The business landscape is constantly changing. Moreover, because of globalization, increased competition, and instant communication, the rate of change is accelerating. A student who has practiced only static scenarios is ill prepared to recognize, process, or adapt to changing negotiation issues and interests. Thus, negotiation instructors must change our practices to prepare students to succeed in the increasingly dynamic negotiation situations they will face by utilizing simulations that are also dynamic. This article reviews research on adaptive thinking, applies it to negotiation training, and provides examples of dynamic simulations that require students to adapt. Finally, it offers advice on how to make existing cases dynamic by using “shocks and rumors.”

Research evidence across a number of disciplines and fields has shown that women can encounter both social and financial backlash when they behave assertively, for example, by asking for resources at the bargaining table. But this backlash appears to be most evident when a gender stereotype that prescribes communal, nurturing behavior by women is activated. In situations in which this female stereotype is suppressed, backlash against assertive female behavior is attenuated. We review several contexts in which stereotypic expectations of females are more dormant or where assertive behavior by females can be seen as normative. We conclude with prescriptions from this research that suggest how women might attenuate backlash at the bargaining table and with ideas about how to teach these issues of gender and backlash to student populations in order to make students, both male and female, more aware of their own inclination to backlash and how to rectify such inequities from both sides of the bargaining table.