Reading Deepak Malhotra's science fiction novel, The Peacemaker's Code, has given me pause about the limitations of many of the cases I've long used to teach negotiation.

Pause, not panic. I'll continue to include the best of them in my syllabus as they provide real‐world applications of the theories, frameworks, and concepts that many of us teach. Useful cases also present students with challenging strategic, interpersonal, and moral challenges that they will confront in their careers. That's all to the good.

But few of those cases dig as deeply into how master negotiators think as does Deepak's recent book. Yes, standard cases track what the parties do and say, and inferences can be drawn from that behavior. But few cases really dive deeply into the premises that negotiators work from, how they weigh different approaches, and whether and how to adjust their strategy as the process unfolds. I expect pushback on my assertion about the limitations of typical cases but bear with me.

Most of the cases we write are done post‐mortem, whether the story is one of stunning triumph or dismal failure. When I interview a protagonist in a case I'm developing, I do ask about how their thinking and feelings evolved over the course of the negotiation. People respond with the best of intentions, but their memories are bound to be influenced (distorted perhaps) by knowing and living with how things ultimately worked out.

Someone who achieves a great outcome may come to believe that their success was due to having crafted a brilliant strategy, but luck may have been a key factor. Others who walked away empty‐handed, or worse, got a rotten deal, may berate themselves when their failure was due to some circumstance they could not have foreseen.1

By contrast, fiction writers have full license to ascribe to their characters motives, insights, perceptions, and all other aspects of the human mind—the mix of virtues, vices, talents, blind spots, and shortcomings that underlie people's thinking. The more the author knows the terrain that his or her protagonist is traversing, the more compelling the resulting portrait can be. Sometimes it may reveal the author's own turn of mind.

I'm not out on a limb alone in recognizing that fiction can be instructive. A recent Negotiation Journal article by Daniel Read and Thomas Hills reached far back for negotiation wisdom, not from a history book, but from George Eliot's classic novel, Middlemarch (Read and Hills 2021). They credited Eliot for being “a perceptive chronicler of social interaction” in general and particularly so in regard to negotiation. They pointed to six lessons that Eliot illuminated that are as pertinent today as they were when Eliot featured them (among them, focusing on relationships, dealing with weakness, and coping with one's own self‐regard). All that and more in a novel written a century and a half ago.

Read and Hills are not the first to find negotiation lessons in fiction. Two decades ago, H. Lee Hetherington's “The Wizard and Dorothy, Patton and Rommel: Negotiation Parables in Fiction and Fact” compared genres and saw similarities in thinking between the fictional Dorothy and the larger‐than‐life General Patton, especially in regard to how each of them revised their perceptions of what they encountered and changed their plans accordingly (Hetherington 2001).2 Hetherington observed that grasping abstract principles of negotiation is not difficult. But putting the concepts to work is quite another matter, given the uncertainty, “misleading signals, hidden agendas, and other ambiguous factors that combine to create the real‐world landscape of deal‐making and dispute resolution” (2001: 315). He concluded that stories, fact‐based and otherwise, are the best way to learn how to put that knowledge to work (Hetherington 2001).

There are many other novels, short stories, and films in which negotiation is featured. In some, it's the central element, as in the classic Twelve Angry Men. There may be fewer explorations of negotiation in science fiction (it would be a stretch to see the movies Alien or Body Snatchers in that light), but perhaps there are some. I'd be surprised, though, if any other business school professor has written a sci‐fi novel in which negotiation is the core theme. Deepak, in fact, surprised himself by doing so.3

He has written extensively in scholarly journals and has published several important negotiation books for general readers. In recent years, he has played an active role in peace‐building attempts in nations around the world. Deepak also has worked on gun violence in the United States and advised doctors who have difficult conversations with terminally ill patients. His new Harvard Business School course on war and peace is wildly oversubscribed.

The breadth and quality of all that work are remarkable, but none of it hints of Deepak's turn to fiction. He got into that quite by accident. At a break in a meeting, a young executive whom he counsels posed an alien invasion scenario. He asked Deepak what he would do if he were assigned to negotiate with visitors who seem none too friendly. “You should write a book about it,” the guy told him (Wheeler 2021).

Deepak laughed and said he had never had any interest in writing science fiction. On top of that, he was getting ready to write a book about war and peace, building on his new class. But he could not get the idea out of his mind. A month later, he thought, “You know what? Let me try to write the first couple of pages and see where it goes, where that seed of an idea is pushing me to go. And then I wrote the next day and the next day and the next day, and then I wrote for about 85 days straight and I had a 150,000‐word novel along the way” (Wheeler 2021).4 The main character he created, Kilmer, is himself a historian of war and peace. As Deepak put it, “It's through him and his journey that real insights and lessons get woven into the story.”

Here is the narrative in the smallest of nutshells. Four alien spaceships have approached the earth at great speed. They have announced themselves—and perhaps their intentions—by causing conspicuous explosions on the moon. Kilmer, an expert on war and peace, is widely respected as an original thinker. He is called in to advise U.S. officials at the highest level, including the President, key cabinet members, military leaders, and representatives of the intelligence community. Now, the largest of the spaceships has landed neared the District of Columbia and has established contact with the Americans. After a series of communications, the aliens insist that they will only deal with Kilmer. Things do not always go well.

As the story develops, Kilmer must negotiate on three levels. (Four, if you count a budding romance midst all the turmoil, but we'll put that aside here.) The first is negotiating his role in the committee of officials headed by the President. Kilmer wants to be a useful advisor, nothing more, but being effective requires understanding the competing views of the committee members, some of whom have different agendas.

When Kilmer is asked a question in the meetings, he often pauses, taking into account how he can best frame his response so that it carries appropriate weight. He also models the deliberate behavior everyone in the room should exercise. He does not make snap judgments, but he rarely equivocates.

On the second level, Kilmer has to advise on building global consensus. Several nations have been attacked and their leaders are under pressure to retaliate. It's not clear, though, that earthlings have any weapons that would be effective. Moreover, there's no basis for knowing whether fighting back would sabotage peace talks or force the aliens to retreat. The fragility of maintaining international restraint, even temporarily, adds to the pressure of reaching some sort of accord with the aliens.

The third level, of course, is engaging with the aliens. Kilmer strongly resists taking that ambassadorial role. Moreover, he is not the choice of the committee members, all senior to him in rank and age. But the aliens have refused to engage with anybody else. Earth's first step in the intergalactic negotiation was to capitulate and give in to the aliens' puzzling demand.

In all those settings Deepak deliberately made it hard for his character Kilmer, painting him into corners where he would have to think his way out. Of course, that meant that Deepak himself would have to do the same.

It wasn't always easy. At a critical point in the story, Kilmer boarded the alien's spaceship to negotiate with his counterpart, “Achidamus,” whom he could hear but not see. Deepak recalled:

I spent a few days putting Kilmer in a totally impossible situation, making sure there was no way out—that nothing he could say or do would save the world. And then, after a few days of writing that part, I thought “oh‐oh… there really is no way out!” I had done too good a job making it airtight/inescapable/ impossible. So, that was the only night in those three months of writing (minus one week when I had to focus on rec[ommendation] letters) that I took off from writing. I just sat in the dark in my family room (with a Scotch) for a few hours trying to figure out what I would do… and that's when Kilmer figured out his strategy. (Malhotra 2022)

What an impressive way to stretch one's mind! One might also ask what Scotch Deepak favors.5

It's in this envoy role that Kilmer is most impressive and his example, most instructive. The challenge was not merely that the stakes were extraordinarily high, though that would have been quite enough. Even more challenging is that Kilmer knew nothing about the aliens—who they were, their intentions, their capabilities, and perhaps most important, how they thought. For that matter, can it be safely assumed that they are multiple beings, not a single entity? And if they are multiple, whether they are many or only a few, do they all have the same interests and intentions, or are they just as divided as the team that Kilmer reports to?

One thing is clear. The aliens are technically advanced. They can travel faster than the speed of light and can inflict large‐scale damage. They also have learned our language, culture, and history at lightning speed. Kilmer recognizes, though, that those capabilities tell us little about how their society (if there is one) is organized and what their norms are. There are two facts, coupled, that are clear, though their meaning is not. First, the aliens have not yet launched a full‐scale attack. Second, they want to talk. But why?

It's not as if Kilmer is working from a blank slate. The narrative is punctuated periodically with excerpts from Kilmer's text, Heirs of Herodotus, with glimpses of history spanning more than two thousand years. There's a reference to Pericles's speech a year into the Peloponnesian War, as well as to Nero, and the subsequent fall of Rome. There also are references to Neville Chamberlain's disastrous meeting with Hitler in 1938, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Drawing on that knowledge, Kilmer looks for relevant parallels and contrasts.

Facing all these unknowns, Kilmer is rigorous, almost brutal in challenging his own assumptions and their possible implications. Like the best doctors, he wants to identify in advance evidence that his diagnosis is wrong so he can change his path before it's too late.6

That same self‐critical habit of mind was central to Air Force Colonel John Boyd's OODA mantra: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Observe the environment in which you are operating. Orient yourself: How is what you are seeing different from what you expected? Decide your next step. Act accordingly and repeat the OODA cycle again and again for ongoing learning. The hard part, though, is spotting the mismatches between prior expectations and the emerging reality.7

Coming back to negotiation, Boyd's approach reminds me of the mindset of U.N. diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, whom the Program on Negotiation honored with its highest award in 2002.8 At the presentation of his award, Brahimi said, “It's all well and good to have a provisional map of the negotiation terrain in which you are venturing, but it is only a rough draft.” As he put it, there's bound to be at least “one little rock somewhere on the sea you will be navigating in. And to spot that rock, you have got to use your eyes. That's the only instrument that will show you because the map contains all the ocean—everything, except that little rock.”9

Striking that single rock, that untested assumption, can sink whatever ship you are steering. For Brahimi, “That is really another way of saying keep an open mind and be ready to change and adapt to the situation. Don't ask reality to conform to your blueprint but transform your blueprint to adapt to the reality.” For negotiators, it's a matter of knowing what you do not know, developing a learning agenda, and recognizing that there always will be uncertainties (even if they aren't as momentous as the ones in Deepak's scenario).

In The Peacemaker's Code, Kilmer considers what evidence might signal that he has misdiagnosed the situation and thus must revise his prescription. In an odd way, the unprecedented nature of this negotiation may have helped further inoculate Kilmer against locking himself in with a been‐there/done‐that attitude. The very novelty of the situation was bound to prompt healthy doubt as to whether whatever he came up with was correct. But that was his fundamental nature, as Deepak depicts him. It was Kilmer's originality of thought, as expressed in his prior books and academic articles on war and peace, that made him a plausible participant in the decision‐making process.

For those of us who engage in ordinary negotiations, as parties or advisors, there's the risk that the more experience we gain, the more ossified our thinking may become. We may too readily assume that the situation we face is the same as the one we handled last week. Similar—yes, in many respects—but significantly different in a way we may have overlooked.

For many of us, harshly critiquing a plan that we have labored over does not come as easily as it seemingly does for Kilmer. There has been considerable research on confirmation bias, the common tendency to embrace evidence that supports our assumptions and beliefs while being oblivious to contrary information. Research by Gary Klein, author of The Power of Intuition, shows the value of doing a pre‐mortem (Klein 2003).

Klein's work shows that in critiquing any plan, it's not enough to ask, “Can we foresee any problems with this approach?” Such a question will surface some concerns, but often it's a skimpy list. It's easy to be engrossed by our own logic. Having mapped backward from point Z—our goal—to our starting point A, we may persuade ourselves that there is but one true way that things can go. Klein has found that rephrasing the question of foreseeability slightly conjures up a richer picture of what could unfold. Specifically, he recommends stress‐testing our strategy by flashing forward and imagining that the negotiation is underway. Now imagine there's been a major setback. What is it?

That subtle change in framing can shift our focus from whether something bad might happen to assuming that trouble will occur. We needn't be paranoid. Put aside being hit by a meteor just as we are about to sign the deal. But consider things that are unlikely yet still could happen. Perhaps, for example, there's a small chance that the market will tilt in the other party's favor, or that after making an agreement, we will learn that we could have gotten better terms elsewhere. If we think about such scenarios, we may realize that they are more likely than we first believed, and act accordingly.

Artful sci‐fi and classic novels like Middlemarch are not the only ways to get into a negotiator's mind. Some teaching materials do this very well (though I wish there were more). My colleague Jim Sebenius created superb teaching materials by tracking the experience of Paul Levy, who was recruited for, and ultimately took on, the position of CEO of Boston's Beth Israel‐Deaconess Hospital. This was not a retrospective case. Rather, Sebenius created it in real time, meeting with Levy biweekly, interviewing him about issues he was facing and his plans for dealing with them.10

Levy realized that negotiating the scope of his authority and the structure of hospital governance had to be settled before he signed on. The board of directors was way too big; it was an obstacle to needed innovation and change. Believing that a major financial cutback at the hospital was necessary, Levy realized that he could slash the budget only if his authority to do so was a precondition for accepting the job. If he tried to do that after the fact, the opposition would be entrenched, and he would have no leverage.

After the board complied and Levy was installed, he immediately engaged in difficult negotiations with staff, who threatened to walk out, and with doctors who said they were ready to jump to other hospitals if Levy failed to increase their pay and support. All this took place in a period when Beth Israel was running huge losses.

Sebenius and his team documented Levy's strategies for dealing with these challenges as events played out. Sometimes Levy's plans succeeded. Other times, they did not. Students working through the case can see instances where Levy had remarkable foresight, other times where he was nimble and able to adapt to unexpected change, and still others where (with the benefit of hindsight) he had chosen the wrong approach.

Insights into how negotiators think may also be gleaned from cases available from the Program on Negotiation (some supplemented by video) on the work of people it has honored as Great Negotiators (like Lakhdar Brahimi). Most compelling are the artists Christo and Jeanne‐Claude, who installed “The Gates” in Central Park, “Running Fence” in Northern California, and two dozen other massive projects around the world. Their negotiations with government officials, interest groups, and the public at large took years; with “The Gates,” it was almost three decades (Wheeler 2020). Fortunately for us, some of Christo and Jeanne‐Claude's negotiations were filmed by documentarians, so we can see their interactions in public meetings and private conversations.

Artful sci‐fi, classic novels like Middlemarch, and well‐crafted, real‐time cases can expose our students to how other negotiators, real and imagined, think their way through challenging situations. In the end, though, the most valuable service we might afford our students could be providing them a multifaceted mirror to help them track, evaluate, and refine their own thinking as negotiators. I've attempted that with a semester‐long exercise to help them assess their own habits of mind, specifically how they individually:

  • surface the assumptions and expectations that underlie their planned strategy;

  • identify what more they need to know about the case at hand and how to uncover it;

  • foresee and prepare for different ways, good and bad, the process may unfold; and

  • draw lessons from their experience and commit themselves to ongoing learning.

That list could be expanded, of course, but I hope it gives students a structure for connecting their thoughts as they prepare for, manage, and learn from their negotiations, both simulated and real.

I've designed an app, Negotiation 360,11 that students use for the series of exercises I assign over the term. Personal reflections also can be documented in a journal or spreadsheet, of course, though there is an advantage in compiling all the information (including peer feedback) under one umbrella. Either way, students in my classes go through a four‐step process.

First, they assess their relative strengths on four essential negotiation skills: creating value, claiming value, empathy, and assertiveness. The first two elements (creating and claiming) lay out the substantive dimension of negotiation. The latter two (empathy and assertiveness) relate to the interpersonal dimension. Students can revise their self‐assessment as they do more simulations and deepen their reflections.

Second, in preparing for each exercise, students sketch a “game plan” for how they will manage the process. The prior self‐assessment is meant to prompt them to consider potential problem‐solving issues and relational ones, as well.

Third, right after completing an exercise, students do an after‐action review, cataloging what worked well for them and what, in hindsight, they might have done differently.

Fourth, the Negotiation 360 app curates information into a master list of best practices, strengths that they can build upon, and other areas where improvement would pay off. (The same can be done in a journal.) I encourage students to regard their workbooks as Volume One in a series that will continue after they graduate, documenting their experience in their negotiations at work, in their communities, and maybe even among friends and family.

I believe this all has been worthwhile in my classes, though in writing this piece, I see that there is something missing. It is the gap of time between pre‐negotiation game planning and post‐negotiation reflection. With complex negotiations, I'd like to have students pause midway in the process. I'd want them to examine what they have discovered about the dimensions of the case that they are handling and the nature of the person with whom they are dealing.

In the language of Col. John Boyd, I'd like to have them practice “orienting.” Are there mismatches between what they expected and what in fact is transpiring? If so, does that call for tweaking their approach, and if so, a little or a lot? I'd want students to weigh their next step (“decide”), and then take it (“act”), fully prepared to re‐orient again as things play out.12

I am curious to see how students would respond. I hope that putting a spotlight on real‐time, mid‐negotiation reflection might give students a felt experience they might remember as personally valuable. Doing it several times could increase the odds that some of them, at least, might learn to think more deeply before, after, and—perhaps most important—while they negotiate.

As for me, reading Deepak's The Peacemaker's Code has prompted me to think about things I might do better in my teaching—nothing as consequential as Professor Kilmer's imaginative thinking while dealing with hostile aliens, but it's a pleasure to contemplate doing something in a new way.

1.

Beyond that, negotiation cases (including my own) typically are one‐sided, hence incomplete. We have the buyer's side of the story, but not the seller's; the plaintiff's, not the defendant's. As a consequence, we often know little, if anything, about what other parties thought and how they planned as the negotiation unfolded.

2.

Heatherington also noted how fact and fiction can overlap, pointing to dramatic moments in the film Patton that never actually took place.

3.

For now at least, Deepak likely has a unique status as an academic writing science fiction about dealing with aliens, but at least one other Harvard University faculty member, astrophysicist and psychologist Avi Loeb, is exploring the challenges of communicating with beings who may be much smarter than we are and who do not share our conceptual system. Loeb says that even if such creatures are in our neighborhood, they may have no more desire for communicating with us than we have for “talking to ants on the sidewalk” (Walsh 2022).

4.

Deepak further explained, “I had these ideas about how we should think about war and peace, and about the role of history, strategy, and negotiation. And I had the time to do something about these ideas because of Covid and because I wrote from 11 p.m. to three or four in the morning every night” (Wheeler 2021).

5.

During the Civil War, some senior officials in Abraham Lincoln's administration scorned General Ulysses S. Grant for being a drunkard. Lincoln reputedly answered, “Well, I wish some of you would tell me what brand of whiskey Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”

6.

See, for example, the much‐cited “rules” of the late Dr. C. Miller Fisher, an eminent neurologist. One of them proclaims, “Make Hypotheses and Then Try as Hard as You Can to Disprove Them: Find the Exception Before Accepting a Hypothesis As Valid” (Caplan 2021). See also Rudolph, Morrison, and Carroll (2009).

7.

Boyd never wrote a book or even an article, but he was very influential in shaping maneuver doctrine in all of the U.S. military branches. For more information on his OODA loop, see Richards (2020).

8.

For the award, see “Great Negotiator Award” at https://www.pon.harvard.edu/category/the‐great‐negotiator‐award/. For Brahimi, see “2002: Lakhdar Brahimi, Algerian United Nations Diplomat” at https://www.pon.harvard.edu/the‐great‐negotiator‐award/2002‐lakhdar‐brahimi‐algerian‐united‐nations‐diplomat/.

9.

A link to a video of the presentation of the Great Negotiator Award to Brahimi may be found at https://www.pon.harvard.edu/shop/great‐negotiator‐2002‐lakhdar‐brahimi‐2/.

10.

Drawing on the process set up by Sebenius, two members of his research team, David Garvin and Michael Roberto, wrote a case study titled “Paul Levy: Taking Charge of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (A),” which is available from Harvard Business Publishing (Garvin and Roberto 2002). Using the same real‐time, journalistic approach, Sebenius created another case on how Levy crafted a strategy, titled “Paul Levy: Confronting a ‘Corporate Campaign,’” which is also available from Harvard Business Publishing (Sebenius 2014).

11.

Negotiation 360 is available from Harvard Business Publishing: https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/8865‐HTM‐ENG?Ntt=Negotiation%20360.

12.

As I think about this, it might not be hard to pull off. If students are negotiating in the same room, the instructor can call for a five‐minute break in which participants privately answer those questions. If students are scattered, a group text would do the trick.

Caplan
,
L.
2021
.
Caplan‐Fisher rules
.
Stroke
52
(
5
). Available from https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/STROKEAHA.121.035017.
Garvin
,
D. A.
, and
M. A.
Roberto
.
2002
.
Paul Levy: Taking charge of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (A)
. Available from https://store.hbr.org/product/paul‐levy‐taking‐charge‐of‐the‐beth‐israel‐deaconess‐medical‐center‐a/303008?from=quickSearch.
Hetherington
,
H. L.
2001
.
The wizard and Dorothy, Patton and Rommel: Negotiation parables in fiction and fact
.
Pepperdine Law Review
28
(
2
):
289
315
. Available from https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol28/iss2/1.
Klein
,
G.
2003
.
The power of intuition
.
New York
:
Random House
.
Malhotra
,
D.
2022. “Peacemaker.” Email to author, February 18.
Read
,
D.
, and
T.
Hills
.
2021
.
A negotiation in Middlemarch
.
Negotiation Journal
37
(
2
):
203
220
. Available from https://doi.org/10.1111/nejo.12355.
Richards
,
C.
2020
.
Boyd's OODA loop
.
Necesse
5
(
1
):
142
165
.
Rudolph
,
J.
,
J. B.
Morrison
, and
J.
Carroll
.
2009
.
The dynamics of action‐oriented problem solving: Linking interpretation and choice
.
Academy of Management Review
34
(
4
):
733
756
.
Sebenius
,
J. K.
2014
.
Paul Levy: Confronting a “Corporate Campaign” (A)
. Available from https://hbsp.harvard.edu/search?N=&Nrpp=25&Ntt=sebenius+paul+levey&searchLocation=header.
Wheeler
,
M.
2020
.
Christo and Jeanne‐Claude: The negotiation of art and vice versa
.
Negotiation Journal
36
(
4
):
471
487
. Available from https://doi.org/10.1111/nejo.12338.
Wheeler
,
M.
2021
. Interview with Deepak Malhotra: Negotiating the impossible, the 34th episode in Agility at work (podcast). Dropped June 15.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.