Here in America, in a political climate which increasingly abandons the reasoned debate and factual analysis that once characterized public discourse in favor of logical fallacies, cheap appeals to emotion, and personal attacks, there is evidently little popular support for intelligent dialogue between political parties, let alone between the U.S. and its adversaries abroad.

Against that backdrop, a question that emerges time and again is, “Should we negotiate with terrorists?” In the public imagination, negotiation has unfortunately come to be synonymous with compromise, appeasement, and weakness, and the answer for many here is “no”.

In his latest edition of Negotiating Tip of the Week, Josh Weiss poses and ponders exactly that kind of tough question. He begins by challenging the popular definition of negotiation and proposing instead one that mediators will be familiar with.

To join Josh in asking what it means to negotiate with extremists, listen to his podcast here. As always, Josh welcomes listener input, along with ideas for future programs. This is one place on the web at least where public discourse remains welcome.

Technorati tags: conflict resolution, negotiation, Mediation

Every journey begins with a single step. In the case of Canadian Kyle MacDonald, his began with a single red paper clip.

Kyle, who could teach the contestants on the reality show Unan1mous a thing or two about negotiating, decided to barter his way from a red paper clip to a house, using a series of upward trades to move closer to his goal, which now looks increasingly attainable.

You can read about Kyle’s adventures in bargaining here at his web site, One Red Paperclip.

Zapdramatic, the Canadian-based interactive media company, is well known for the online negotiation games and simulations it designs and produces. Its portfolio includes “The Raise” and “The Angry Neighbor”, a mediation game (links to these games and others can be found online here).

Its web site now features a brand new interactive negotiation adventure, “Move or Die,” a film noir animation in which players assume the role of a hitchhiker who has to negotiate his way through perils which include an ethically-challenged brother-and-sister pair, a dead body carrying $10,000 cash, and a trapdoor to man-eating piranhas (all in a day’s work for your typical negotiator).

This negotiation game is currently available for free to visitors to Zapdramatic’s web site. Other interactive dramas can be found here.

I’ve written before, both here and here, on the significance of gender differences in negotiation. It’s a subject of great interest to students and scholars of negotiation and negotiating behaviors.

This week’s edition of the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge newsletter includes “When Gender Changes the Negotiation“, an article by Dina W. Pradel, Hannah Riley Bowles, and Kathleen L. McGinn, which discusses strategies for counteracting gender differences in negotiation.

Among the suggestions? Doing your homework in advance to arrive fully prepared for negotiation levels the playing field–sound advice for anyone, regardless of gender, who wants to make the most of any negotiation.

Also recommended reading: Tammy Lenski’s “Top 5 Negotiation Traps for Women“.

By the way, the Working Knowledge newsletter is available for free. Click here for more information and to sign up to receive it.

Negotiators, economists, game theorists, and mediators alike are probably familiar with Pareto optimality, which envisions the reallocation of resources among individuals so that the outcome for at least one individual can be improved without leaving anyone else worse off.

Here’s an interesting reflection on the recent New York City transit workers strike, from blogger Mike Goelzer, who wonders whether strikers and the city could have achieved Pareto optimality — avoiding disruption to commuters and loss to New York businesses while enabling the city and union to continue negotiating.

Goelzer links to “A Better Way to Go on Strike,” an essay originally published in the Wall Street Journal back in ’97 which proposes a creative way to address labor disputes while reducing the costs and collateral damage which traditional strikes result in.

(Thanks to Amit Gupta’s blog for this link.)

When I was a kid, one of my mother’s favorite maxims was, “It never hurts to ask.” It was an adage she lived by, testing it repeatedly in restaurants, in motels during family vacations, in the meat department at the local supermarket, with contractors doing work on the house. What never ceased to astonish me were both her courage in asking and the readiness with which people said yes to her. Her daring unfailingly resulted in better tables, a room with a view, a choicer cut of meat, or a lower price on linoleum.

Last week I published a post here about gender differences in negotiation, a subject I’m revisiting today. While there is statistical evidence that in certain circumstances men negotiate more favorable outcomes for themselves than do women, and while it is undisputed that failure to or difficulty in negotiating can have serious economic and social repercussions for women, it’s not just women who may be shortchanging themselves when it comes to negotiation.

I spoke with my friend Moshe Cohen, president of The Negotiating Table, and a lecturer in the Organizational Behavior Department at Boston University School of Management. Moshe is also a mediator, a trainer, and a much-sought-after negotiation coach here in Boston and nationally.

What Moshe has noticed in his work as teacher and mediator is that it’s not just women who find negotiating tough. Men do, too. Both genders have a very hard time asking for what they want.

What accounts for this? In Moshe’s experience, people are overly concerned about how they will be perceived if they ask people for what they want. They want people to like them. They don’t want to rock the boat. They worry about what others will think of them later. Worst of all, what if the other person says no? Men and women alike are often terrified of asking for what they want.

My own professional and personal experience bears this out. Generally speaking, women have no more difficulty talking about what they want, why they want it, and how they’re going to get it than do men—which is to say, some of them are good at it and some of them aren’t, in about the same ratio. (What I’ve also found, unsurprisingly, is that the better prepared for negotiation any party is, regardless of their gender, the better they’ll do, and the easier it is for them to ask for what they need.)

To help them overcome their fear of asking, Moshe gives his negotiation students an assignment called “The 10 No’s”. Adapted from Negotiation: Readings, Exercises, and Cases by Roy J. Lewicki et al., this exercise requires participants to go out and ask for things, keeping track of the number of no’s they receive until they have 10.

What is particularly instructive about this exercise is the fact that accumulating 10 no’s is actually extremely difficult. Students of both genders discover that it’s far more likely that people will say “yes” instead–an astonishing revelation.

Over the years Moshe’s students have reported all kinds of benefits flowing from their participation in this exercise: salary increases, job promotions, rent reductions, better deals on consumer goods, you name it.

I encountered a similar story in the introduction to Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s book, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. A professor named Deepak Malhotra gave his students at the Kellogg School of Management an interesting assignment: to “go negotiate something in the real world.” The students, 35 of whom negotiated something for themselves and 10 of whom negotiated something for an employer, succeeded in negotiating in some cases substantial price reductions:

More significant than the amounts saved, however, was the answer the students gave when asked to name the most important tactic that enabled them to achieve such extraordinary results: “Choosing to negotiate at all.” They reported that the biggest benefit of completing the exercise was learning that they could negotiate for things (such as rental fees) that they never knew were negotiable.

So, what does all of this mean?

In order to get to yes, all of us need to begin by negotiating with ourselves. It turns out that getting to yes in the end may be much easier than getting to no. As my mother has been saying for years, it never hurts to ask.

Chances are pretty good that if you live in the U.S. and own a TV, you’ve probably seen the Kia commercial which depicts a husband and wife’s visit to a car dealership.

The husband is seated inside a minivan with the salesman, while his wife stands outside several yards away, watching intently but unable to hear the conversation. As the husband motions with his hands in a forceful, assertive way, he says to the car salesman, “I need to gesture aggressively with my hands so my wife thinks I’m really working you over.”

The point seems to be that Kia’s prices are so low that there’s no need to negotiate. But as a result this means that the husband must pretend to hard-bargain as a face-saving measure so his wife thinks that it was his tough negotiating style that got them the great deal.

You don’t need to be a Freudian psychologist or a radical feminist to divine the meaning of messages popular culture delivers regarding negotiation, or the ways in which it reinforces the differences—perceived or real—between men and women in negotiating behavior.

The type of negotiating we see in this ad is what pop culture typically depicts—competitive, winner-take-all, zero-sum bargaining, rather than the interest-based, value-creating, win/win negotiation promoted by ADR practitioners.

It’s hard to miss the fact that the negotiation, such as it is, takes place between two men, while predictably the woman remains on the sidelines (with the baby stroller). The message is clear: negotiation is a man’s job. And anything besides hard (racy pun intended) bargaining just isn’t manly. (Interest-based negotiation is for girly-men.)

Normally I tend to tune ads out (in fact, in my opinion, it’s why the “mute” button on the TV remote control was invented). But this ad caught my attention because of several articles I just finished reading on negotiation, which I invite you to ponder.

The first of these is “Legal Negotiation in Popular Culture: What Are We Bargaining For?”, by Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Director of the Georgetown-Hewlett Program in Conflict Resolution and Legal Problem Solving at Georgetown University Law Center.

This article, although not focusing on gender, explores the ways in which popular culture depicts legal negotiation and what these depictions reveal about our culture, including its consumers and creators. (Unsurprisingly legal negotiations are usually portrayed as high-conflict, win-lose battles between adversaries, rather than as creative, value-creating processes which result in greater gain for all participants.) It’s a well-crafted deconstruction of popular culture’s formulaic representations of negotiations in legal contexts.

Another article, “The Womanly Art of Negotiation”, written under a pseudonym, appeared last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It recounts the difficulties in negotiating for an academic position while a) female and b) pregnant. It offers thoughts on factors preventing women from being fully effective negotiators, including a tendency to believe that “nice girls don’t demand money”. (Something which this nice girl has never had trouble doing.)

So, are men in fact better negotiators than women? What difference does gender make to the ability to negotiate successfully?

A third article considers these questions. According to Hannah Riley, the author of “When Does Gender Matter in Negotiation? Implications for Public Leadership” (PDF), while it is difficult (and even unwise) to make generalizations about negotiating behavior on the basis of gender alone, her own studies and observations reflect the fact that at the very least women may approach negotiation differently from men.

The effects of gender, according to her theory,

depend systematically on two situational factors: structural ambiguity and gender triggers. Structural ambiguity refers to the clarity of information about the bargaining range and appropriate standards for agreement. With increased ambiguity, parties have to rely more on subjective assessments of the negotiating situation…

In studies of competitive bargaining…I found that when structural ambiguity was high, male negotiators had more optimistic expectations and negotiated higher payoffs than did females in mixed-gender pairs. When ambiguity was low, gender differences faded away.

What Riley also discovered was that when women believed that they were negotiating on behalf of someone else, they tended to ask for more than if they were bargaining for themselves. Riley observed that “The results suggest that the women did not lack confidence in their competitive bargaining ability, but rather felt inhibited about demanding value for themselves.”

Available online for downloading is “Gender as a Situational Phenomenon in Negotiation”, the complete report of the study Riley conducted together with Linda Babcock examining the impact of gender on behavior in and outcomes of negotiation.

Finally, for more information and statistics on gender and negotiation, visit the web site for Women Don’t Ask, the book Babcock authored with Sara Laschever, which discusses negotiation’s gender gap, identifies the challenges women face, and proposes some solutions.

Those of us in the ADR field here in North America are familiar with the story of the orange, which is used in probably hundreds of mediation trainings each year to illustrate the theory behind facilitative, interest-based negotiation and mediation. (For those of you not acquainted with this oft-told tale, please click here to learn more.)

Although the orange story is frankly getting a little dog-earred and shabby from the constant retelling, it remains a useful tool for helping students understand the theory behind interested-based negotiation and mediation. It’s a great way to get the point across, and it’s a story which even little kids can easily grasp.

Which leads me to my friend Ashok Panikkar. Ashok is a highly creative dispute resolution professional with an entrepreneurial flair who resided and worked here in the U.S. for ten years. He recently returned to his native India with plans to start a conflict resolution firm with an international focus.

Back in Bangalore, Ashok’s first project was to design and conduct a training session on conflict resolution skills for law enforcement officers as part of a human rights conference. Wanting to use the orange story but realizing that an orange would not have the same cultural resonance in India that it does here in the U.S., Ashok elected to tell the story by substituting a coconut for the orange—and in doing so succeeded in reaching his audience through a more culturally accessible metaphor.

In today’s world, you have to have that kind of flexibility and understanding. After all, with 20th and 21st century advances in transportation and technology, the widespread availability of Internet and telephone, and the instantaneous transmission of information and ideas through television and the Web, the world has diminished rapidly in size. I can call Ashok on his cellphone in Bangalore, email another pal in Sydney, and hop on a plane and be at my mother-in-law’s flat in Winchester, England, in seven hours—a journey that used to take many long and grueling months to complete.

And despite the fact that this planet of ours seems to be rapidly shrinking, the world remains wondrously and spectacularly diverse. We speak different languages, dress differently, observe different rules of etiquette, eat different foods, worship differently, have differently constituted political systems, engage in different courtship and marriage rituals, and are rabidly fanatical about different sports (if you don’t believe me, just ask a Briton, an Australian, and an American to each define “football”—and then ask whose version is better). It’s what makes international travel so much fun.

Multiculturalism and understanding of cultural differences are not only a source of fascination for world and armchair travelers alike, but they are a serious subject, too, for anyone who is interested in negotiating, mediating, or resolving conflict in international or multicultural settings. After all, the orange story may play well in Peoria, but it may not go over so well in Bangalore or Tashkent.

The following are some web sites and articles on the Internet which explore the relevance of multiculturalism and international perspectives to conflict resolution and negotiation.

The web sites are:

Interneg. The InterNeg site, based in Canada, describes itself as “a virtual organization bringing together people, studies, services, systems and information concerned with decision making and negotiations. It is also a source of, and repository for, negotiation-related resources comprehensively covering topics in negotiation and negotiation support in the international arena.”

The Culture of Peace News Network (CPNN). According to its web site, CPNN is a “global network of interactive Internet sites in many languages for information exchange on events and media productions that promote a culture of peace. It is a project of the United Nations International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for Children of the World coordinated by UNESCO.” Visitors can submit papers relating to the advancement of peace and participate in moderated discussions about other papers. There are also satellite CPNN sites located around the world, which CPNN provides links for.

WWW Virtual Library, in its section on Peace, Conflict Resolution, and International Security, contains numerous links to web sites focusing on international conflict resolution and related topics. (Just ignore the Itchy and Scratchy animation that appears at the top of the page.)

Some articles of interest are:

Culture-Based Negotiation Styles, by Michelle LeBaron from the BeyondIntractability.org web site. This well-written article by an important contributor to the dispute resolution field examines cultural approaches to and differences in negotiating.

How to Negotiate “Yes” Across Cultural Boundaries, by Professor James K. Sebenius, Harvard Business School, from the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge electronic newsletter. This excerpted article examines the ways in which cultural influences can impact the outcome of a negotiation.

The Cultural Vacuum in Online Dispute Resolution by Sharanya Rao, Associate Director of Programs, Envision EMI Inc. This article “addresses the issue of the extent to which [online dispute resolution] sufficiently accommodates for and facilitates cultural issues between parties.”

Cultural Issues in Mediation: A Practical Guide to Individualist and Collective Paradigms, by Walter Wright of the Association of Attorney Mediators, looks at two distinctly different approaches to negotiation.

Finally, for a list of other web-based articles and resources dealing with culture and negotiation, be sure to visit CRInfo.org, which is always one of the best sources for information and materials on conflict resolution.