A New Use for Practitioners in Teaching Negotiation

With some notable exceptions, the challenges associated with teaching negotiation had not been extensively discussed in the negotiation literature until fairly recently. One such exception is Bruce Patton’s pioneering working paper entitled “On Teaching Negotiation” (Patton 1985, 2000). In that article, Patton refers to an earlier article entitled “Negotiation: A Pedagogical Challenge” (Matthews 1953) that must surely be one of the first published on the subject of teaching negotiation.

Interest in negotiation pedagogy seems to have increased significantly in recent years. The publication of a steady stream of articles on the topic can be traced back to a conference on negotiation pedagogy held in 2000 and sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation. (Papers presented at the conference were subsequently published in Negotiation Journal 16[4], October 2000.) The same year saw the publication of an edited anthology entitled Teaching Negotiation: Ideas and Innovations (Wheeler 2000).

In the book’s introduction, its editor, Michael Wheeler, wrote that “relatively little of the hard-won learning about pedagogy has been documented” (Wheeler 2000: 2), a situation that the book attempted to remedy. The articles published on negotiation pedagogy in recent years have tackled a wide-ranging number of topics. They include examinations of pedagogical developments in teaching negotiation in business schools (Lewicki 1997), of ways to facilitate discussion in a negotiation or communication workshop (Stone 2000), of how to encourage deep learning in negotiation (Fells 2001), of the challenges of learning to negotiate effectively (Lowenstein and Thompson 2000, 2006), of the cognitive demands of a negotiation curriculum (Manwaring 2006), and a discussion about whether teaching negotiation is too easy, too hard, or both (Wheeler 2006).

In addition, beginning with the Hewlett Conference, negotiation seminars and conferences have begun to more frequently examine issues related to negotiation pedagogy. Such examples include a 2003 conference at the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School that focussed on the teaching of multiparty negotiation and the 2005 New Trends in Negotiation Teaching Conference that was held in Paris and cosponsored by PON and the Institute for Research and Education on Negotiation in Europe.

Because most scholarship on negotiation pedagogy has focused on the teaching of negotiation in an academic setting, with little examination of the role of the skilled practitioner in negotiation instruction, students might easily infer that academics teach and practitioners practice.¹ However, it is our experience that practitioners do, in fact, teach in the academic context as well, usually as one-off guest lecturers from the “real world”— that world which our students, especially younger ones, so often invoke to challenge the validity and usefulness of what we “ivory tower” educators and our negotiation simulations and cases offer them. (See Fortgang, Subramanian, and Wheeler 2000: 74 in which researchers found that a number of business schools “bring in outside speakers to link material to the applied world or to cover areas of specialized expertise.”)

In this article, we discuss the role of the guest lecturer-practitioner in the teaching of negotiation and describe a particular lesson that we believe makes more effective use of the practitioner’s expertise and experiences. This lesson addresses a particular challenge that negotiation teachers face because it addresses students’ concerns that integrative negotiation is not achievable in real-world business negotiations. In designing the lesson, we have attempted to follow the advice of educational psychologist Howard Gardner by offering one of a “plethora of entry points,” which he believes is key to presenting new ideas about negotiation (Gardner 2000). We understand Gardner to mean that the more ways that can be found to help students learn about negotiation, the better. In other words, if the subject of negotiation can be seen as a table, then we, as negotiation teachers, should be looking for as many and varied lamps as possible to light up that table. We conclude the article by discussing how the lesson can help our students achieve “deep learning,” an approach to learning where students “endeavour to understand, to focus on what the author intends or on the concepts applicable to solving a problem. The task is interpreted as an opportunity to gain new insight and understanding rather than to satisfy external demands” (Fells 2001: 2).

In our course for graduate students at the Norwegian School of Management, we used guest lecturer-practitioners in a fairly typical manner; that is, they would join our course for a single lesson, offering thirty to forty-five minutes of anecdotes relating their real world negotiation experiences as well as some general “how-to-do-it” negotiation advice. This worked well, in that the guest lecturers presented coherent and relevant stories, and most students evaluated the talks positively.

Generally, the practitioners’ anecdotes supported (or at least did not undermine) our claim that integrative negotiation approaches can work outside the classroom. Occasionally, however, a new guest would extol the virtues of distributive negotiation. Although this undermined our efforts to demonstrate that integrative negotiation can actually work, we used these messages as the bases for some interesting discussions. Allowing such dissenting views to be aired can also alleviate that “scolded choir” feeling that Michael Wheeler (2006) notes can develop among students when an instructor constantly preaches the virtues of a single negotiation approach.

Although the off-message guest lecturer-practitioner presents one kind of risk, a much more frequent danger, in our experience, arises when a guest tries to stay too much on his or her message. In such cases, the guest takes the academic setting so seriously that he or she learns and then presents what is essentially the course syllabus, leaving aside much of what he or she knows of the “real world.” Such a presentation often contains nothing new or challenging, but merely repeats material previously covered in the course.

In any case, regardless of the content and quality of the traditional guest lecture, it is our experience that it rarely produces much student response in the form of questions or discussion.² Student evaluations of guest lecturer-practitioners have usually been politely positive, but our view is that these sessions have often failed to generate enough meaningful learning, even though they have satisfied student requests to bring the “real world” to their classroom. Essentially, we became concerned that in our negotiation classes, the traditional guest lecture did not sufficiently utilize the strengths and resources of the guest practitioners.

In an effort to offer students more than we felt they were getting with the traditional format, we redesigned the role of the guest lecturer-practitioner in 2005 to encourage students to participate more actively and to take better advantage of the guest lecturer’s experiences and expertise. We discontinued the traditional speech that offered a potpourri of “war stories” and advice, choosing to concentrate instead on one specific and important point: that integrative negotiation outcomes are attainable in real-world business negotiations and are not confined to academic courses in which sisters have unusual needs for orange peels (House 1982), libraries are so constructed as to permit fresh air but no draft (Davis 1989), and carefully constructed negotiation simulations written by professors are the norm (see, e.g., Fortgang, Subramanian, and Wheeler 2000).

We chose this specific goal — to get students to understand how and why integrative negotiation techniques can work in the “real world”— for two reasons: because it seems to be one of the hardest concepts for many negotiation students to grasp and because the talents and authority of skilled practitioners from the real world of negotiation lend themselves perfectly toward achieving this goal.

We have implemented the redesigned practitioner’s lesson two times as of this writing. We have scheduled it for fairly late in the course, after we have introduced the concept of integrative negotiation through lectures, readings, and negotiation simulations. It is usually around this time that students begin to argue that negotiation “isn’t like that in the real world.” Integrative negotiation may work well in course simulations, they often say, but these are fictitious scenarios negotiated with other students in the same course, and negotiation will not be like that “out there.” (We think it is likely that other negotiation teachers often hear similar comments from their students.)

This, then, is one of our pedagogical goals: to convince students that integrative agreements are possible in business negotiations. Even when such negotiations appear to be straightforward buying and selling situations, they often are not only or even primarily about price but involve multiple issues that present opportunities for value creation. In our experience most students, especially younger ones with no relevant work experience, assume that successful buyer–seller commercial negotiations are all about buying at the lowest price and selling at the highest price. Countless readings and lectures urging that price need not (and often should not) be the only issue often fail to teach our business school students this fundamental concept.

Student hesitation to embrace integrative approaches is reflected in the results of a survey conducted by Jeswald W. Salacuse (1998). In the study conducted among 310 graduate students of different nationalities and occupations from twelve different countries, only 43 percent of students displayed a “win-win” attitude, thus, placing them at the low-end of the scale alongside lawyers (42 percent) and members of the military (40 percent). All the students surveyed were graduate students although their ages were not given. Teachers landed at the higher end of the scale, with 71 percent demonstrating more positive attitudes toward integrative approaches. Diplomats and public sector employees were the most likely to have a win-win attitude at 86 percent.

When we ask our students why they have a “fixed-pie” bias (Lewicki, Saunders, and Minton 2003; Bazerman and Shonk 2005) that leads to win–lose thinking, they frequently respond that they find the theory of integrative negotiation somewhat naïve and unworldly and the negotiating exercises designed to elucidate the theory unrealistic.

With our redesigned guest practitioner’s curriculum, we seek to address students’ skepticism toward integrative approaches to negotiation by having them engage in an hour-long study of an actual business negotiation, facilitated by two practitioners closely involved in it. The negotiation scenario is as follows:

At first, students often view this as a fairly straightforward distributive negotiation in which both buyer and seller would typically focus exclusively on price, with the buyer pressing to have the invoicing done at the lowest possible price and the seller arguing for the highest possible price. According to this view, the resources are fixed and limited and both parties seek to maximize their share of these resources. Thus, the gain of one party is made at the expense of the other (Lewicki, Saunders, and Minton 2003).

But the actual situation is more complex than it initially appears; in fact, this scenario encompasses multiple issues that could be negotiated. Herb Cohen (1980) has compared a negotiation to an iceberg in that what is immediately visible is only a small part of the whole. In this lesson, we hope to encourage our students to explore the waters beneath the iceberg’s tip to reveal the complexity and integrative potential of the case.

Before the practitioners arrive, we conduct an introductory session in which the background information is presented, and the twenty-four students are divided into two groups of twelve in separate rooms. One group of students interviews the buyer’s (electricity company) representative, while the other group interviews the seller’s (invoicing company) representative.

Once in their respective rooms, the two groups of twelve are subdivided into four subgroups of three and told that they will be given forty-five minutes to prepare questions that will try to uncover how this apparently distributive negotiation situation might in fact have a large degree of integrative potential. At this point, students have already listened to lectures and been given case material examining these two types of negotiation. To encourage participation and discourage domination of the conversation by just a few students, we tell each subgroup that they are to ask one question at a time, taking turns until all groups have asked all their questions. Students are asked to write down the answers to all questions and not just the ones from their group. They are free to ask any questions they like, and some students have been very perceptive in forming their questions. Most, however, like to be given guidelines for the questions they should ask.

After this preparation period, the company’s representatives are brought into each room and introduced. We ask the practitionersto respond to questions asked by the group but not to expand too much on their answers, instead, we encourage them to invite follow-upquestions. This is because we want the students to be proactive and to diligently seek answers rather than be fed the information “on a platter.”

Here are examples of some of these questions, with typical answers from the representatives. (Some are questions originating solely from the students themselves while others have been developed by them using instructor’s guidelines.)

Meanwhile, the seller group interviews the representative from the invoicing company asking such questions as:

When the group sessions are completed, the class reconvenes and the buyer and seller representatives summarize the issues that arose in the discussion, also noting any unaddressed issues they felt were important but again not going into great detail or giving the students answers to questions they have not asked. Moreover, they do not talk about the actual details of their negotiation or the content of the contract.

Thus, at the end of the practitioners’ visit, the students are not left with the story of a successfully conducted negotiation and the details of the resultant contract. Rather, the practitioners have helped give the students insight into their own thinking and planning as they approached the negotiation. For us teachers, this creates a fruitful learning opportunity: the students, half from the one side of the negotiating table, half from the other, now have the information to convert what they have been told into a scenario as to how they might reach an integrative deal with the other party. The individual groups of three are then given one week until the class meets again to develop ideas about how their party (buyer or seller) can contribute to an optimal win-win contract. These ideas are then posted on the course’s interactive website.

When the class meets again the following week, students and instructors discuss and compare the contributions of the various groups. Although the practitioners do not attend this session, the instructor relates the general terms of the agreement into which the two parties entered; confidentiality concerns preclude detailed description of the contract.

We hope that by the end of this plenary session, students will have grasped the basic learning point that business negotiations are not always about price and that integrative outcomes are possible in the “real world” even within a fairly narrow buyer–seller commercial negotiation (Lewicki, Saunders, and Minton 2003). Indeed, in this case, we know that price played a relatively minor role in the whole negotiation.

Another advantage of this module is that students interact with the practitioners much more extensively and meaningfully than in the traditional guest lecture format. Because the students have to ask the questions, they are forced to actively participate.

Selecting the right practitioners for this exercise is critical. The practitioners who have participated in our class have been open about sharing their negotiation goals and were keen to discuss them with business students in an academic institution. For this lesson, our task as educators is to select those whose negotiation stories exemplify the principle of value creation.

Is our guest practitioner teaching module effective? Does it promote deep learning rather than surface learning (Fells 2001; Wheeler 2006)? Because this module was implemented rather recently, the number of students who have evaluated the lesson is not large. Based on individual comments to instructors and statements made in class following this lesson, which are admittedly informal and nonscientific measures, students view this lesson favorably. An obvious next step could be to schedule a traditional guest practitioner’s lecture as well and ask students to rank the two or compare the responses if the two formats were presented in different classes.

To truly assess whether or not the learning has “stuck,” of course, we should check out the students several years after the course has concluded, when they too have become experienced practitioners. This is no easy task because historically more than half the class is composed of one-term exchange students from dozens of countries, and determining their whereabouts could prove daunting. The Norwegian students would be somewhat easier to trace, although like many institutions, our alumni’s rate of response to institutional surveys tends to be low. What makes obtaining such feedback potentially worth the effort, however, is that our learning goal is for students to understand how and why integrative negotiation is possible in actual business negotiations. Obviously, it is only after our students have had the opportunity to apply integrative negotiation techniques in the “real world” that they can reliably say whether they believe the theory works or not.

By using guest practitioners in the way we have described, we also seek to bring the bare bones of a real-world negotiation into the classroom. Real-world negotiating is, of course, far more challenging than classroom simulations (Wheeler 2006). Roy Lewicki (1986) has noted that students often argue that role-playing and simulations are not “real” because there are no actual outcomes and people play artificial roles. Given the structure of our lesson, we are able to address this objection because the negotiation under discussion really happened, there was a real integrative outcome, and the guest practitioners were the real participants.

We have also asked ourselves whether and how this lesson relates to the Experiential Learning Model (Kolb 1984), which is a methodology involving:

1. concrete experiences;

2. observations and reflections;

3. formation of abstract concepts and generalizations; and

4. testing implications of concepts in new situations.

This teaching unit clearly incorporates “concrete experiences” by giving the students the opportunity to closely question the practitioners about a real negotiation. It also utilizes the practitioners’ own “observations and reflections” of their experiences, and the students later provide their own observations in writing. Thus, the methodology is well suited to those individuals who prefer to begin with an experience and then generalize and create concepts from it (in contrast to those students who prefer to begin with abstract conceptualization and move to the experience) (Kolb 1984; Lewicki 1997).

One brief lesson cannot completely address all students’ skepticism about the applicability of integrative negotiation strategies in business, particularly in light of the survey we cited earlier (Salacuse 1998) demonstrating students’ distributive attitudes toward negotiation. If our students’ attitudes match those of the students in the survey, then, nearly half our students begin the course with “win–lose” negotiating attitudes. Furthermore, Jeffrey Lowenstein and Leigh Thompson (2000) have shown that entrenched theories can be difficult to dispel even if they are what they term “naïve theories.”

On the other hand, we believe that this particular lesson addresses the often-voiced complaint of business students that “negotiating isn’t like that in the real world,” and refutes it using the skill and authority of “real world” negotiators. Furthermore, even if some doubters remain unconvinced, we believe that this module encourages them to reconsider their preconceptions. At the same time, we believe that it reinforces the view of students who believe that integrative negotiation is possible in many situations, including buying and selling in the business world.