STATE OF THE ART: PRACTITIONERS, RESEARCHERS AND TRAINERS
Entering the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis for the second conference on international negotiation processes at the end of the 1980s, I wondered how anything substantial could come out of a conference with so many people from so many different backgrounds.
Several things struck me at that time: first, the differences in thinking between East European (mainly Soviet) academicians and academics from Europe and the United States; second, the number of my fellow countrymen present, all of them unknown to me. It was at that moment that my present-day negotiation network, and hence the Dutch PIN Group, was created. But my most important observation was that practitioners, researchers and trainers do not communicate at the same level. Forget the fact that many researchers are also teachers of international negotiation at universities and that they use their discoveries of the ‘secrets' of negotiation to enhance their students' insight—teaching is not training; teaching is about ‘theliterature'. And although simulation games are used to illustrate theory, teaching is still a far cry from real training.Charismatic trainers
Trainers are—in the best-case scenario— capable of providing participants with experience of negotiation processes. However, unlike teachers/researchers, trainers are often unaware of the bulk of modern literature. They often copy something that has been copied from somebody else who once developed a practicum on the basis of academic insights. Trainers can be charismatic people who often know more about private-sector management than about negotiation and have the empathy to influence the thinking and framing of course members. They radiate strength. Participants will often remember their personalities many years afterward, but forget what they taught about negotiation.
One would expect a natural life-cycle to consist of practitioners helping researchers to understand the soul of the negotiation process and trainers using the insights from research to train effective (future) practitioners.
One would expect a mutual understanding to grow, just as has happened within PIN over the past 20 years—that the three groups would come together in joint forums. While there is somewhat more communality today, however, on average, the cleavages between practitioners, academics and trainers have not been bridged. Why? And what's the remedy?Old-fashioned diplomats
First of all, many practitioners, especially those in the interstate negotiations arena— mainly diplomats—do not really believe that negotiation is a science. To many, especially the old-fashioned diplomats, it is an art: in-born, something that cannot be learned. One might hope for a change as time goes by, but for the moment, these senior diplomats hold the most important diplomatic posts and dominate the scene. Apart from their perception—and perception determines reality—they are often handicapped by not understanding their own behavior. They are effective diplomatic negotiators, but they are not really aware why. What am I doing in order to be effective? How are we negotiating? They are so caught up in their routine that they often do not have the ability to explain what—in their behavior—made them effective negotiators.
Losing face?
Frequently, practitioners have a certain dedain for negotiation research and academic education. They do not really believe in training as a tool for becoming a better negotiator. Of course, I am stereotyping here, but many negotiation practitioners do not want to waste time by conferring with academics. And they also do not want negotiation ‘experts' looking into their kitchens, first because this might harm the ‘national' interests of their country (secrecy of negotiation in order to maintain room for maneuver) and, second, because they might lose face if consultants observe that mistakes are being made and opportunities lost. We should keep in mind here that even diplomatic negotiators are human beings (sic!). They sometimes show emotions and nonverbal leaks (e.g.
unconscious body language), and they do not want this to be revealed to the outside world. The principle of ‘open covenants, openly arrived at' has never worked.And then there is the problem that practitioners, that is, civil servants, are not by definition effective teachers.Actually, they are often boring and have a problem putting a message across to their audience. Of course, there are notable exceptions, but on the whole it is a bad idea to ask (former) ambassadors to teach negotiation. Their accounts of the past do not raise awareness; we need exercises to do that.
Simulation games
Even those ambassadors who are ready to work with simulations still pose problems for the training staff. They look too one-sidedly at the reality level of the games and criticize them for not being correct in detail. However, this kind of realism stops good simulation games from working smoothly. It creates unnecessary complications, hampering the dynamics of the exercise and thus causing participants to lose the plot. After all, good role play only works well if the substance and procedure of the simulation exercise are easy to understand and the process and implementation are complicated—and thus interesting. If the game is too realistic, course members will have problems experiencing the processes. Balancing reality and fiction is one of the major dilemmas in games designed for learning processes. This is the first ‘reality dilemma'. The game must be realistic, but does not—and should not— need to fully mirror reality, for in that case the game will fail to accomplish what it is aiming for: training the (potential) international negotiator. In some cases, the dilemma can be resolved by writing a forwardlooking case, reflecting future probabilities (Ebner and Yael 2005).
For academics and trainers, this poses a problem. Practitioners sometimes spoil simulation games by openly commenting in a negative way, undermining the legitimacy of academics and trainers and their exercises in the eyes of the students.
More serious is the second ‘reality dilemma' where practitioners do not allow researchers (and trainers) to observe real-time negotiations. Negotiation ‘experts' are sometimes invited to watch bilateral negotiations, but in multilateral interstate bargaining especially, the closed session is the rule. The result of this is twofold. First, practitioners do not profit from the insights of negotiation research, and serious mistakes are made on matters like timing and trust, strategy and tactics, skills and styles— indeed, in many consultations, we know that obvious mistakes were made and that process experts would probably have noticed them and helped the process stay on track. Second, the practitioner's attitude seriously hampers academics and trainers: not being able to observe real negotiation processes means that alternative methods, such as observing mock communication and studying memoires and other written accounts, have to be used to approximate the real processes. Interviews and surveys might help a bit, but interviewees have a tendency to leave out the things they did wrong and to stress their moments of glory.Video and DVD
A good alternative to watching international negotiation processes would be to be able to videotape them. This has been done in some rare instances. One famous example is the tape Space Between Words from 1971 (sic!) on the negotiation process that created the United Nations Disaster Relief Organization (UNDRO), of which a simulation exercise will be found in this chapter. In general, there is a real need for more openness on the side of governments in order to help ‘negotiationists' uncover the underlying forces and dynamics of the international negotiation process. There are many tapes revealing negotiation processes and actor behavior, but they are simulated proceedings. Negotiators are actors, and all these videos and DVDs focus on the private sector. Not being real and not being public-sector seriously limits their value as training tools.
Commercial trainers
The private sector is relatively more open. Researchers have been given the chance to observe and measure labor negotiations, for example, and some boast that they can prophesy the outcome of this kind of one-dimensional bargaining with 90 percent precision. But this does not help us much in the international sphere, where issues like sovereignty play a major role and where multilateral processes are abundant. An interesting question, of course, is why companies are (1) more open about having negotiations observed and (2) show more willingness to spend much more money on negotiation training than governments and international organizations. Money is the clue here. Firms are in real need of effective negotiators, as ineffective representatives can mean poor business results and therefore loss of revenue. It is no coincidence that real training devices on negotiation were developed in the private sector by commercial trainers long before diplomatic negotiation seminars were launched. At the author's (Clingendael) Institute in the early 1980s, we transformed the findings of privatesector seminars into public-sector practica. Interestingly enough, commercial trainers used these transformed concepts to train civil servants, to whom business workshops were of little interest, given the different nature of public-sector and private-sector negotiations caused—inter alia—by different stakeholders. In the meantime, the question is to what extent mixed seminars would be useful for training business people in their dealings with civil servants and vice versa.
Characters versus culture
For the same reason, business is also ready to invest in intercultural seminars, while governments often see this as unnecessary. Ministries of foreign affairs, in particular, feel that their diplomatic mores overarch cultural differences and that culture is therefore not a real factor in negotiation processes. Research done at Clingendael Institute showed that EU Council working group negotiators see characters, rather than culture, as an obstacle to negotiations.
However, the research also showed that the Dutch ministries (transport, social welfare, agriculture) that do pay attention to building relationships with fellow ministries of other EU member states have had fewer problems with culture than those (notably the Ministry of Economic Affairs) that did not invest in networks: prioritizing on issues, neglecting people.Second-hand knowledge
As has been stated, we also see an abyss between academics and trainers for several reasons. One reason might be that academics feel that trainers—especially those from private-sector companies—do not really deliver anything worthwhile. Their knowledge of the literature is often scarce, secondhand, and confined to pieces of ‘academic' work that are long past their sell-by date— literature passed on to them by others who often translated it into relevant exercises. Trainers also have a problem understanding the more complicated academic findings and, even if they do understand, the complexity of the scientific findings often prevents their being transformed into practical tools. Trainers will thus have to create their own tools. And just as practitioners often do not believe in the value and relevance of the academic findings, so too the academics mistrust the added value and correctness of the training devices. Academic programs on negotiation analysis are on the whole very different from training modules and are judged by many trainers—and practitioners, by the way—to be too theoretical and therefore not applicable to the education of new practitioners.
Commerce
Academics go for substance, trainers for money. There are many exceptions to this ‘rule', but the fact is that trainers are often in the service of a company—or self- employed—and train for a living. They find it just too costly to invest time in academic conferences and writing book chapters and articles, and they are always in a hurry so that training programs will often be ‘routinized’ into formats that can be applied to any situation. Tailor-made seminars are quite rare; seminars balancing good content and good exercises even more so. In other words, not- for-profit organizations play a beneficial role here, as they have the resources to do research and therefore to act as vanguard in the renewal of training and education materials.
On the other hand, commercial trainers are often more aware—and better educated in—modern training techniques that many academic teachers lack. Apart from this, there is something like being ‘gifted’. In order to make the money they need, commercial trainers work on seminars that are attractive to trainees—not only by content, but foremost by method. Therefore, these trainers develop more advanced methods of training than academics, but they themselves have to be charismatic in order to lure institutions into sending their staff to their training outfits. Some natural gift is needed to create effective theatre as well as effective training.
Academia
It may be because of this perception of negotiation as a ‘mere’ technical tool that non-Anglo-Saxon universities are—with the exception of a few like Mannheim and the College of Europe in Bruges—not willing to accept negotiation research and teaching as a viable academic study. An academic branch of the study of international relations? In the Anglo-Saxon world, negotiation studies and training are increasingly accepted as a useful adjunct to political and other sciences—often in the context of conflict studies—but this is not so much the case in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. As a study revealing one of the major vehicles of international politics, however, a study of and training in negotiation studies is worthwhile because of the importance of (future) practitioners and scientists knowing how to deal effectively with the issues affecting our world, and because it is one way for a country to build a more effective international policy.
Continental universities might take a while before they will be aware of modern literature on international negotiation processes, before they will acknowledge negotiation as an integral part of their academic curriculum. This is partly due to a lack of knowledge, being unaware of academic progress made in the past 20 years. On the other hand, it is snobbism too. How could something connected to skill training be academic? In that sense, negotiation research is the victim of the success of negotiation training. The latter is better know than the first, being overshadowed by it. Some mathematicians are making progress in academia with their methodologies on negotiation processes. Probably because their scientific approach strengthens the perception of others that somebody who uses such complicated methods must be a true academician and therefore his/her subject true as well. It will take a while till international negotiation will be seen as an indispensable ingredient of international relations. But in Europe the time will come, as it did in North America.
Diplomacy
It is vital for diplomatic and other organizations around the world to have interstate negotiation on their agenda, and not just by asking (former) ambassadors to speak about it. That is why the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis is supporting the Processes of International Negotiation Project: while comprehensive knowledge about issues is undeniably important, so too are the ways of implementing it. Processes are the roads to implementation, while master classes, workshops and seminars are vital in training the people who have to fulfill the policies of the countries and resolve the conflicts bewitching them. It is interesting to see that more and more commercial trainers explore the diplomatic market. In order to be successful, they are forced to research the diplomatic features of international negotiation processes and to develop simulation exercises that accommodate the needs of the diplomat and civil servant, rather than those of the salesman.