Keynote speech at PON’s 40^th Anniversary Symposium December 9, 2023

Let me begin by asking each of you to recall the moment when you were first introduced to PON and began participating in this community. Just out of curiosity, what year was it? Anybody here from the 1980s? Wow, quite a few. Who’s here from the 1990s? Who’s here from the 2000s? The 2010s? The 2020s? That’s impressive; each of the last four decades is well represented. We have a wide range here, which offers us a real opportunity to learn together.

Let me ask you if you can remember how you felt when you first encountered PON. What made you curious? What intrigued and attracted you? What excited you about the program? What was the feeling that you had?

I can tell you what it was for me. I was lucky enough to be around for the inception of PON. One freezing Sunday night in early January 1977, a few years before PON’s formal founding, I received a surprise phone call. I was living in a little rented room at the top of one of those three-decker wooden houses in Cambridge just up the street from Harvard Law School. I was 23. I had taken a break from studying hard for my graduate school exams in social anthropology to read the papers of the students I was teaching. And the phone rang. I picked it up. The voice at the other end sounded strong and clear:

I was speechless. Was I dreaming? I don’t think I’d ever been called by a professor, let alone on a weekend. And it had certainly never occurred to me that an idea that had popped into my head in that little attic room while writing an academic paper could be of any use to a high government official in Washington working on what was even then widely perceived as the world’s most challenging conflict.

So that’s what inspired me then and has inspired me ever since: the power of applied thinking, the possibility that an idea, a framework, a certain way of understanding a situation, might be valuable to someone facing a very difficult conflict. I will forever be indebted to Roger for that generous invitation that would change my life and open up for me an entire field of inquiry and practice.

Thanks to Roger’s invitation, I had a chance to witness over the ensuing years a convergence of remarkable minds animated by a spirit of practical idealism that eventually gave birth six years later to the Program on Negotiation. I’d like to reflect just for a moment about the lives of three of the founders of PON who are no longer with us, and the beliefs and dreams that I believe they shared.

Roger Fisher graduated from Harvard College and then went off to fight in WWII. When he came back, he learned that he had lost many of his closest friends, which ignited in him a lifelong passion to find better ways to deal with our differences, better ways than war to resolve conflicts. After Harvard Law School, he went off to work on the Marshall Plan in Paris with Averell Harriman and to practice international law with Dean Acheson in Washington before he came back to Harvard to teach.

Howard Raiffa also served in WWII and went on to become a leading exponent of decision theory and game theory. Howard was the founding director of IIASA, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, which was a stellar example during the Cold War of scientific cooperation between adversaries, in this case between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Frank Sander fled Germany as a boy with his family as the Nazis rose to power. He served in the army right after WWII. He later became a pioneer of ADR with his proposal for a multi-door courthouse in which parties would be offered a range of options from mediation to arbitration to litigation so that, in Frank’s words, “the form could fit the fuss.”

All three of these founders belonged to a generation that was born and came of age in the short period between two terrible world wars. All three of them witnessed the rise and defeat of fascism. And all three were just beginning their careers when the threat emerged of a third world war, a cataclysmic nuclear conflict that could quite possibly end life as we know it.

All three founders were gifted not only with remarkable minds but also with kind hearts and generous spirits. They had dreams of a better world that was safer, more peaceful, more prosperous, and more equitable. They were optimists, but I believe they were more than that. They were what could be called possibilists. They were willing to look at the negative possibilities, the destructive consequences of conflict, straight in the eye. And then they were highly motivated to look for better, more positive possibilities. They sought to apply rigorous creative thinking to one of the greatest human dilemmas: How do we deal with our differences? It’s a question that, as we know, pervades every aspect of human life, and ultimately has existential implications. In an age of increasingly destructive technology, can we learn to coexist?

Roger, Howard, and Frank were all practical idealists who shared a conviction that creative problem-solving grounded in both theory and the realities of the world could open up new possibilities for mitigating even the most serious problems facing humanity. I would suggest to you that these shared dreams, ideals, and beliefs in a fundamental way helped form the DNA of the Program on Negotiation.

I got my first inkling of this DNA when helping Roger coordinate and facilitate what he called “the Devising Seminar.” Held at the Harvard Faculty Club, the seminar was a series of meetings to which Roger invited assorted groups of professors and visiting diplomats, scholars and practitioners, thinkers and doers to discuss a particular world conflict in order to devise creative ways forward. His question was always: Who can do what tomorrow morning to reduce the risk of a war or help resolve a conflict? It was an experiment, a lab of sorts. Could we engage in a different kind of conversation that would help create new possibilities in conflicts that seemed impossibly stuck?

I remember those meetings vividly. The faculty club was an august place, decorated with great portraits and silk wallpaper. When we entered with flip charts and magic markers and covered the walls of the room with large sheets of paper to facilitate brainstorming, I’m sure it raised a few eyebrows.

Perhaps the high point of the Devising Seminar was a memo that we produced together on the merits of the single negotiating text process. It went on to be used with success by President Jimmy Carter to negotiate the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, leading to a peace treaty that is still in effect 45 years later.

After a few years, the Devising Seminar evolved into the Harvard Negotiation Seminar. It continued to have a case format, with presentations by practitioners looking for useful advice for dealing with their negotiation problems. The scope of the seminar expanded well beyond international conflicts to include issues ranging from a judge dealing with a proliferation of small claims disputes, to a government official tasked with figuring out where to store nuclear waste, to a coal mine beset by wildcat strikes.

Key to the seminars was a rich interplay of theory and practice. As Roger used to quip, “There is nothing as practical as a good theory.” And as Howard used to stress, there is nothing that can stimulate and sharpen our theoretical understanding like a good set of practical cases.

Howard and Roger were convinced that good theory could advance practice and that practice could inform and guide useful theory.

The seminar participants came from a wide range of fields, including law, business, political science, economics, psychology, anthropology, environmental studies, and education. We discovered that even coming from very different fields with different concepts and terminologies, we were dealing with many of the same issues. And we started to evolve a common language. The case format compelled us to articulate the implications of our conceptual frameworks in the form of practical analysis and advice for the practitioner whom we were seeking to help.

PON thus emerged from a collective realization that here was a new potential, emerging field of inquiry and practice. For those of us who had the opportunity to participate in those early discussions, it was like a giant “aha moment,” a feeling of intense intellectual excitement. As we searched for mutual gain for the parties, we ourselves realized a great deal of intellectual mutual gain. And out of that collective “aha,” that intellectual mutual gain, PON was born as a community of inquiry into this nascent field.

Negotiation was an unusual focus for academic inquiry because most academic fields tend to dwell on substance—on the “what.” Negotiation seemed a bit more ephemeral, focusing on the “how.” Instead of just dwelling on the substance of the problems that we were addressing in the Negotiation Seminar, we also were focused on the process of how to understand and deal with those issues. We studied the very process of joint problem-solving negotiation that we were using. We were engaged not just in inquiry; we were engaged in what might be called a “meta inquiry,” an inquiry about the inquiry. In the celebrated phrase of Marshall McLuhan, “The medium was the message.” Or as Roger liked to put it, “The product was the process.”

So, as I look back at the origins of PON and its founders, I return to the question of what was the DNA of this place? What I see is the spirit of possibility inspired by a remarkable flowering of practical idealism. I see practitioners and scholars drawing on a rich dialogue of theory and practice, engaging in intense interdisciplinary collaboration, and using—while at the same time studying and improving—a process for creative and rigorous joint problem-solving. The aim was to address one of the central dilemmas facing humanity: How can we better deal with our differences? How can we negotiate better agreements? How do we resolve and transform even the hardest conflicts?

These were the questions that motivated the founders of PON and with which we continue to struggle today. To the search for answers, PON’s founders brought ideals and values that guide us still, ideals and values such as improving people’s lives, opening up possibilities for mutual gain, creating tools for better communication and self-awareness, and finding ways for adversaries to move from animosity to curiosity. PON’s founders believed that it was possible for people to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, irrespective of ideology. They believed that authentic communication could even lead to mutual empathy, to a place where people could see the humanity in each other regardless of the dispute or negotiation at hand. And they believed that passing along these ideals and values to future generations was critical to creating a world in which their children and grandchildren would not witness the carnage and destruction that they experienced in World War II.

From its start, PON brought people together across disciplines. And as I recall in those days, interdisciplinary ventures resembled startups. They lacked institutional backing and support and had a very high failure rate. I remember people saying that the Program on Negotiation would not last, that the academic interest in negotiation was a fad; that a venture involving scholars from disciplines as diverse as psychology, economics, sociology, and business would last five years at best. People believed that the study and practice of negotiation, a field that involved multidisciplinary expertise, would never have the respect and standing accorded traditional disciplines.

So, the fact that PON has lasted for 40 years is really quite remarkable. As the many roots of a tree unite into a single trunk, PON’s founders reached across disciplines and united to form a single organization, a consortium, perhaps the very first interdisciplinary, interuniversity research center on negotiation and dispute resolution in the world.

And just as many branches spring from a single tree trunk, so did the program create many different activities, from faculty seminars to scholarly books and articles to an increasingly important focus over the years on training the next generation of negotiation scholars, along with a wide variety of course offerings in negotiation.

I remember in the early days, there was a little booklet published by PON with descriptions of the different negotiation classes available in the Boston area. We were all amazed when the number of courses reached 40. Then came the creation of PON’s Teaching Negotiation Resource Center, which wrote and distributed teaching materials such as cases and simulations, which we’ve all used in our teaching. The Teaching Negotiation Resource Center has distributed millions—literally, millions—of copies of such materials around the world.

There was valuable learning from practice, like the Great Negotiators Award, which has studied and celebrated exceptional practitioners from diplomats George Mitchell and Lakhdar Brahimi, to environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and most recently, to Christiana Figueres, an internationally recognized expert on climate change who negotiated the Paris Agreement.

And, of course, there was our flagship executive education program that has trained thousands and thousands of leaders around the world from all different sectors and continues to be vibrant. These are just some of the principal activities of PON.

Forty years ago, there were hardly any courses on negotiation taught in universities. Now there are courses everywhere—from law schools to business schools to schools of government, and to many academic departments. There are courses in business, government agencies, and non-profits. And many of them draw on ideas and materials that come from PON.

When PON began, the dominant paradigm for understanding negotiation was very much win–lose. Two of the best-selling books of that time—the mid to late ‘70s—were Winning through Intimidation (Ringer 1974) and Looking Out for Number One(Ringer 1977). Those are just two examples but there were many more. PON played a key role in helping people around the world understand that negotiation does not need to be a zero-sum game; it can be a positive-sum game in which all sides potentially end up better off, and certainly better off than they would be by pursuing their BATNAs (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement).

The idea of interest-based negotiation had deep roots in the work of pioneers like Mary Parker Follett, who lived in Boston a century ago and whom Peter Drucker once called “the mother of modern management,” and later in the work of scholars like Richard Walton and Robert McKersie. Thanks in great part to PON, the idea of interest-based negotiation has spread far and wide and has helped change the way millions of people around the world understand their differences and deal with them through negotiation.

So, I think it’s fair to say that PON has made a fundamental contribution to improving the theory, the teaching, and the practice of negotiation and dispute resolution. It has played a leading role in putting the study and teaching of negotiation as a field on the map. It has also, I believe, markedly contributed to legitimizing negotiation as a field, which is not always easy to do in new areas of scholarship and creative practice.

Looking back, we can see that a lot has been accomplished in introducing and disseminating new ideas on negotiation. At the same time, we can see that there is a great deal still to be done. Comparatively speaking, our field is still very young and our work has just begun.

While we can all rightfully feel a sense of satisfaction for all that’s been accomplished in the last 40 years, it’s also a rather humbling moment for us to take stock as conflict increases and intensifies all around us, polarizing our societies, poisoning relationships, and paralyzing us from addressing our common problems.

Wars are raging in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Ethiopia, and many other places around the world. The US and Russia are in a renewed confrontation while the US and China are on a collision course over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Here in the United States, politics has gotten so toxic and polarized that polls show a majority of Americans fear we may eventually end up in large-scale civil violence, even civil war, as unthinkable as that might seem. Throughout the world, we are faced with climate change, rising inequality, and massive population dislocations, just to take a few major problems exacerbating conflict.

Then there are technological revolutions like AI that are disrupting almost every aspect of life, ultimately redefining what it means to be human. Even as AI creates great opportunities, many who know it best are warning us that it poses an existential risk to humanity.

All of these crises are beginning to intersect in what has been aptly called a polycrisis.

And this polycrisis, this new age of conflict, I believe, compels us to return to the central question with which PON began: How do we deal with our differences, particularly our deepest and most intractable ones? The question calls out for creative answers. It’s not hyperbole to say that, more than ever, the very future of humanity depends on how we learn to negotiate. There’s never been a greater need for creative problem-solving negotiation in pursuit of positive-sum outcomes that leave everyone better off. And at the same time, it has perhaps never been more challenging.

Negotiation, I would suggest, is the key competence that our societies need to navigate these turbulent seas to survive and thrive in this age of conflict. The perspective of looking back 40 years invites us now to look forward another 40 years, which admittedly is hard to do in today’s rapidly changing world. How can PON help meet the challenges and opportunities of today and tomorrow? How can we contribute?

I believe it’s important to remember how we began, our DNA. The program emerged, as I described, as a remarkable flowering of practical idealism that animated so many people to join—people who had the audacity to think big together with the humility to listen and learn, theorists who could learn from practitioners, and practitioners who could learn from theorists.

As we face these turbulent times in the world, it is important for us to remember that PON was created by people who had lived through tough times, through depression and fascism and war. It was formed to deal with the kinds of stormy challenges that we might face in the coming decades.

I believe that PON has a great deal to offer as we work to create a future that is not riven by destructive conflict and despair. In the area of research, PON has the resources to push the field forward by studying aspects of negotiation that have yet to be explored. For example, we have much to learn from neuroscience about how our brains work and how our emotions influence our management of conflict. There also is a need to deepen our understanding about external complexity and interconnectedness through digital intelligence, social media digital intelligence, and artificial intelligence. We have an opportunity to push forward in a significant way, to take a big leap in advancing the field—similar to the progress we made in the 1980s and ‘90s—by focusing on both the internal with neuroscience and the external with digital and artificial intelligence.

We also have an opportunity—even, perhaps, an obligation—to work with local communities, Indigenous groups, government officials and agencies, and other stakeholders who could benefit from our expertise and experience. I imagine PON as a place to which people in conflict situations from local disputes to international discord increasingly turn as a source of both training and consultation. I imagine PON as a place that helps people recognize that although our different identities, experiences, and backgrounds may lead to conflict and impasse, together we can create value and opportunities for mutual gain that are greater than what we can accomplish alone.

Given the magnitude of the challenges, I believe we’re going to have to learn a lot more about how we can harness our full human potential to transform difficult conflicts. PON played an enormously important role in highlighting the potential of mutual gain, the potential that lies between the parties. But there are at least two other major human potentials that deserve to be studied and developed with equal rigor.

First, there’s the unrealized potential that exists within the parties, within our own psyches. All too often in conflict situations, we become our own worst enemies as we react blindly out of fear and anger. As Ambrose Bierce once quipped, “When angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” I’m curious about what can help us individually and collectively shift out of reactive states into what might be called a balcony state, a place of calm and perspective where we can stay focused on what we really want and we can see the bigger picture. Instead of being our own worst opponents, what does it take to become our own best allies? I see a lot of potential here, as was mentioned, for collaboration with neuroscientists, and with the emerging field of trauma psychology, for example.

Second, there’s the unrealized potential that exists around the parties. In charged conflicts, there’s a common tendency to reduce everything to two sides—us vs. them. But as we know, there’s always a third side, which is the surrounding community, the friends, the neighbors, the allies, the colleagues. Speaking as an anthropologist, I would suggest that this third side, the surrounding community, is our most ancient human heritage for dealing with conflict.

Mediation is just one of many roles that the community can perform. Others include relationship-building, providing tangible assistance, and equalizing power. The third side can be mobilized into a winning coalition in support of negotiation. I’d love to see us learn far more about how we can harness the full power of the human community to help parties reach and sustain agreements.

If we can figure out how to unlock all three kinds of potential together—the potential that lies within the parties, the potential that lies between the parties, and the potential that lies around them—I believe that will give us our best chance for dealing with the intractable conflicts that we face. We may not be able to resolve every conflict, but we just might be able to transform them, in other words, to change the form of the conflict from destructive to constructive, from costly fights into creative negotiation.

To unlock that full potential, we’re going to need to learn more about how to “swarm” tough conflicts with collective intelligence. “Swarming” is a term from biology that is popular in Silicon Valley for applying a critical mass of collective intelligence to a thorny problem. Swarming involves multidisciplinary teams working closely together, pooling their diverse skills and perspectives. As I reflect back on the origins of PON, I realize it started with a kind of a swarm. It was a multidisciplinary team of scholars and practitioners collaborating very closely together, applying our collective intelligence and creativity to create a common language and field of inquiry about this new subject of negotiation.

Looking to the future, I imagine “swarm teams” here at PON of scholars working side by side with practitioners building theory and practice together, collaborating with networks around the world to address the knottiest conflicts and issues that we face, from the Middle East to climate change, from domestic polarization to AI.

I believe that negotiation increasingly must become a team sport. The complexity and difficulty of the conflicts that are emerging today call on us to move beyond the archetypes of the single negotiator or mediator to multidisciplinary teams and networks using radical collaboration to swarm problems with collective intelligence and grounded creativity. And, of course, if we’re going to harness our full potential, we can benefit from the revolutionary emerging tools of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, even as we are mindful of their risks.

I believe that, in these times, there’s no better place than a university program like PON for this kind of creative ideation to work—a safe, neutral place to talk about ideas. I imagine PON providing intellectual capital, research, and training, as well as the auspices for problem-solving conversations. I imagine PON developing new ideas, both academic and practical, inspiring the next generation of scholars and practitioners with the same kind of excitement that gave birth to the program. I imagine PON serving as a kind of intellectual balcony, a place of perspective, helping to build unlikely bridges amid conflicts, and serving the third side, the side of the whole community.

In these challenging times, it’s all too easy to be daunted. But when everything is in flux, it also means there are great opportunities to reshape our world and the way that we deal with our basic differences. There’s never been a greater need and at the same time there’s never been a greater opportunity.

In a nutshell, my dream for PON is that we will rise to meet this new age of conflict, as I believe its founders intended us to. I dream that PON will be a place that hosts and nurtures a thriving community of possibilists, a critical mass of scholars and practitioners who deploy deep curiosity, rigorous creativity, radical collaboration, and the latest intelligent technologies in order to swarm the world’s toughest conflicts.

Let me end as I began, on a personal note of gratitude for all those from whom I was privileged to learn, and gratitude for all of you here with whom I’ve had the privilege of sharing the journey. PON has been a treasured intellectual home for me for the last 40 years. I’m profoundly grateful for what was created here 40 years ago, for the seed that was planted, for what has flourished here, and for what will yet flourish here through the next 40 years.

As PON turns 40, I happen to turn 70. And I’ve become a grandfather. My young grandson’s name is Diego. On Diego’s first day, I had a chance to hold him in my arms for an hour. And I looked at him, and I wondered about the world that he’s going to grow up in. What would he and his generation want us to do now to create a more peaceful, livable, equitable future? I like to call Diego my new boss.

The choices we make will profoundly influence the world that our children and grandchildren inherit. I believe there are few, if any, problems on Earth that we cannot address, if only we can learn to negotiate our differences skillfully. I believe that if we can transform our conflicts from destructive fights into creative problem-solving negotiations, we can genuinely help transform the world around us. And I believe that this community of possibilists, the Program on Negotiation rising to its full potential, can play a vital role in helping to bring about the world that we all want for our children and grandchildren.

As was asked by a sage long ago, if not us, who? And if not now, when?