Bringing Soul to International Negotiation

The first generation of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) theory and training evolved from the idea that negotiation should be taught as mere gamesmanship to the belief that it should be presented as a thoughtful, coherent series of processes. The conceptualization of negotiation as a systematic interplay of identifiable factors has enhanced its status as a professional skill and field of academic study. At its optimum, the first generation of training provided a broad framework for understanding negotiation dynamics as a logical identification and prioritization of competing interests. Various adaptations of generic, (largely) American negotiation and mediation models promised a measure of objectivity and regularity that, ideally, facilitated business transactions among parties from widely disparate backgrounds around the world by creating a recognized format for deliberations.

Less optimally, however, the supportive framework sometimes became rigid, resisting nuance and flow; trainers became overreliant upon objective facts and figures, and ignored critical subjective realities; their unquestioned use of standardized, linear, Western models seemed to presume not globalization of commerce but homogenization of cultures. The next generation of training for international commercial negotiation must return something vital that has often gone missing: soul.

“Soul,” as I mean it here, combines into one word several concepts that would integrate findings about human cognition, cultural intelligence, and effectiveness in global business relations. As used in this article, soul encompasses three components: emotion and subjectivity, deep narratives rooted in faith and ethnic traditions, and cultural intelligence.

The most efficient route for communication may be nonlinear. Recent discoveries about human cognition tell us that most human brain activity and much unconscious decision making involves nonrational, emotional, and subjective functions. Scholars of modern political discourse have posited that communication emphasizing primarily rational, objective arguments often fails (Lakoff 2008). Similarly, a routinely linear approach to negotiation often fails to persuade parties to change positions or to reveal underlying interests essential to a successful, self-enforcing business deal.

One of the most valuable services the next generation of negotiation trainers can provide may be to help parties identify implicit, unstated assumptions about morality, honor, and material needs. This presents challenges. First, the most fundamental assumptions about how one understands life are so deeply rooted that they go unspoken and may not be consciously available even to the speaker himself. Second, the concept of “parties” must expand to include not only identified persons at the table but the broaderunidentified constituencies to whom negotiators have social, community, or kinship obligations.

Just as global business managers have learned to seek employees with high “cultural intelligence quotients” (CQ), negotiation training for international commerce must acknowledge CQ as a valued asset (Thomas and Inkson 2004).¹ Granted, some individuals will have greater natural abilities than others. Nevertheless, for all trainees the goal should be to understand that culture plays a vital — albeit infinitely subtle — role.² The next generation of negotiation training must merge cultural knowledge, intuition, and rational problem solving, which could also enhance the ability of negotiators to recognize when a mismatch between the parties' communication styles and cultural norms warrants a shift from party-to-party negotiations to the use of a mediator.

The next generation of international negotiation training does not necessarily require new skills. It requires that we expand the Western concept of what constitutes “negotiation.” In many societies outside North America, the business deal is developed and confirmed not at the formal bargaining table but during the informal discussions that first-generation training often treats as mere preliminaries. In this article, I encourage the next generation of trainers to view the entire series of interactions among the principals as a long-running, indirect, fluid negotiation.

First, I explain how a rational consideration of the way humans listen, interpret, and decide supports making space for the “irrational” in negotiation. Because so much of the human decision-making process involves emotion and subjectivity, I believe that it is more productive in negotiating a lasting agreement to work with and through these soulful aspects than to deny them. A brief example of a negotiation in Latin America contrasts how restating and reframing can enhance the effectiveness of commercial negotiations by following the inherent logic of emotion instead of marginalizing this aspect of soul.

Second, I point to assumptions about cultural norms that are deeply embedded in Western conventions of international commercial negotiations. Chief among those typically unexamined assumptions is that the parties speak and act as individuals or as independent units, detached from duties beyond the economics of the business deal. But community traditions that affect global partners can strongly affect the dynamics of negotiation. An example, drawn from my own ethnic heritage (the Igbo of Nigeria) illustrates the cognitive dissonance between one pervasive, explicit convention in Western discourse (references to family) and a different, implied non-Western convention. This illustration suggests ways that cultural awareness coupled with problem-solving methods can contributeto a stable, ethical, and culturally appropriate environment in which business can prosper.

Finally, I describe the ways that culturally strategic thinking — applied to the soulful aspects of negotiation — can provide a flexible, responsive framework. My final illustration describes how this framework was used to resolve the unanticipated cultural issues that arose when the American-educated daughter of an ethnic Chinese family brought home to Malaysia representatives of her potential American business partner. Gender, age, and status concerns suggest in this case that mediation would prove more effective than direct negotiations.

The idea that human communication interweaves both facts and feelings is neither new nor particularly controversial. Among ADR specialists, debate has focused on how to handle emotions in negotiations: should framing and reframing be used to bring emotions toward center stage or to nudge emotions to the sidelines?

At least in one conflict context, family disputes, this debate has been largely resolved; current conventions in family mediation typically eschew restating techniques designed to purge from party statements the language of feelings. Why? Because feelings so obviously comprise the core of any divorce or child custody dispute. Instead, the facilitator in a family case is trained to filter toxic words from a party statement but to retain the underlying emotion — be it regret, fear, anger, gratitude, or concern for reputation.

Coincidentally, these same emotions can create both barriers and bridges for most business deals, especially on the global level. They raise problems when the negotiating executives come from societies that place different emphases on the use of language, the role of the individual, the meaning of family, and the dynamics of hierarchy. Anthropologists and social scientists have derived matrices of varying complexity to describe these differences. Many ADR scholars have adopted the multivariable, more statistically oriented work of management scholar Geert Hofstede (2001) For purposes of our discussion, we shall turn to the simpler, more readily accessible framework articulated by anthropologist Edward T. Hall.

The classic Hall matrix of “low-context (LC)” and “high-context (HC)” societies posits that the value placed on unwritten social dynamics when compared to the value placed on written contracts varies depending upon whether the parties come from LC societies (e.g., Northern European, North American) or HC societies (e.g., Latin American, Middle Eastern, Japanese) (Hall 1989). (I describe this in greater detail in the final section of this article.) For now, I will contrast LC and HC understanding of one word, exploring its cultural context, and implications for commercial negotiations; that word is “family.”

As one specialist in international business negotiations described it: “In low-context societies, family is very important except during business hours. . . . In high-context societies, family connections are a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week matter of concern; avoiding shame is more important than death itself” (Burnstein 1994: 43, emphasis added). For the individual from an HC culture that places great value on family and honor, the subjective needs that drive a family mediation in the United States may play a similar role in negotiating a commercial agreement. Communication can fail if the party from the HC culture is unable or unwilling to articulate these values, while the party from the LC culture remains unaware that such values even apply in the commercial sphere.

Commercial ADR training models rarely make room for the parties' feelings. Instead, standardized Western models for commercial negotiation and mediation purposefully enforce a rigid logic designed to narrow the focus to facts and figures. The financial bottom line becomes the foremost measure of success.

To illustrate: two parties initiate formal bargaining to complete a financing arrangement involving a hotel in Buenos Aires. Negotiations between the Argentinean hotelier and the American investment team reach the topic of compensation. A Latin American businessman might not address the issue directly but instead divert the conversation to something that appears tangential, at best. Eventually, he might state: “As you may have noticed during our previous visits, I have children in college, in the United Kingdom and in the United States. We are very proud of them.”

The other party, a negotiator or mediator — using a first-generation approach — might assume this is a financial issue, requiring a financial resolution. She will try to move the deliberations along as quickly as possible, assuming the negotiations must reach closure within a limited timetable or else lose the momentum necessary to complete the transaction. The responding negotiator will frame the situation in a way that translates this statement into objective, monetary terms. She might respond this way: “You want to make sure you receive enough in this arrangement so their college expenses are covered.”

By contrast, a person trained in a next-generation approach would first, slow down; second, not assume that finances take priority over feelings; third, engage in highly interactive listening to explore the initial frame before attempting to reframe. There are feelings behind the statement, feelings that can identify underlying objectives that, if not met, could eventually lead to impasse.

The negotiator could respond with a series of questions or comments that explore the feelings behind the statement. For example, what are the children's names, ages, and expected fields of study? What are the family's hopes for the children when they complete their education abroad? The answers might reveal that the hotelier's concern is not how to pay for immediate expenses, but rather that he seeks assurances that his children will have a position in the family business after college graduation and the continued association of his family name with a successful enterprise. For him, this is a higher priority than having more money in the present. The approach of the Latin American businessman may be nonlinear, but his emotions have an unwavering logic of their own: his goal is family security and social status.

Consider the opportunities revealed by taking the more subjective approach described above compared to the objective approach typically stressed by first-generation training. If the hotelier's concern had been reframed in terms of money alone, his statement treated as a maneuver to gain increased compensation, the negotiations may have deadlocked. His cooperation might have degenerated because he believed that he had been disrespected. If his anger and frustration began to surface, first-generation negotiation training would most likely categorize his expression of emotions as distractions or possibly a manipulation, or as a temporary concern that could easily be dissipated through venting in caucus. To the extent a response appeared nonrational or subjective, it might have been discounted.

This soulless approach to commercial negotiation is anchored in what increasing numbers of linguists and cognitive scientists construe as flawed premises about how humans listen, think, understand, and function. Standardized negotiation models are typically grounded in a theory of mind that holds reason to be “conscious, literal, unemotional, disembodied, universal,” something that functions “to serve our interests” (Lakoff 2008: 43). These concepts date to the Enlightenment and stand at odds with contemporary knowledge about neurolinguistics. Whether in everyday discourse or commercial negotiations, “most of what we understand . . . is not in the words themselves, but in the unconscious understanding that we bring to the words” (Lakoff 2008: 43). Reason, neurolinguists now believe, is not dispassionate; it is fully intertwined with emotion. Thus, the paradox: experts in the brain processes of communication might advise that a rational resolution to a dispute can be achieved most efficiently by connecting with nonrational, unconscious thought processes, which I refer to here as soul.

Whether by nature or nurture, personality or peer pressure, some corporate counsel may be reluctant to endorse an approach to dispute prevention and resolution that American lawyers sometimes deride privately as “touchy-feely,” something alien to the world of big business. On the other hand, the international business executives that these corporate counsel serve might consider that a broader (more soulful?) approach better supports the informal relationship building that lays the ground work for formal negotiations. Indeed, such an approach fully aligns with the approaches to international commercial negotiation that have been endorsed by the American Bar Association Section on International Law and Practice since the mid-1990s (Burnstein 1994).

The story of the Argentine hotelier and the American investors highlights how seemingly informal conversations among the principals in international commercial negotiations can serve purposes that extend well beyond mere civility. Formal negotiations often place the capstone on a lengthy series of informal interactions through which party representatives have already assessed each other's temperament and character. In such situations, which assessment tools best serve the negotiators?

The sharing of personal narratives, for example, allows negotiators to seek and find areas of common experience, such as postsecondary education, employment, or travel. By observing comportment in such social activities as shared meals, business executives can achieve a level of comfortable, implied understanding about mores and trustworthiness. Many rounds of intuitive communication can forge personal relationships that would — in many countries — form the essence of the business agreement. Particularly outside the United States, this informal relationship sometimes assumes greater importance than any formal, written contract that might follow. Moreover, the formal written contracts that lawyers prize in order to close loopholes and guard against contingencies can often undermine the trust on which the parties' working relationship depends (Solomon and Flores 2001).

The parties' personal narratives do not merely describe themselves alone. Each person's narrative is “embedded in the story of a larger community from which the self derives a social and historical identity” (Thomas 2005: 91). This is where “diversity training” or a “cross-cultural component” in the typical commercial negotiation training attempts to provide context. Such training usually explores only how to maneuver what sociologist Erving Goffman described as the “front stage” of cultural communication; it does not explain what is going on “backstage,” directing the scripted scenarios of polite business discourse between Westerners and Western-educated professionals from different ethnic and faith traditions (i.e., Caribbean, African, Asian, Islamic, or Latin American) (Early, Ang, and Tan 2006: 154).

Consider again a series of informal discussions during which the principals develop the organic terms and conditions of the agreement, long before the formal negotiations. In this example, an American representing her manufacturing company is engaged in dinner conversation with the chief executive officer of a Nigerian auto parts company. Following global etiquette, they discuss family at the dinner table, not business finances.

This Nigerian businessman follows Western conventions and refers only to his nuclear family. But the African concept of “family” extends much more broadly than this: a traditional household (whether rural or urban) is usually a fluid cooperative among multiple generations. In Nigeria, the word “family” thus includes members of one's extended family, including alliances by marriage and even friendship. All such individuals may count as family members in pragmatic arrangements that can baffle Western anthropologists and census takers (Hollos and Leis 1989).

The West African businessman might speak readily of his trips to London, New York, or class reunions at the Wharton School because they serve as points of common reference with his prospective American partner. He may also share stories about the global megalopolis where he has a prestigious career, but he does not share stories about holidays and town festivals in his hereditary rural community, which he truly considers home.

This Nigerian businessman negotiates with an eye toward satisfying expectations that arise from his obligations to his family as well as from his membership in ethnic fraternal and religious organizations. A simple bottom line figure may not meet his complex needs. To retain respect, and to avoid economic hardship, he seeks terms that support him in these multiple roles.

He may propose a supply chain involving towns covering a fairly wide territory. Perhaps he alludes to the desirability of meeting with various community leaders, local government officials, even the governor of the states in which these units would be sited. The arrangement may appear — on its face — to be inefficient and the other party might wonder whether the arrangement he seeks is designed to distribute “dash,” which are traditional gifts of respect in Nigeria that World Bank guidelines and U.S. anticorruption statutes characterize as bribes.

Standard diversity or cross-cultural training might have led the American negotiators to presume that the widely publicized corruption of Nigeria motivated this proposal or that, despite his Wharton School degree, this chief executive officer had failed to understand the need for lean, efficient staffing. Under either presumption, a “front stage” level of diversity or cross-cultural training would generally delve no further. Negotiations would take a hard line, stressing the need for cost control, push for a cap on expenses that could be recovered under the contract, demand all monies be paid only to entities approved under the contract terms at risk of breach or penalties, or increase the contract amount to allow the payment of dash without ever mentioning the word.

The next generation of training in cross-cultural contexting must have the courage to go “backstage” and beyond the stereotypes about what party conduct to expect and explore instead the reasons why. The scope of negotiation should expand to facilitate problem solving for the CEO with regard to his many nonparty constituencies. A negotiator or mediator who understands family in the broad, non-Western sense would invite the Nigerian businessman to describe more fully the towns, the people, and community life in the areas included in his proposed supply chain. Many of the same patient, soft listening skills used in family mediation could be applied to acknowledge the CEO's complex, multilayered obligations. Standard problem-solving methods would apply more widely, seeking resolutions that meet the mutual interests among the CEO and his various constituencies in ways that redound to the benefit of the entire venture.

In our illustration, assume that the CEO is a member of the Igbo minority ethnic group.³ As he describes the towns, their locations, their histories, we learn that some of the civil strife that regularly threatens Nigeria's oil industry can also compromise the infrastructure needed to succeed in this auto parts venture.

If the American negotiators were to apply the fundamentals of problem solving, they might develop a next-generation approach. The CEO's stated position is to establish multiple sites throughout southern Nigeria, employing the maximum feasible number of adults. His underlying interest is to extend the benefits of economic security beyond his own family and ethnic group, and to enhance the authority of parents to divert youths from gang (or guerilla) activity that disrupts business through stable employment. His mutually beneficial solution is to allow the number of sites and staffing that can be maintained consistent with quality controls, spreading employment opportunities among a broad cross-section of ethnic groups and communities. This, he hopes, will create maximum community “buy-in” to the success of the venture.

Similarly, by making courtesy calls on local government officials and traditional leaders, the CEO's underlying interest is to show respect for the hierarchy of community life, defuse potential opposition, and encourage leadership support without paying dash. His mutually beneficial solutions are to have the venture purchase and distribute school supplies for local children, and to undertake several low-scale road repairs along routes used by the auto distributor to improve access while also helping others.

The pervasive presence of CQ curricula designed for the global workplace arguably reflects a level of awareness and acceptance that should remove any need to justify the inclusion of cultural awareness training as an element of the next generation of international commercial negotiation training; in fact, we can probably assume global business managers are familiar with the subject (Early, Ang, and Tan 2006). But the cultural contexting process that I describe in this article can give voice to deeper narratives than does the usual corporate cultural training. The next generation of negotiation training should first acknowledge the value of this baseline knowledge and then, second, help executives understand how communication skills can put broad cultural knowledge to specific use.

His or her training will have reached a milestone when an executive has learned to recognize those situations when direct negotiations between the parties may be less productive than indirect communication using a mediator. Some cultural aspects are not readily accessible to the speaker nor to the listener without facilitation because “people avoid verbalizing what they take for granted” (Hall 1989: 153).

But what is taken for granted by one party may not even be apparent to the other. To a large extent the problem exceeds what cultural awareness training alone can resolve. “[M]uch of the truly integrative behavior that falls under the rubric of culture is under control of those parts of the brain that are not concerned with speech” (Hall 1989: 153). Indeed, one could argue that the more important, the more central these norms are “in the scheme of things” they can be nearly “impossible for us to formulate verbally” (Hall 1989: 153). With the assistance of a third-party neutral, who restates in order to verbalize cultural norms, the parties can explore those heretofore unspoken assumptions and manage the ways in which those norms may affect the business deal.

If the negotiating parties do not share — or cannot readily adapt to — the same contextuality level (high context or low context), the use of a mediator may be necessary to bridge communication styles. Indeed, a negotiator from a very high context culture may expect that she would not speak directly about whatever was the most important factor in her situation. The negotiator from a low context culture who expects directness might be frustrated by the high context convention of using circular speech patterns. Instead of disclosing vital elements only gradually — the HC communication style — the LC party may demand a nonintuitive, specific response that could result in a loss of face for the HC party.

Clarity about assumptions, resources, and expectations is essential to a successful business deal. Given the paradoxes of the HC/LC matrix described above, how can next-generation training that incorporates cultural awareness training enhance effectiveness in negotiations?

Consider my third example. Lily is a twenty-eight-year-old textile designer who grew up in California and trained in the merchandising world of New York City. Her family is ethnic Chinese and emigrated to California from Malaysia. A budding entrepreneur with a company that is a subsidiary of her father's corporation, Lily seeks to sell traditional Malaysian textile designs to an upscale American retailer. She has brought two fast-rising executives in an American retail company named Bob (age thirty-two) and Mary (age twenty-nine) to Malaysia.

Upon arrival, the three meet with Lily's father for tea. Her uncle and grandfather, a silent, elderly gentleman, are also present. Her family calls her Yi Li, her Chinese name, which her American colleagues have never heard before. Although everyone understands English, conversation is limited. After initial introductions, the grandfather is silent. Throughout their polite repartee, the father, uncle, and Yi Li/Lily all look to the grandfather for nonverbal signals of his approval or disapproval.

Bob prepares to deploy squadrons of facts and figures to overwhelm Lily's father with the benefits of a supply-purchase contract. Mary, on the other hand, approaches the situation quite differently, shifting to culturally strategic thinking using a four-step process (Early, Ang, and Tan 2006) and her next-generation negotiation training.

Rather than treating this invitation to tea as a mere preliminary before closing the deal, Mary recognizes that she and her colleagues are being assessed for their comportment, integrity, trustworthiness, and for Lily/Yi Li's business judgment. Dealing with this was not part of the Americans' business strategy. But Mary remembers the contemporary truism: “culture eats strategy for lunch.” So, Mary focuses on the present, not on her preconceived plans. She listens attentively, monitors verbal and nonverbal cues, and allows self-reflection and introspection. She checks for what she understands and what she does not. Her intuitive, subjective sense of the situation advises: “proceed with caution; there's more going on here than you know.”

The change in Lily's demeanor — from a vivacious, assertive leader to almost demure daughter — is striking. Mary realizes the team neglected a fundamental aspect of cultural awareness: before embarking on the trip, they should have sought knowledge about the ethnic Chinese family culture. She has little specific, objective information to work from, but she knows that a vital component of cultural awareness is the ability to create analogies with prior experience.

Mary recalls a similar change occurred in her own mother — a successful clothing store owner — when visiting their older, male, Lebanese relatives. Eventually, Mary came to understand that her mother's deferential demeanor acknowledged the importance of hierarchy and role within that culture. It honored the fact that financing for her mother's store came from Mary's grandfather on behalf of an entire network of family members. Mary guesses the (correct) analogy: the silent Chinese-Malaysian grandfather is not a figurehead, but the actual head of an extensive family business in which Lily/Yi Li's project plays only a small part.

Mary seeks to apply the logic of appropriateness, finding what is the appropriate thing for her to do in this situation. More specifically, her CQ training has taught her to understand that her own psychological filters (e.g., her personality, biases, and prejudices) could affect the way she makes decisions, that the kind of situation she encounters may differ from what was originally expected, and that she should use knowledge of cultural or organizational norms to shape the options available.

Mary sees that in this situation, according to the cultural norms she recalled from CQ training, she and Bob may be the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although the achievement-oriented business culture of New York City conferred status on Mary and Bob, that status does not automatically transfer to an ascriptive-oriented culture. Their relative youthfulness makes them inappropriate for negotiations with the older leaders.

There is a “mismatch between the current situation and a desired future one” (Early, Ang, and Tan 2006: 58), which constitutes a problem needing a solution. Mary recognizes that the elders will remain reluctant to speak with outsiders about family issues. Nevertheless, to ascertain whether expectations, assumptions, and resources fit appropriately, someone must probe this delicate area. To make discussions productive while allowing participants to save face, a respected neutral should serve as mediator. This person would seek to enhance the accuracy of language and give voice to soul. Negotiations may suffer some necessary delay to allow a higher status, elder representative of the American firm to join, if only to endorse the status of Mary and Bob.

Bringing soul to international commercial negotiations represents an evolution in training, not necessarily a revolution. To do so means updating the original framework of what has become standard management training for global executives. This can be accomplished by placing appropriate emphasis on communication skills that bring to the front stage the backstage dynamics of emotion, subjectivity, kinship, and cultural ties that can make or break a deal.