The following items are tagged intuition.
The United States and Russia have announced plans to hold a peace conference aimed at ending the civil war in Syria, which has killed more than 70,000 people.
In an op-ed in the New York Times this May, Christopher R. Hill, the dean of the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and a former U.S. ambassador, argues that the Obama administration’s decision to engage Russia on the Syrian conflict is both long overdue and insufficient.
In past articles, we have highlighted a variety of psychological biases that affect negotiators, many of which spring from a reliance on intuition.
Of course, negotiators are not always affected by bias; we often think systematically and clearly at the bargaining table.
Why is learning difficult? Possibly because it will expose past mistakes and engender negative feelings yet this process is essential to improving your negotiating ability and in avoiding this problem again in the future.
How would you characterize your negotiating style: Are you collaborative, competitive, or compromising? If you have trouble answering that question, you’re probably not alone. That’s because skilled negotiators typically take on all these styles during a negotiation: they listen closely and collaborate to create value, they compete for the biggest slice of the pie, and they make compromises when necessary.
Placing Trust in Others
When it comes to trusting others, negotiators often rely on their gut instincts.
Recent studies indicate, however, that extraneous factors can sway such judgments.
For example, Michael Kosfeld and other University of Zurich researchers introduced a twist in a classic trust game in which subjects must decide on how much money to invest when there’s no guarantee that the party playing the “trustee” will return the investment or share the gains.
In 1901, J.P. Morgan wanted to buy the Carnegie Steel Company from its founder, Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie was 65 years old and considering retirement. As Harold C. Livesay recounts in his book Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Little, Brown, 1975), when Carnegie finally decided he was ready to sell, he jotted down his estimate of his company’s worth in pencil: $480 million. Carnegie had the sheet of paper delivered to Morgan, who took one look and said, “I accept this price.”
Imagine that after ample preparation and weeks of negotiations with three potential vendors, you have to choose among their proposals, each of which has numerous strengths and weaknesses. What’s more, you have only five minutes left to make this tough decision.
How should you spend this precious time? Ap Dijksterhuis and other researchers at the University of Amsterdam offer this somewhat surprising advice: fight for the temptation to read through the proposals one last time, and don’t run any more numbers. Their studies suggest that you actually may make a better decision by putting the proposals aside, doing an anagram puzzle, and following your intuition.
In her book, The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, Leigh Thompson cites four widely held myths that bar negotiators from improving their skills. This analysis is worth the attention of anyone who wants to move beyond platitudes to a deeper understanding of negotiation.
Myth 1: Great negotiators are born.
While we’re all born with varying abilities for almost any skill that can be imagined, our social environment and education have a tremendous impact on what we achieve. Negotiations professors recognize that executives enter the classroom with different capabilities. They also understand that all students can gain confidence and competence. The belief that one is either born a great negotiator, or not, can stand in the way of learning.
For your next negotiation, what would you pay for a gadget that shows you how well you’re engaging the other side?
It would tell you when you’ve been persuasive enough to close a deal.
It would also alert you when the other side has tuned you out, so you’d know how to take a different tack.
A team of researchers at MIT’s Media Laboratory are developing just such a device: specifically, software for cell phones and PDAs that analyzes speech patterns and tone of voice to determine how people are relating in conversation.
Many things factor into whether you choose “fight or flight” when faced with a difficult situation in life. Whether it is a disagreeable coworker or a border struggle between nations, the decisions made at the onset of conflict often determine the tenor of the entire proceeding.
Along with information and a good-faith desire for collaboration, knowing
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