Rethinking the orange tale
Published in Clarín Newspaper, Argentina, July 2016.
Translation: Luciana Telo
Fisher and Ury’s orange tale constitutes the foundational myth of the winner-winner negotiation. The story narrates the scene of two sisters fighting for an orange. Each of them employs different arguments in order to legitimate its stance.
Their mother arrives tired from work and, overwhelmed by the situation, takes the fruit, cuts it in the middle and gives one half to each daughter. One of them eats the sections and throws the skin away, while the other one throws the sections away and uses the skin to bake a cake.
Moral: the mother solved the argument in a Solomonic way, assuming that both of them wanted the orange for the same purpose, while instead it could have given both of them the double. She focused her attention in the equity of the decisive process more than in the efficient satisfaction of the peculiar needs of each daughter.
One of the keys to generate value while negotiating is detecting interests, this means, understanding for which purpose the other wants the thing it’s demanding. It is a subtle and simple distinction, but powerful for transcending the distributive struggle.
As the tale shows, many times the interests (baking a cake or eating the sections) are more fruitful and less competitive than the initial demands. Of course, the difficult thing is when there’s no trust in relationships and both parts tend to hide their interests because they are afraid of the other part taking advantage of the situation.
In other words, in order to create value it is necessary to share information, and this assumes tension, baptized by David Lax and James Sebenius as the “negotiator’s dilemma”.
Well then, going from positions to interests is not the only way of breaking the competitive mindset or “sum 0” while negotiating. Let’s imagine a slightly different version of the tale in which the girls manage to communicate their interests, but both want the orange for eating the sections (competitive interests). What can we try?
A useful technique is to complex the amount of themes or variables for negotiating in regards to the long term relationship, in order to find non common or complementary interests.
For mathematic reasons, few more things included on the table, the more possibilities we will have of finding non distributive dimensions between the parts. For example, one of the girls could enquire into her sister’s plans for the rest of the afternoon.
Let’s imagine that the other one answers “I have mathematics private lessons downtown at six o’clock”. This information (which at first has nothing to do with the original negotiation) could be useful for detaching the dispute about the orange if it offers (for example) going with her during the ride, or lending her her bike in exchange for the 100% of the orange.
The third way of creating value while negotiating consists no more on decompressing positions into interests or increasing the themes spectrum, but on building alliances and adding other actors to the negotiation table in order to increase the non competitive interdependences.
We use to neglect this political dimension because we are too focused on the negotiation as a kind of riddle or a problem we must solve, and we cannot see that the parts which sit down and negotiate are a variable on which we can operate. What would happen if one of the girls adds an older cousin to the table in order to help her sister studying for the private lessons?
Summing everything up, the expert negotiators have a sophisticated box of changes, with different gears that combine and complement one and other, in order to maximize the creation of value. Sometimes the key lies in shredding the other one’s demand to understand what it wants to achieve. This requires a convergent focus where we work with the explicit variables of negotiation.
In other situations, it is necessary to put aside the initial issues (the orange) in order to strengthen the discussion and increase the themes flow to be negotiated. Finally, there are opportunities in which the secret lies on modifying the table of involved actors in order to improve our offer through strategic alliances.
Three concrete and practical mechanisms to approach Pareto’s famous definition of success: that situation where I could not win more than I have won without damaging the relationship with the other.
¿Te interesó el artículo? Te invitamos a compartirlo.
