Craig T. Owens

Last week I spent two jam-packed days at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. As always, I was on information overload with the great content that is presented every year. So I’ve been taking some time to ponder what I learned.

There are a couple of past post on my blog that consistently rank near the top of the list of “most read”:

• Disagreeing Agreeably
• What Is Valid Criticism?

With that in mind, William Ury’s discussion on how to successfully negotiate conflict really caught my attention.

Ury pointed out that conflict isn’t bad; it’s natural. Therefore, we don’t need to eliminate conflict, but find ways to deal with it in constructive ways.

I’ve tried to learn to look at myself in the mirror before entering into discussions where the potential for conflict is high. This thought was reinforced when Ury said: The greatest obstacle to successful negotiation is: Me. Why? Because I tend to react. “When you’re angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret,” he said.

The greatest power we have in negotiation is the power NOT to react. 

Here are some strategies William Ury shared for successful negotiations:

• Separate people from the problem. Be soft with people and hard with the problem. Soft means listening, empathy, and respect. Change the game: instead of squaring-off against each other face-to-face, be side-by-side facing the problem.

• Focus on interests not positions. Probe behind the position to find out what the underlying interest is. He gave a great example about two girls who each wanted the one remaining orange. Our natural instinct is to divide the orange so each girl gets one half. But in watching what happens next, we see one girl throw away the peel and eat the fruit; the other throws away the fruit and uses the peel to complete her cake recipe. If we had figured out the interests of each girl, both girls could have had a whole orange! 

• Develop multiple options. Search for creative options that meet the needs of everyone. Ury shared an example of a successful solution to a problem in the Middle East. Egypt wanted the Sinai peninsula because it was their historic possession; Israel wanted the same piece of land as a security buffer. The solution: let Egypt have sovereign control of the Sinai peninsula, but make it a demilitarized zone. Both sides got what they wanted.

• Expand the pie before we divide it up. Uses standards that are objectively fair to each side.

The final piece of advice William Ury shared was the concept of BATNA = best alternative to a negotiated agreement. I need to think this through before any negotiations start. This is what I have determined ahead of time that I will walk away with if the negotiation doesn’t go as planned. Ury pointed out that we can negotiate with more confidence if we have a BATNA.

I thought this was pretty good advice. What do you think?