Learning from Practice to Teach for Practice: Reflections from a Novel Training Series for International Climate Negotiators Presentation at PON’s 40^th Anniversary Symposium¹

At a dinner hosted by the Program on Negotiation in honor of Christiana Figueres, the former Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), I, Anselm Dannecker, was auspiciously seated next to the former lead climate negotiator for Colombia. I asked how she learned to negotiate. She recounted the story of her first COP²—a story that, in many ways, birthed a multiyear project that would take us to Dubai and Bonn, lead us to spend countless hours virtually training young negotiators on their way to their first COPs, and ultimately present this talk. Her story began as she sat on a plane as a member of the official Colombian delegation, reading a print-out of the climate negotiation guide titled “On behalf of my delegation” that she had downloaded just before boarding the plane. This guide was her negotiation training. Upon arrival she didn’t know how to turn on her microphone and wasn’t able to intervene in an important plenary session. When she finally was able to get her voice in, she accidentally created a diplomatic mess. Not knowing the history of a negotiation item, she made a suggestion that threatened to open up a hard-fought agreement. Her comment earned her outraged stares, a forceful response by a colleague scolding her, and a reprimanding call from her foreign ministry.

Around the same time, we began engaging senior climate negotiators in our work at the Harvard Kennedy School in a simple way. We would invite them to seminars, ask them to share a challenging negotiation case, and facilitate an interactive discussion with them using the lens of negotiation theory. A former head of the African Group of Negotiators and very influential actor in the regime shared his story in one such seminar in 2021. I, Monica Giannone, took what he had said and parroted it back in the language of my discipline, repeating back what he said, but in words that would lift up and illuminate the negotiation theory behind the practice. He asked me to stop and to repeat what I had said, took out his notebook, and began taking notes.

These stories are illustrative of a basic diagnosis: People who are leading one of the most important negotiations in the world—international climate negotiations—are often “learning by doing” even though negotiation theory has something beneficial to offer.

The problems associated with a lack of training disproportionately affect small, underresourced delegations from developing countries. Delegations such as the EU and US have entire floors of people dealing with a specific aspect of a narrow issue, for example, reporting greenhouse gas emissions, and work with a team that is solely dedicated to negotiating international climate agreements. On the other side of the spectrum, delegations of small developing countries often consist of only a few people who have a day job in a line ministry and negotiate many different environmental treaties on the side.

Working with a passionate team of advisors, supporters, funders, faculty, and friends, we decided to develop an accessible virtual negotiation training for young early career negotiators on delegations with limited resources. However, our goal was not just to provide a training but to learn from the many seasoned negotiators who started their careers in much the same way as noted above but were able to become highly influential and effective and to shape the climate architecture for the better. In our seminars at HKS we would find ourselves furiously taking notes when our climate colleagues were speaking, only to look up and notice them furiously scribbling when we were speaking. We could learn from what they know about their craft—about how to navigate the difficult reality of having no time and no resources, and still leave a footprint on international treaties—while fruitfully injecting, complementing, and, at times, interrogating their thoughts based on what we know from negotiation theory.

Today we will tell you about our approach and lessons learned when trying to leverage mutually beneficial insights. It includes things we got right and other things we got wrong. For telling this story, we focus on two key questions:

We will offer lessons learned for each of those questions and at the end will note a few questions with which we are still grappling.

We all teach for practice. What often unites an otherwise wonderfully diverse group of colleagues, peers, students, and mentors, is our passion for action and seeing how our discipline shows up “in the real world.” We teach principles of human interaction; we teach a view of the world in terms of interests, positions, BATNAs, and perceptions of what’s fair; and we work with students to understand themselves and to develop their own voice when doing the thing effectively. But in principle, we teach in a cross-cutting way. We don’t teach students how to negotiate their job offer. We teach how to negotiate effectively and how to apply important principles when negotiating their job offers, when resolving their neighborhood dispute, or when drawing up a renewable energy project with local stakeholders.

With a specific application of international climate negotiations in mind as well as a specific clientele—early career negotiators on small developing country delegations who chiefly negotiate in a UN process—the question of how context specific we should teach required a closer look. Do we need to adapt our teaching approach for such a specific audience? What do we need to know about their world? What does it mean to teach for practice? There are two specific conditions that made asking these questions important. First, our typical participants are very junior in their teams. They have limited authority to enact the creative thinking we know is helpful for negotiating effectively. Second, the UNFCCC treaty negotiation process in which participants work structures negotiations in a way that often incentivizes “bad bargaining.”

In today’s opening session, William Ury shared a personal story. As a 23-year-old graduate student, he received a surprise phone call from Roger Fisher, who said: “Thank you for sending me your paper. I took the liberty of sending the main chart to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East. I’ve been advising him, and I thought he might find your ideas useful as he prepares.” This story encapsulates the beauty of negotiation as a marriage of scholarship and creative practice. As a student, Ury used our conceptual tools to take a fresh look at big, protracted conflicts. Inspiring such “practical idealism”³ is needed to make progress on the resolution of such conflicts. And we all know that fresh, big thinking inspires students in profound ways.

But in our experience, the realities of early-career practice often disappoint the desire to think in big and inspired ways. The people we set out to teach—usually civil servants—often lack access to assistant secretaries of state in their countries; they are embedded in systems that restrict their creativity and constrain their engagement. Every system has its own logic of the arguments that it accepts. People find themselves thinking big but face superiors who want a few speaking points for their opening speech. Unsurprisingly, for us, it often feels easier to work with senior negotiators. With their greater degrees of freedom, the language of negotiations resonates more immediately with their experience.

This poses challenges. The people we train undoubtedly negotiate every day in their restrictive environments, for instance, when negotiating their job responsibilities. But our aspiration was for them to effectively advance ambitious climate action and make progress on the collective climate challenges within international fora. So, we have to contend with the real constraints they face when negotiating climate change. Simultaneously, we need to maintain a key promise of our field: to inspire progress on the large issues.

It is not only the immediate environment of the early career bureaucrat that poses restrictions. The UNFCCC process that structures international collaboration between countries, groups, coalitions, and individuals often incentivizes “bad bargaining.”

We know that the creative resolution of differences tends to be easier in systems that separate the stages of commitment and option generation, create spaces for learning between individuals with fundamentally different views and constraints, are facilitated actively based on a set of best practices, allow for leveraging differences of all kinds (often by adding issues or trading across them), and prevent the organization of rigid blocks that obscure interests.

Leaving out a lot of important nuance, the UNFCCC features a design that often works in the opposite direction:

• Countries coordinate a rich set of domestic interests into a singular position; these country positions are then coordinated into positions of groups of countries who arrive to a big annual negotiation completely locked into their position.

• Country groups tend to be rigid and determined by historical foreign policy alliances rather than reflect the dynamic evolution of countries’ interests vis-à-vis global climate action.

• Most engagement processes are highly formalized and structured around rules of equal participation with people getting short timeslots to announce their positions publicly and a strong procedural expectation of commitment.

• People are engaged as country representatives (who are expected to speak as “the country”) based on mandates that tend to specify settlement points and red lines.

• There is an unclear consensus-based decision-making procedure that is often interpreted as unanimity—indeed, the rules of procedure are known as the “draft rules of procedure” because the decision-making rules have never been agreed on.

• Multi-issue negotiations tend to be split into many different negotiation tracks based on a top-down logic with ministers and heads of delegations at the top and technical negotiators leading the single-issue negotiation tracks.

• There are few mechanisms to prevent countries from misrepresenting their interests or engaging in what’s known as “hostage taking” tactics. Countries will hold up and block negotiations on issues that are irrelevant to them (e.g., forest negotiations), with the sole purpose of extracting concessions in another room where issues that the same country does care about (e.g., fossil fuel phase-outs) are discussed.

Many of these design choices are made for valid political reasons. We merely want to point out that many UNFCCC features fly in the face of what negotiation theory would recommend. As we’ll see later, many creative people have worked around these limitations of the formal process by creating side-processes.

With these two problems in mind—limited authority of junior negotiators to act within a process that itself incentivizes bad bargaining dynamics—we faced choices on “how to teach for practice.”

We could teach early career negotiators how to be effective operators of the process. But that would mean ceding too much ground to a process that itself isn’t designed to deliver. It would mean sacrificing the idealism in practical idealism. We could instead teach participants about good negotiating and help them understand the limitations and constraints of the process. However, that would be risky as we did not want to create effective outsiders but effective internal actors.

This clear distinction is certainly a false dichotomy. And indeed, we ultimately moved beyond it, aiming to train effective operators who question the system within their scope and push its boundaries when needed. But the dichotomy points to an important tension that helped clarify our thinking, especially as we got things wrong in our initial attempts to leverage practitioner insights to design the training.

Our initial (misguided) approach to learning from practitioners, both early career and senior negotiators, followed a simple formula:

Almost immediately, we noticed that interviews, especially with senior negotiators, often felt “off.” When prompted to discuss lessons learned and what they wished they had known when they started, they would talk about the importance of the proficient use of internal tools to navigate the complex logic of the process, such as making effective plenary statements, submitting effective position papers, coordinating positions, etc. Often such points about the effective navigating of the procedure were combined with broad points about the need for empathy and retaining poise during distress. The language and ideas negotiators used to describe what makes for good negotiating—submit good position papers and be empathetic—didn’t resonate with our language and ideas of what makes for good negotiating in multiparty contexts, such as understanding the coalitional structure of a situation based on interests, leveraging differences to create value, finding unique alliances, and sequencing one’s engagement effectively.

A revised interviewing approach changed the tone in useful ways. Instead of asking senior practitioners about what lessons they had learned, we asked them about stories and experiences that had yielded positive, surprising outcomes as well as the constraints that they had to navigate to achieve these outcomes. In these stories, actions that illustrate what our field suggests started popping up.

The story of the Cartagena Dialogue is one such example. After the diplomatic disaster of the 2009 Copenhagen COP, a small group of individuals decided to convene an informal, somewhat secret meeting of negotiators that cut across traditionally opposed coalitions. The members bridged the traditional divide between “developed” and “developing” countries that has characterized climate diplomacy for decades. The initial goal of the members was to have a conversation to understand each other in a way that had not been possible in the usual highly formalized and often hostile settings. To their surprise they found that in this setting, people who seemingly held opposing views were able to make progress on the important issues on which they had been gridlocked for years. The group had a set of rules for their engagement: be open to learning, speak frankly, appreciate the politics but don’t replicate the politics, and attend as individuals. They agreed never to make any joint statements since their purpose wasn’t agreement but exploration. Individuals would take ideas from those convenings back to their home countries where they would advance them.

The ideas they devised started showing up as the official country positions in subsequent negotiations. COP Presidencies—i.e., the countries that are tasked every year with facilitating an overall agreement between almost 200 countries—and the facilitators who work on the various negotiation tracks to iron out differences on specific issues such as forests or finance were eager to engage with the group. They could use those prenegotiated ideas and inject them for discussion to resolve long-lasting disagreements. Over time, the secret group became more influential, and would actively (but informally) coordinate the order of their interventions. In formal plenary settings, they would deliberately make motions one after the other to make the same point on behalf of countries that were thought to hold widely diverging views signaling to whoever presided over the meeting that there may be scope for agreement. The informal alliance that subverted traditional coalitions would also sometimes block positions in those traditional alliances in a coordinated way, for instance, when they believed that too firm a position could make agreement elusive and stall progress. Many of the countries that usually dominate the news headlines during COPs and are often seen as the main powers shaping COP outcomes—the US, China, India, Saudia Arabia—were not part of this group. Yet many articles in the Paris Agreement reflect the group’s ideas.

For anyone studying negotiations, this is a clear illustration of a negotiation process that we know can be helpful. The group designed a process, including the communication norms and relationships that allow people to disclose their interests more freely and brainstorm various mutually satisfactory options. The agreement to refrain from making commitments allowed negotiators to engage more openly and freed them from the tactical burdens of “claiming whilst creating.” Once mutually satisfactory options are developed, they must enter the formal process and the coalitional strategizing we advocate for in our teaching becomes necessary. Allies are identified, winning coalitions are built to drive toward an outcome and simultaneously blocking coalitions are constructed to prevent outcomes.

Importantly, what for negotiation scholars and students is an illustration of “effective negotiating” principles was not coded by the negotiators themselves as “negotiating” at all. It was coded as an interesting “story,” not as something they had translated into their own “theory of practice.”⁴

Due to our revised approach to interviews, many negotiators shared such instructive stories—for instance, how to navigate the tight constraints of one’s mandate and creatively venture outside of those restrictions, or how to look through traditional voting blocks and instead understand the various nuanced interests of actors in that block to craft new alliances across traditional divides. These stories had several features in common. They all illustrated the skillful navigation of the internal logic of the process, identified when traditional paths of influence posed barriers to resolution, and showed how to creatively “dance at the edge of one’s authority”⁵ to venture outside of the UNFCCC architecture for influence.

These conversations with negotiators felt generative. We offered the sense-making language to those conversations, and the ability to classify stories into a larger cluster of common negotiation problems. When in the stories, negotiators deviated from what we thought to be useful; interview participants would usefully illustrate certain norms of UNFCCC diplomacy that would render such action impossible or counterproductive.

We took the collection of stories and clustered them into a set of barriers—as barriers that arise because of the way the formal process structures negotiations, barriers that arise because of historic coalitions aggregating a rich set of varying interests into one singular position, barriers that arise due to strict mandates, and so forth—that must often be creatively navigated for acting effectively.

This logic is more of a reframe than fundamental novelty. But the framing around barriers helped us navigate the tension we described earlier—the tension between effective operators who are extremely skilled in acting within their narrow scope of authority within a problematic process and effective outsiders who master best practices of negotiation and understand why the climate process incentivizes bad negotiation dynamics. Our version of a practical idealist in the climate context who bridges this tension was a negotiator with the capacity to identify barriers to good negotiating in their specific context, with the ability to act effectively within these barriers, but who feels empowered to take action to lift those barriers.

In a post-training interview, one of the participants nicely summarized this aspiration:

This participant went on to reflect on the way in which UNFCCC procedures themselves incentivize and empower such tactical maneuvering. And she presented a plan for how a new cross-group coalition between the young negotiators that attended the training could be used to insulate the process more effectively against such maneuvering. That combination—being effective in the negotiation room together with inspiration to become proactive beyond the room—for a very junior negotiator is a promising sign for us that we are training “practical idealists.”

Before moving on to the second part of the talk—on “Teaching for Practice”—we want to offer some takeaways in PON-worthy checklist form:

• Resist the temptation to superimpose teaching points (and find comfort in ambiguity). We are guilty of having favorite concepts that we teach, seeing them as relevant to the experience of anyone we train, and of engaging practitioners by looking for stories to illustrate them. The superimposition of our teaching points didn’t help. It turned out that many of our classic teaching points would show up in the stories people told but in ways that were highly specific to the particular context. A stance of naivete and deep curiosity proved more helpful than providing answers on “how to effectively negotiate” and fishing for stories to illustrate those. Taking a stance of naivete and curiosity required comfort in ambiguity in relationships. The senior negotiators we worked with needed to trust that we would ultimately devise a useful training despite us approaching hours of interviews with curiosity rather than showcasing any knowledge that could give them confidence in our capability.

• Learn to speak their language. Idiosyncratic words hold intensive meaning. The fact that we were providing negotiation trainings led many to believe that we would talk about formal processes. Climate negotiators deliberately delineate “negotiations” from “conversations” to invoke different process perceptions. Many such words proved to be very important.

• When trying to understand, ask people for stories of unexpected outcomes, not for lessons learned or skills. Senior practitioners are masters of their context. Based on our experience, their focus tends to be on mastering the internal logic of whatever process dictates their actions and how that leads to outcomes. Asking about lessons learnt yields stories that don’t say much about successfully navigating the context. It is more helpful to ask for stories when unexpected results were achieved.

• Try to conceptualize the barriers that are discussed and find stories of people lifting those barriers when developing cases and simulations. The most telling cases and simulations involved people creatively navigating their context-specific barriers and constraints by finding ways to lift them.

Throughout this talk, we have suggested how we infused the lessons learned from the field with the best of negotiation theory to create a training that would target this audience of young negotiators from developing nations. We will spend the rest of our time outlining the specific pedagogy we developed for this work and the two fundamental problems we encountered. First, if we wanted to teach for practice after learning from practice, we needed to narrow our audience—to identify a smaller group within the umbrella of “climate negotiators.” Second, we needed to contend with the reality that everything we could possibly teach is useful to someone negotiating within the UNFCCC process.

There were some basic normative and functional considerations when determining who, exactly, should be in the room with us. We asked ourselves two questions: Who doesn’t have access to the type of teaching that we generally provide? Who will make the biggest impact over their lifetime? We decided to target people in their late twenties to early thirties who have been part of their delegations and have attended between one and five COPs. These people understood the system already—so we didn’t have to teach starting from scratch—and, importantly, feel the importance of skill-building because they understand how complex this process is.

This demographic (young climate negotiators who are in their country’s delegations) are strongly purpose-driven and highly motivated, have strong leadership potential and a solid understanding of the technical work, and are expected to stay in the field for their lifetime. Within this group, we decided to focus on vulnerable countries such as small islands, developing nations, and least developed countries.

But once we targeted this population, our problem morphed from “who do we train” to “how do we train a group that is global, busy, underpaid and overworked, and often doesn’t have strong WiFi?” Addressing this problem meant creating maximum flexibility without sacrificing quality. How do we make formats that are engaging? How do we manage language fluency? How do we increase these negotiators’ ability to build community?

There’s a fundamental question of what to teach when everything appears immediately useful: from the basics of value creation and value claiming, to dealing with emotions, stakeholder mapping, two-level games, principal-agent dynamics, coalitions and multiparty negotiations, difficult tactics and behaviors, cross-cultural dimensions, etc.

Or, to merge negotiation theory and COP: Imagine preparing someone for a negotiation where nearly 200 countries come together once a year to negotiate a consensus-based agreement without implementation or enforcement mechanisms that is, until now, our best collective chance at making significant action on climate change. The negotiation is situated at the nexus of scientific and technical issues and geopolitics while focusing on the most consequential topic facing humanity. It’s a process that is ruthlessly positional, leading to no-ZOPA loggerheads over substantive issues with varying levels of uncertainty and all issues being inextricably tied to values, interests, and deep conceptions of historical justice. Some very important issues appear to be unequivocally zero-sum. In one day, an individual may be in informal one-on-one negotiations, formal plenary negotiations with hundreds of country representatives, informal coalitions with friends and colleagues, and formal and overlapping coalitions like the G77+China or the African Group of Negotiators—all while managing both technical details and geopolitical realities (likely without having eaten or slept in a while).

Our mandate to conduct online trainings over several months for hundreds of negotiators—many with personal conflicts, internet problems, and language barriers—to prepare them for this experience required us to get very creative, very quickly. We had no incentive mechanisms of a grade or a certificate to provide at the end of the training; instead, the incentive was to try to get to Dubai equipped with as much knowledge as possible. We needed the negotiators to stay engaged, active, enthusiastic, and curious. In sessions across more than twelve time zones, we invested in keeping energy high, in developing real relationships with them, and in making them feel that we were deeply invested in their success. A key goal of ours was to double down on engagement, creating a curriculum that was highly interactive, included many games and short simulations, required preparation but enough elements to make sure that the unprepared can follow (without “teaching to the unprepared”!); and to empower the negotiators, over time, to take on more and more of the analytical, diagnostic, and strategic work.

We radically improved our asynchronous materials and spent hours in Harvard’s Widener Library recording short videos that could be assigned in place of lectures. As a principle, we put nothing in a synchronous class that could be taught asynchronously. And we assigned nothing asynchronously that wasn’t essential to the work we were doing in the live sessions.

Key to facilitating maximum learning and engagement was ensuring that we used cases to which the negotiators could relate. In choosing cases, we considered where the negotiators were in their careers and the contexts in which they lived and worked. We developed cases and materials that specifically targeted their entry points into the climate system. In total, we created over ten new cases and simulations, each designed to illustrate a different barrier. Together, they were part of an integrated and strategic teaching arc and curriculum.

We developed with our climate colleagues a framing that “good negotiating” within this system means being able to determine the “barriers” within it and strategies to overcome them. We knew we needed to appreciate the regime’s complexity—a regime that is not designed to create good outcomes. This is how we crafted our curriculum: Here are the basics, here is why it’s impossible in the system in which you operate, here are the different dimensions of complexity, here is how you can think through complexity, and here are examples of how other people in your situation have done so successfully. We packaged this as a training with three overlapping pillars:

• Pillar One: Know the fundamentals of good negotiating.

• Pillar Two: Appreciate the regime’s complexity and the barriers within it.

• Pillar Three: Understand how to navigate such complexity and barriers.

• Let learning inform your process. We were always iterating during this work. We adapted cases, changed the sequence, created new games, split rooms to decrease faculty-to-participant ratio, adjusted homework expectations (in both directions as time went on), pulled in our climate experts, and solicited feedback from participants and advisors throughout. It took more energy, more commitment, and more humility than other trainings we’ve put together, but we believe this made it more rewarding and more impactful.

• Play on FOMO (the “fear of missing out”). We had few carrots and no sticks, and we deeply believed the training would benefit them. So how do we make people show up? Of course, we primarily focused on making our training pedagogically strong and creating targeted learning materials. But we leaned into making our trainings fun, even more than we usually do. We wanted people to feel like they were missing out if they couldn’t come to a session, and we were mostly successful at doing so. People felt the “vibe” within our group; they felt that something special was happening and if you missed a session you would miss out on the opportunity to grow your community, grow your own capacity, and get a little bit of the “magic” we tried to cultivate each week.

• Treat life like a simulation. At some point during this work, we began to ask: “How do we get people to treat life like a simulation?” We noticed a pattern. When we ran debriefs, discussed cases, and otherwise prepared participants for negotiations, the negotiators were very engaged and eager to zoom out, analyze, and think creatively about interventions. But as soon as they faced their own challenges much of that analytical muscle disappeared. We began encouraging them to think about life as a simulation and bring the same curiosity and intentionality to the challenges they are facing as they would if they were “Protagonist X” from “Case Y.” This framing, combined with creating space to bring the case experience to their real world, made a difference. A similar challenge led us to add peer coaching.

• Adopt peer coaching. When we first started to set aside time for the negotiators to workshop their upcoming negotiation challenges, many participants were confused, sharing sentiments like “I don’t know what I’ll be negotiating yet so I’m not sure what to talk about.” We realized that they had difficulty understanding how the theories and tools we taught them and the cases we talked about—which were designed for them and specific to COP—were useful in a wide range of areas in their life. Until we added coaching sessions, the negotiators did not make those connections, despite the fact that we had tried to make those connections for them as part of our teaching. Once we started building in time to coach one another and workshop their own challenges with each other, their understanding of the theory and their grasp of cross-application increased significantly.

We set out to ask how to learn from practice to teach for practice. A few takeaways stood out.

• 1)

  When learning from practice, it proved helpful to forget what we assumed to be relevant and not to solicit “lessons learned” but instead to ask about stories. Jointly interpreting stories of success and failure with climate colleagues, demonstrating a deep curiosity for the constraints of the context, and offering ways to make sense of the experience enabled joint learning.

• 2)

  When teaching early career practitioners who must effectively operate in systems that disincentivize good negotiating, it proved helpful to do that explicitly: to aim at training effective operators of the system who are acutely aware of its limits, can conceptualize those limits, and are thus empowered to challenge the formal processes when they need to do so.

• 3)

  When training busy practitioners using few short-term incentives and challenged by strong access barriers, it proved helpful to double down on what makes teaching negotiation special—make the content exceptionally entertaining, meaningful, and relevant to their experience. For online teaching specifically, this included maximizing the excitement that can be created in synchronous teaching and moving as much as possible to asynchronous learning.

Our experience in teaching rising negotiators culminated at COP in Dubai where we joined them to see whether they could put what we taught them into practice. We did not originally plan to attend but it felt important. And it turned out to be important.

Few negotiations are better suited to overwhelm someone and make them forget everything they learned. More than 80,000 people, only some of whom actually negotiate, are split up in different zones. The treaty negotiations take place simultaneously in many rooms; some of the locations and times are announced on TV screens throughout the venue and others—the very formal, ironically named “Informal-Informals”—are not, so one needs to know where to go. In addition to treaty negotiations, dozens of intergovernmental negotiations take place; ministers negotiate and announce dozens of declarations that formally have nothing to do with the climate treaty, often supported by hundreds of organizations announcing pledges to support the ministerial declarations, usually followed by efforts to get treaty negotiators to add a sentence or two into the treaty text after all. Emotions run high, sleep becomes rare, and many forget to eat when running from room to room.

Like our trainees, we had to find our footing and figure out how to best support them. We became coaches from the sideline, trying to help people remember to see life as a simulation. We advised overwhelmed and stressed negotiators to take five minutes to zoom out and think strategically, and they told us that they didn’t have five minutes. We would remind them that they came to us and that they did have five minutes, and usually followed up with a set of questions to help them regain some type of strategic view. We had not anticipated playing this role, but the real-time negotiation support—being in the chaos with them and demonstrating that what they learned can help in such moments—proved essential.

Our next challenge is to create systems for such real-time support between them while gradually decreasing our own engagement as they master the skill of treating their lives more like negotiation simulations.