Imagine a setting where world business leaders, in the form of CEOs of global corporations, meet with leaders of governments from around the world. As leaders of millions of citizens from around the world, these are the individuals who bear the responsibility of navigating us all safely into the future.
The participants are divided into six groups and have three rounds of negotiations to determine which of the groups everybody should join to prevent the world from exploding! The groups have ample time to deliberate and to arrive at a consensus decision regarding which group the participants should join in order to save the globe.
Were they successful? Sadly, no – I’m sorry to report that the world exploded.
These events did in fact take place. Of course, only a hypothetical world exploded, but the world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, did indeed fail to negotiate rationally enough to avoid a global apocalypse.
This is just one of many cases that Daniel Shapiro – a Harvard professor, best-selling author, and renowned expert on conflict resolution – describes in his latest book, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable.
We all negotiate almost constantly. We negotiate with our spouses, our children, our management, our employees, our clients, our suppliers, our colleagues. I have determined that up to 80% of what we generally consider dialogue with other people is actually negotiation. Considering that fact, it’s surprising how little schooling our children receive on dealing with interpersonal conflicts. And it’s surprising how little time adults devote to developing their human-engineering abilities. We are so focused on technical skills that we often forget how important the cultivation of social intelligence is for our own and others’ success.
If you find yourself in situations of conflict – whether privately, in business, or otherwise – that are hard to navigate, Dr. Shapiro’s book will come in handy. Dr. Shapiro exposes the myth that humans are primarily rational in their decision making. There’s a fundamental conflict between Homo economicus and Homo emoticus – the emotional human being. We have been led for decades to believe that we actually make decisions on a rational basis. The behavioral economics movement, however, has shown clearly that this is not in fact the case. On the contrary, our decision-making process is very much irrational – scientific fact most traditional economists don’t like.
We tend to make decisions based on emotions – and then come up with rational justifications after the fact. This conclusion leads to an important question: Is it possible to put a price on emotions?
My answer is yes. Absolutely. We can easily put a value on an emotion or on trust (which is a feeling as well). I have conducted hundreds of experiments that clearly document this effect. One of the more famous of these, the one I call the glass-buying exercise, is described in one of my previous Forbes blogs.
As an author and expert in negotiations, I learned plenty from reading Negotiating the Nonnegotiable and understand why so many negotiations fail, even when both parties should be able to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement. As the Davos experiment shows, our desire to satisfy our own pride, ambition, and emotional needs can stand in the way of resolving conflicts in a rational way.
Don’t change people’s minds, change the subject is just one of the many powerful phrases Dr. Shapiro uses to encapsulate his approach to conflict resolution. In addition, he discusses negotiating what’s Sacred in negotiations.
For instance, he relates the famous biblical story of the disagreement between King Solomon and the two women regarding who was the mother of the child. If you can’t remember or don’t know the story, look it up – it’s a great anecdote.
As a psychology professor, Dr. Shapiro is uniquely able to address a number of interesting aspects of negotiation the rest of us often forget, such as identity, repletion compulsion, taboos, how to build connections, and emotional pain.
More importantly, he discusses the conflicts between good and bad that take place in all of us, quoting an old Native American legend in which a Cherokee tells his grandson about his internal battle between the “wolves” of good and evil. When his grandson asks him which wolf wins, the old Cherokee answers, “The one I feed!”
The world has been enriched with another intelligent lecture on how we should interact with each other. Hopefully this time we will listen.
