Molly Klapper’s book Definitive Creative Impasse-Breaking Techniques in Mediation features an insightful and practical contribution by Dwight Golann about “insulting” opening offers or demands. He suggests why they are made, how they can be conveyed by a mediator, and how they can be converted to useful negotiations.
The second post on Molly Klapper’s book, Definitive Creative Impasse-Breaking Techniques in Mediation, focuses on a deceptively simple and profoundly wise short essay by Laura Kaster, Addressing Impasse by Helping the Parties Value the Case. She opens her piece with a “much overlooked but obvious” point: “Settling or mediating a case is, among other things, a process for agreeing to the value of the claim. … Impasse often occurs precisely because the parties do not agree on the value of the case.”
As recently as a few weeks ago this blog noted the distinction between public and private negotiation. Nevertheless, the current debate concerning raising the public debt “ceiling” seems to present a stark lesson on when to negotiate and when not to.
It is curious that, as formal training in private negotiation increases, the quality of public negotiation has fallen into such disrepair.
Business people negotiating a private deal are trained to listen attentively, in order to discover their counterparty’s interests, and to devise beneficial options that accomodate them. Yet listening is something one seldom observes in public legislative debate. Adjusting one’s view on the basis of what one hears, practically never.
Why is that? And might the ADR community have something to contribute to encourage creative negotiation of matters of public interest? The Council of the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution seems to have something to say about both those questions.
