4 (2005): 415-423.
Preparation and Mindfulness
Negotiation is a fascinating subject in part because the process is so often unpredictable. External events outside the control of the parties — unexpected outbursts, accidentally pressing someone’s “emotional hot button,” learning critical new facts about the issues being negotiated — can intrude at any time. A negotiator who learns to react effectively in unpredictable moments clearly is an improviser. He or she somehow manages to cope regardless of the people, the problem, or the process in place. We have known people who have this gift. But how do these virtuoso performers do it? [...]
A cornerstone of negotiation theory is that a negotiator must consider the needs, interests, and concerns of the other side. Proper preparation requires weighing everyone’s alternatives away from the table and identifying their best (and worst) alternative to a negotiated agreement (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991; Menkel-Meadow 2001). Negotiation theorists encourage negotiators to prepare by brainstorming options to create mutual gains (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991).
In spite of preparation’s obvious virtues, theorists express doubts about whether the negotiation process should or can be scripted. The dynamic and interactive nature of negotiation would seem to doom rigid plans to failure. Negotiation, by its very nature, calls for the involved actors to construct the interaction jointly, making sense of the negotiation as it evolves (McGinn and Keros 2002). Negotiators improvise — it is unavoidable. They work with the unpredictable and deal with the unexpected. [...]
In the arts, professionals learn to improvise, not by trying to foresee everything that could conceivably happen, rather by accepting whatever transpires and working with it (Berliner 1995; Close 1982; Spolin 1963).
They cultivate an understanding that helps them work from the unknown with comfort and ease. Rather than preparing for various specific potential outcomes, improvisers train to work with any situation that arises. Professional improvisers learn to be comfortable with the unexpected without learning prescriptive formulas. This distinction is important. While some negotiation literature describes specific ways to prepare, it typically fails to describe how a negotiator can learn to proceed through the improvisational process of a negotation. Exploring the skills of artists and therapists who improvise professionally thus offers insights to negotiators who also seek to comfortably and confidently navigate the unpredictable twists and turns of a negotiation.
In improvisational theater, actors learn to use all the information that is presented. They learn to be mindful of what occurs around them and interpret words, actions and emotions. They then add information so the scene can progress. The actors must use active listening and heightened awareness to respond to verbal and nonverbal cues. The best improvisers engage fully with everything that occurs around them — both on stage and in the audience. Similarly, jazz musicians learn to listen to cues that their fellow musicians transmit. If they do not listen to one another and watch each other
carefully, they will play over each other and the resulting performance will be disjointed. Improvisational musicians and actors must develop keen awareness or “mindfulness” in order to perform at all.
Scholars have begun to consider the role that this type of “mindfulness” or self-awareness plays in negotiation. Meditation, visualization, hypnosis, and other techniques are all being explored as vehicles for developing mindfulness in negotiation, which in turn, may have an impact on negotiation success. According to Fisher and Shapiro (2005) a truly mindful negotiator is both self-aware and attached to the emotions of others (Fisher and Shapiro 2005). Much like an improvisational performer, a negotiator should be aware of, on a deeper level, what is happening around him or her, what might be occurring with the other party, and how this might look to an observer.
The Improvisational Orientation
The ability to be deeply aware is at the heart of an improvisational orientation. Effective negotiators learn how to “play off” of what the other party has said and done. In doing so, they demonstrate that they have not only heard what the other party has said, but that they have also reflected on that information. In an improvisational theater, actors acknowledge and supplement each other’s statements by saying “Yes, and,” a technique similar to that recommended by Douglas Stone, Sheila Heen, and Bruce Patton in Difficult Conversations (1999).
The authors refer to this approach as the “And Stance.” They maintain that adopting the And Stance helps negotiators connect to the opposing party differently than if they were to resort to the more adversarial, instinctive response of “No, but.” As the authors note, this may go beyond mere politeness by encouraging a fundamental shift in perspective. “The And Stance gives you a place from which to assert the full strength of your views and feelings without having to diminish the views and feelings of someone else” (Stone, Heen, and Patton 1999: 40). The And Stance is not a strategy,
per se, but it does provide a way to reorient the relationship of the parties. In this respect, it is an “echo improvisation” in the arts. When performers think “Yes, and,” it helps them be reflective in the moment — to develop an improvisational mind-set by working with whatever information others have given them. An improvisational mind-set is similar to the notion of mindfulness discussed earlier, which utilizes an ancient Eastern method of deliberate, moment-to-moment attention through meditation (Riskin 2002). Improvisational artists pay careful attention to the moment by listening carefully to notes and words and watching for body-language cues from their counterparts.
For negotiators, this method of listening carefully and empathetically is derived from the “active listening” suggested long ago by the psychologist Carl Rogers (1961). Developing awareness and the ability to respond appropriately fosters spontaneity. In negotiation, that requires freeing oneself from one’s conditioned-behavior patterns in order to encourage value creation. Conditioned patterns, stock answers, and communication rituals are the antitheses of spontaneity.
Some negotiators seem to have a particular knack for getting “unstuck” from such conditional patterns or other difficult moments that tend to hinder progress during a negotiation. Confronted with a tense situation, they have the psychological acuity to know when to step back and address those tensions. That kind of negotiator might say, “There is a lot of emotion in the room right now. I know because I feel frustrated. Maybe we should just talk about that for five minutes.” After the group discusses its frustrations, the conversation may move to something completely different. That experience may also make it easier to raise other concerns, including emotional issues, more authentically and calmly. If so, tensions may be reduced and stalemate defused. Such an intervention can be difficult, of course; it requires both self-awareness and a willingness to take a risk. It also requires that the negotiator break out of his or her conditioned negotiating pattern, those familiar behaviors and mind-sets that may be comfortable and difficult to abandon [...]
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