Post Negotiation - the Great Dog Frisbee Controversy

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Finally, once we locked down the retraction of all Jocker’s comments, we tried one last tactic and made one last demand (partial compensation): making this attempt at this stage of the negotiation wasn’t really part of the original strategy, but more of an improvised, out of the blue decision; unsurprisingly, it proved to be ineffective.

As for the other side’s strategy, she definitely understood she had a superior power in the situation and made sure we as well knew by repeatedly reminding us our “wrongdoings” and the damages she suffered as a consequence. Nevertheless, after setting the tone of the conversation and making it clear that she was negotiating from a strong hand, she shifted from a competitive approach to a much more cooperative one: I guess she herself had sensed the promotional benefits and economical profits (even if less obvious than ours) she was likely to gain from a new business deal. As already mentioned, she put forward almost all the terms and conditions, but I think she deliberately avoided bringing us on our knees. On the contrary, she proposed a few arrangements that were in our sole favor (e.g. chance for promotional work at her company’s facilities): I don’t know if this was a “move” she had planned from the beginning, but I guess our compliant attitude contributed as well.

What I think I handled well was the preparation stage: I knew my facts, assessed my interests and priorities and attempted guessing my counterpart’s, evaluated the emotions at play (both mine and my counterpart’s), considered strengths and weaknesses of all the parties, decided a strategy and also came up with a set of possible proposals organizing my demands from the highest to most reasonable. One thing I did miss in my pre-negotiation assessment was setting my bottom line.

The strategy I had chosen rested on two pillars, apology and compromise, and my goal was saving my business by restoring my reputation: I won’t go as far as saying that it was a good (or a bad) tactic, but I managed to stick to it and achieved my interest, even if I had to do a lot of logrolling and concede on the money aspect. I also think that self-disclosure was a sound choice, despite the fact that it didn’t deliver the results I was hoping for.

On a last note, something I think I did well was starting off by apologizing, suggesting that we dropped our lawsuits and emphasizing the importance and the value that we could both derive from finding an agreement and working together towards the future: in other words, I opened the actual negotiation and made the first move, but, whether this is not necessarily a good or a bad choice in absolute terms, here it certainly helped creating a cordial environment and a positive relationship with the other side, preparing the ground for developing a solution.

Now, despite being pleased with the overall outcome of the negotiation (after all, I did achieve the goal I was aiming for) , I am not satisfied with the way I handled it. There were two major flaws in my execution and they are tightly connected: emotion control and power assessment.

As for the latter, my counterpart objectively did carry greater power than me for a number of reason that I have already mentioned. On the other hand, though, she had much less power over me than I thought: going to trial rather negotiating a solution would have been more time-consuming and expensive and it would have set back Dog Pound’s project to be promoted to a major league park. Moreover, I didn’t realize I actually had other alternatives in case the agreement hadn’t worked, e.g. going public and making a statement on the local newspaper explaining my side of the story: sure, it was a much less desirable and effective solution, but still there were other options out there that I didn’t consider at all.

I am sure my counterpart already knew to be more powerful than me, but the perception of myself as a “weak” contractor that I gave away made things even worse. This obviously lowered my bargaining power, making me desperate for a deal and losing sight of the distributive element: I gave up my compensation and damage claims entirely and let the other side put forward and define all the details, without even making use of the proposals I had come up with in the preparation phase and expressing no creativity at all in shaping the agreement; even worse, I made my compensation demands at the very end, when the negotiation was already wrapped up, risking to spoil the negotiation by making my counterpart flinch.

In my opinion, this was a natural consequence of the adversarial and competitive approach I have always had to negotiation: I would look at it as a power play, a game where your goal is victory. So, as soon as I realized I was more vulnerable than my counterpart I “panicked” and surrendered to the thought that, since a “weak” deal to me was still better than no deal at all, I would have had to make all the concessions. On top of that, the unexpected twist of having to team up with another person definitely took me aback. Had I been able to control my emotion more efficiently, I would have realized that I had to ask more questions to my counterpart and gather information to use to my advantage: this way I might have bargained a better deal, e.g. one that included some form of monetary satisfaction (as some other classmates of mine did, proving it possible); instead I rushed to wrap up a deal and secure my (only one) ultimate goal.

On a last note, this negotiation turned out to be particularly interesting because it gave me the chance to see several issues and theories we had discussed in class put into practice.

First of all, this exercise allowed me to come face-to-face with the adversarial and the accommodating approaches we had talked about in class. As I have mentioned, I have a natural tendency to see bargainings as competitive situations, surely by inclination, sometimes out of distrust in my counterpart. We saw how in distributive bargaining you are much more focused rights and power and how parties, after setting their target and resistance points, come to a compromise solution through reciprocal concessions: this is commonly called “dividing the pie”. Such concept of distributional negotiation is shared by an opposite approach to bargaining, often described as “accommodating”, which was in fact the style I felt I had –reluctantly- to turn to in this particular situation, given the circumstances.

However, being a “soft” bargainer didn’t work out too well for me, since it resulted in a deal that was much more favorable to the other side. In a need to get past blame and go towards explanations, I made the first move and tried to make the most of the potential