Harvard Negotiation Master Class

Advanced Strategies for Experienced Negotiators
Monday to Wednesday, November 13-15, 2023

Take Your Negotiation Skills to the Master Level

What if you could negotiate at an even higher level? The Harvard Negotiation Master Class is designed for people like you: strong negotiators who want to become even better ones.

Strictly limited to 60 participants who have completed a prior course in negotiation, this program offers unprecedented access to experts from Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Kennedy School—all of whom are committed to delivering a transformational learning experience.

Through dynamic exercises with two-way feedback and intensive simulations, you will gain proven frameworks for addressing your most complicated negotiation challenges—and emerge a highly skilled and confident dealmaker.

The Harvard Negotiation Master Class has run biannually to sold-out classes, and along the way has taught nearly 1,000 global negotiators to become “Master Negotiators.”

Top Nine Reasons to Attend the Harvard Negotiation Master Class

1. Learn to set the tone and build momentum at the outset of a negotiation.
2. Identify shared, opposing, and tradeable interests.
3. Recognize the indicators that your negotiation counterpart is ready to close—with a particular focus on thresholds of satisfaction with the process, the substance, and the relationship.
4. Gain a robust framework for improving the quality of feedback conversations.
5. Assess the deal versus the attractiveness of no-agreement alternatives.
6. Learn to identify blind spots—the places where you are missing opportunities and frustrating others.
7. Establish the groundwork for identifying the other side’s victory speech by addressing their underlying interests and concerns.
8. Learn how to ask probing, clarifying, and investigative questions in a nondefensive manner.
9. Understand how to manage difficult deals and ugly conflicts.

Join the Ranks of Master Negotiators

Mastering the art of negotiation is a lifelong journey. The Harvard Negotiation Master Class offers the rare opportunity to step away from your day-to-day responsibilities to self-reflect and focus on developing a competency that will serve you for the rest of your professional life. After three intensive days, you will emerge a highly confident negotiator who truly understands the game—and loves to play it.

Agenda

DAY 1 – Monday, November 13

SESSION 1

THE FIRST 180 SECONDS: CREATING IMPACTFUL OPENINGS

8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET
Led by Brian Mandell

Learn to set the tone and build momentum at the outset of a negotiation.
As a seasoned negotiator, you know how important it is to come prepared for the full arc of a negotiation. Research shows, however, that you should spend just as much time preparing for the first 180 seconds of a negotiation encounter as you do for the rest. That’s because the outcomes of the very first interactions—where negotiators act upon thin slices of information—disproportionately affect overall success. Moreover, when things go awry in these critical first few moments, it can be difficult to recover lost ground.

In this session, you’ll learn how to effectively set the tone and agenda, create rapport, and build momentum at the outset of a negotiation. You will additionally enhance your ability to:

• Prepare for negotiation by evaluating sources of power and assessing barriers to negotiated agreement
• Identify shared, opposing, and tradeable interests
• Set a firm, collaborative tone, shape expectations, and propose a well-sequenced agenda that aligns with your priorities
• Generate momentum and a trust-building conversation by sharing information
• Invoke fairness standards to avoid early missteps likely to trigger an impasse or motivate potential spoilers
• Ask probing, clarifying, and investigative questions in a nondefensive manner
• Make opening offers grounded in high aspirations that signal a robust BATNA
• Leverage your professional reputation to encourage concessions
• Maintain emotional control and defend against hard bargaining tactics by reframing unacceptable early moves or offers designed to destabilize negotiators
• Establish the groundwork for writing the other side’s victory speech by focusing on addressing their underlying interests and concerns
• Signal your attentiveness to geographic and organizational cross-cultural differences

SESSION 2

Managing “Trigger Point” Moments

1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET
Led by Rob Wilkinson

Identify—and capitalize on—game-changing inflection points.
Maybe this scene is familiar to you: You are engaged in some sort of interaction—a quick chat with a colleague in the hallway, a spirited political debate with an aunt at the dinner table, a friendly exchange with the stranger behind you in line at the bank. You and your counterpart are pleasant and cordial.

And then things change.
Your counterpart says something and the words you hear are an affront—to your values, your beliefs, and even your identity—and in that moment, you are frozen. You wrestle with the impulse to defend against personal attack, or the need to correct this person’s misguided views on such an important topic.

What should you do?
Call them out and risk escalating the situation, or walk away and risk validating their righteousness? Hear them out and risk amplifying their nonsense, or educate them and risk compelling them to dig in further?

You need to manage those tensions, control your emotions, and make decisions: on what you’re trying to accomplish, on whether to engage, on how to engage, on how to preserve the relationship, on how to end this conversation.

And it all has to happen in about two seconds.

This session will examine these moments—when we impulsively react or are clueless how to—through the lens of choice, and how we can manage our individual abilities to identify, analyze, and select one in a split second, thus charting the course for the rest of the interaction.

Participants will walk away with a set of concrete ideas, tools, and skills for how to avoid reacting instinctively, and instead diagnose what is going on in a heat-of-the-moment situation, and respond thoughtfully and strategically.

DAY 2 – Tuesday, November 14

SESSION 3

Advanced Difficult Conversations—
Building (and Re-Building) Trust

8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET
Led by Sheila Heen

Overcome the relational friction and frustration that can make joint-problem-solving impossible.
You can’t avoid difficult conversations. But you can learn to make them less painful—and more productive. In this session, we will take a look at three suites of skills that advanced negotiators can use to diagnose challenges and adjust their approach when things get tough. We will also draw on the Difficult Conversations framework for engaging tough issues in difficult circumstances, and under time pressure.

The centerpiece of this session will be preparing for and conducting a 10-minute negotiation, in which frustration, mistrust, time pressure, grave consequences, and the need for complex problem-solving come together to create a perfect storm.

Alongside your peers, you will have the opportunity to:

• Face a counterpart who is impatient, distracted, in a position of authority, and with whom you have some relationship history
• Work with a teammate in order to learn from another’s negotiation approach and think about how to best prepare together as a team
• Integrate sometimes conflicting information from multiple sources
• Clarify your own purposes and priorities
• Plan how to open and to frame the problem
• Respond to unexpected surprises or resistance
• Draw on your diagnostic skills to make good choices in the moment as that negotiation unfolds
• Practice advanced skills that will enable you to repair trust, build a stronger working relationship, and solve problems together

SESSION 4

TALK: Understanding the Role of Conversation in a Negotiation

1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET
Led by Alison Wood Brooks

Take your negotiation skills to the next level by mastering conversation.
Good negotiators know they have to analyze their BATNA, reservation price, aspiration price, and ZOPA, as well as their interests and the interests the other party. However, there is one other, often underestimated and misunderstood aspect of a negotiation: how to deliver all of the above via conversation.

What Good Negotiators May Not Know
We talk to people in every aspect of life, but a negotiation conversation can’t be left up to chance. Negotiations involve complex conversations filled with hundreds of micro decisions. Like the terms of the negotiation itself, conversations require preparation, careful thinking, and thorough execution.

How Good Conversation Skills Can Improve Your Negotiation
In this session, you will learn how to sharpen the conversation skills you use before, during, and after the negotiation. Professor Brooks will guide you through her program using the skills from the TALK framework, derived from cutting-edge behavioral science. You’ll learn to effectively prepare for and execute a conversational strategy that will help you achieve the best possible outcomes.

Using the TALK framework you’ll explore:

• Topics: Select, shift, and end discussions effectively
• Ask: Ask (and answer) questions well
• Levity: Create and appreciate moments of humor and warmth—on balance with gravity
• Kindness: Speak respectfully, listen responsively, and be receptive to opposing views to avoid hostility

In this high-impact session, you will engage in discussions and experiential exercises aimed at helping you more effectively manage conversations during every phase and stage of the negotiation process.

DAY 3 – Wednesday, November 15

SESSION 5

Multiparty Negotiations—Managing the Challenges and Opportunities of Group Decision Making

8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. ET
Facilitated by Master Class Coach Team, led by Alonzo Emery

Put your negotiation skills to the test.
Most decisions are made with input from a variety of stakeholders. As the number of parties at the decision-making table grows, negotiation challenges and the opportunities they present multiply as well. Additional parties create more opinions about the “right” process to follow and more views about which issues should remain central. Attempting to satisfy all of these various interests and perspectives can reduce the zone of possible agreement. This session explores how advanced negotiators manage the myriad challenges of multiparty negotiations, while also leveraging opportunities to improve relationships and create greater value.

Through a fast-paced multiparty negotiation simulation, you will put the many skills you have honed throughout the workshop to the test. Led by Master Class coaches, the simulation debrief will help you to draw unique insights from your own experience—lessons that you can rely on during the many group processes you will lead in the future. Specifically, you will learn to:

• Diagnose the peaked challenges inherent in multiparty negotiations
• Identify key stakeholders and decide which to include at the table
• Focus on value creation in the face of multiple, conflicting interests
• Maintain relationships while managing diverse personalities and perspectives
• Design a robust process that will keep your group moving forward and on task
• Consider and choose the right forum for your group discussions
• Establish group norms to help guide you through your deliberations
• Set realistic deadlines that will keep your group centered on its purpose
• Divide responsibilities appropriately so that each group member fills a meaningful and useful role

Participants will be supported by a group of coaches. Past coaches have included Clinical Instructors with the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program; Harvard Law School Negotiation Workshop; Harvard Kennedy School Negotiation Project; MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program; and practitioners and consultants.

SESSION 6

THE LAST 180 SECONDS: CLOSING THE DEAL WITH CONFIDENCE

1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET
Led by Brian Mandell

Openings and closings are the critical bookend of any negotiation: the close.
You’ve made it to the end of a negotiation—are you ready for what comes next? The goal of this session is to prepare you to effectively manage those final minutes in a negotiation when an important, high-consequence deal hangs in the balance and any missteps could quickly undermine parties’ trust and confidence, resulting in the deal unraveling. Navigating this “last mile challenge” compels negotiators to multi-task—to maintain discipline, focus, and resilience, while simultaneously addressing the substantive and relationship dimensions of the negotiation needed for crafting a sustainable value-creating deal.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Assess willingness and readiness to close the deal
• Overcome psychological and bureaucratic decision-making barriers to commitment making and closing the deal
• Confront hard bargaining “take it or leave it” and yes-but tactics
• Write your counterpart’s victory speech to reduce hesitancy and resistance to closing the deal now
• Use the negotiator’s pause to better control the rate and scope of making any final concessions
• Deal with impasse stemming from the last-minute introduction of new pre-conditions prior to signing the deal
• Distinguish between hard and soft closings and when to use them to maximize your leverage
• Manage intra-team conflict with your own back-table to better communicate strong and consistent signals across the table
• Limit gratuitous bargaining and conflict escalation
• Leverage deadlines and time urgency
• Build commitment to deal implementation
• Frame and re-frame offers to scope and refine the deal components
• Use dispute resolution mechanisms to safeguard against a counterpart’s non-compliance with commitments to deal implementation