The Negotiation Book: Your Definitive Guide To Successful Negotiating

9.5. KNOWING WHAT VARIABLES YOU HAVE TO WORK WITH

Planning and preparation consists of effort and investment of time that goes into creating something of value from the various components that, when put together, lead to more value than the sum total of the parts. What does aircraft construction or a work of art have in common with negotiation? Both have a need for planning, preparation and design.

However, it's easier to visualise the need to plan when creating something with a physical form compared with planning simply to build an agreement. You can more easily imagine the design and planning needed when creating a new aircraft, critical to it ever coming together let alone flying, in the first place. The creativity employed by an artist, starting with a blank canvas and with all the work to do ahead of them, requires flexibility and a mental picture for what will be. In both cases, options and creativity play a significant part in ensuring a successful outcome, as well as necessity for some visionary thought.

As a negotiator, planning starts with identifying possible variables and linking them together in such a way so as to realise incremental value. Design and structure is similar in so many ways across disciplines and yet, because of the time pressures in negotiation, the potential consequences and dilemmas, the discipline of planning can easily escape us, resulting in deals which are sub-optimised, or worse still, may not even be possible. During the planning phase, scoping ...