Introduction: Negotiation Teaching 2.0

Several overlapping chains of events led to this venture. Most obviously in this context, Negotiation Journal has long given regular space to a series of teaching innovations. A second chain of activity culminated in late 2006 when Andrea Kupfer Schneider and Christopher Honeyman published The Negotiator's Fieldbook, a reference book that pulled together the largest and most diverse cross-section of ideas and concepts about negotiation yet seen. The eighty chapter authors include leaders from almost thirty academic disciplines and practice specialties. Relatively few of the topics covered were then being taught in a typical negotiation course, except in whatever field had originated a particular finding.

Initially, that was not seen as a matter of immediate concern for the teaching of basic negotiation because one of the goals of the Fieldbook was to foster the development of advanced courses in negotiation and most of the material in the book was considered more appropriate for that setting. Six months later, however, Honeyman (2007) published an article in these pages, which amounted to a challenge to his own previous point of view: a supposedly simple real estate transaction had left him with the uneasy feeling that a great deal of knowledge that one might require to understand or be successful at “basic” negotiation was only now being considered even for “advanced” courses.

At the same time, a third initiative — a three-year, four-country, six-university project to develop transnational alternate dispute resolution (ADR) curricula, started by James Coben and Giuseppe De Palo — was reaching related conclusions. We decided to mount a new interdisciplinary project that would follow up on all three streams of inquiry.

In short order, it became apparent that many experienced negotiation teachers were open to the possibility that the field might be ripe for a comprehensive attempt to rethink what is taught and how it is taught in basic negotiation courses. The result was a collaboration between Hamline University Law School's Dispute Resolution Institute, ADR Center (Rome), the JAMS Foundation, and many of those who had contributed to the Fieldbook. The organizers planned a three-year effort entitled the Developing “Second Generation” Global Education Project, with the formal beginning taking place in May 2008 at a four-day meeting in Rome. This meeting was intended to produce a first set of writings that might serve as a kind of blueprint for adaptation of short courses in negotiation to take account of recent discoveries and to confront the challenges of teaching them in cross-cultural settings.

Because the organizers agreed that Western, particularly American, concepts have infused the first generation of negotiation from soup to nuts, we felt that the most appropriate way to assess any effort to produce “version 2.0” updates of typical teaching methods and topics would be to try them out promptly in other cultures, to the extent feasible. The group has therefore scheduled the second round of the effort for Istanbul in late 2009; in 2010, the project will move farther East.

As noted above, the first public event of this initiative occurred in May 2008. An “executive” two-day training course in basic negotiation was organized and offered in Rome, with primarily Italian students. The course was typical of such two-day courses in one respect and untypical in two others. The organizers and a distinguished advisory team agreed that the subject matter chosen was mainstream, if not universal, for such short courses.

Less typical was the use of six different teachers, each given about two hours of class time; this was done so that each module of the class would be presented by an instructor regarded by peers as particularly adept at that subject. Our intent was to present a course at an unexceptionable “benchmark” standard, so that anything new would be weighed against the best of current practice.

An even more untypical element was that the instructors were observed not just by the thirty students but by fifty of the instructors' peers. (This was so untypical that it surprised even the organizers, who had anticipated that most of these extremely experienced negotiation teachers, invited to a four-day meeting, would choose to spend the two days of the executive course touring Rome rather than sitting in a cramped room watching material they had seen, or presented themselves, many times before. The participants' dedication created a space crunch.)

Following the observed teaching, the students were presented with the customary certificates and then excused, while the experts convened for two days of analysis and rethinking. They were encouraged to form interdisciplinary, and when possible, transnational, teams for purposes of writing the initial round of articles and book chapters. This issue represents a cross-section of the thirty works completed to date.

The software-derived imagery of version 1.0, version 2.0, etc., seems appropriate for an effort that logically can never reach more than an interim conclusion if our field is to continue to develop. It also allows for the concept of a beta or test version. Indeed, the thirty writings that make up this year's output of the initiative might best be understood as a beta version of what will come over the next few years.

Through prearrangement with Negotiation Journal, we knew that the April 2009 issue would feature a special section devoted to the outcome of these discussions. Simultaneously, thanks to funding offered by the JAMS Foundation, we are publishing Rethinking Negotiation Teaching, a book that we hope will become the central spine of the effort, with further editions to reflect the discoveries of the next two years. The two publications are complementary. But with an enormous range of topics and concepts to consider, we are not under the illusion that either publication represents an end stage of development of any of these topics. We look forward to assisting our dozens of colleagues as they develop these concepts further.

A significant part of the development yet to come will involve greater specificity. Subject to the request for interdisciplinary collaboration where possible, our colleagues were given great latitude to decide for themselves what topic or what approach seemed most attractive and most appropriate to write about for this first year of the effort. Several of our colleagues found themselves rethinking fundamental aspects of our field. As with the other themes adopted by their colleagues (which we have defined for convenience as writings about “how to teach” and “what to teach,” respectively), we have divided these broad thematic pieces between the book and this special issue in a fashion that we believe presents a cohesive set in each venue. Here, the writings with the most macro perspective are represented by Phyllis Bernard, Kevin Avruch, and John Wade.

Bernard challenges the precepts of most students and instructors in executive courses, showing how typical executive thinking results in a narrow, constrained, ethnocentric, and frequently ineffective approach, even within their expected domain, international commercial negotiation. Avruch tackles the concept of training as such, challenging teachers of negotiation to recognize that training frequently fails to educate. And Wade reviews the idea of success, finding that our conceptions of success in negotiation training could use a major version upgrade.

In this issue, the first year's “how to teach” pieces include an article by Melissa Nelken and a coauthored work by Bobbi McAdoo and Melissa Manwaring. In their different ways, both these pieces challenge negotiation courses that typically fail to model the learning they are trying to get their students to absorb. These articles argue that the best opportunity the instructor will ever get to assist the students in understanding what can be negotiated, as well as how it can be negotiated, is to start with the concept and manner of the course itself, in which all of them have a conspicuous stake. Treating that as negotiable to a meaningful degree, they argue, creates more “teachable moments” than are likely to be found using other strategies.

As any reader of the Fieldbook will know, it is in the greatly expanded range of specific topics and techniques that “ought to be taught” that our field has made the greatest strides over the last thirty years. Already, and appropriately, the first year's output of this initiative features a larger variety of “what to teach” pieces than pieces on broad themes or how to go about teaching methodologically. We can offer only a small selection here. We have chosen them for variety, as a way of illustrating in limited space the range of topics covered in more detail in the parallel book.

But these pieces also indicate much about where we expect the initiative to go in future. Here, the reader will first find Clark Freshman and Chris Guthrie challenging a common teaching of the field, that negotiators who set high aspirations for themselves do better objectively in the results than those who do not. Yes, they say, but those high-performing negotiators feel worse. And what's a negotiation for, if not to improve your happiness?

Next are Catherine Tinsley, Sandra Cheldelin, Andrea Schneider, and Emily Amanatullah, with a fresh view of teaching gender in negotiation. They focus on the subconscious biases that impose unequal social constraints impeding the success of women, especially those with high aspirations. Our third contribution in this area, by Deborah Shmueli, Wallace Warfield, and Sanda Kaufman, takes a radically different view of what is meant by the question “what to teach?” They argue that one of the greatest failings of the executive courses in our field to date has been their unspoken but constrained view of whom they should be addressed to. The people who need these knowledge and skill improvements most, and who can make the greatest difference in society as a result, they argue, are community leaders in disadvantaged communities, whose typical lack of training and organized skill development leaves them less effective than they might be in negotiating for disadvantaged groups, who are most likely to suffer from unresolved social conflicts. They find commonality of needs and possibilities between two radically different kinds of communities, with surprising similarities between Bedouin villages in Israel and one of the most violent neighborhoods in Washington, DC.

We look forward to the next stage in this initiative, which will involve redesigning a two-day executive course for members of an ancient and rich culture in which a Muslim majority coexists with a determinedly secular tradition. We will cheerfully admit that our colleagues have a challenge in front of them, to devise appropriate and concise teaching models and methods that will take best advantage of the writings they have already produced. But we have no doubt that this handpicked team of fifty is up to the challenge. And no sooner will they have essayed how best to teach such novel material in the context of Turkish culture than the initiative will move on again, to a radically different environment farther East. (We are not defining where, at the moment, only because recent discussions indicate that we have additional options that we did not expect when the series began.)

We can't wait.