THE VALUE OF TRAINING AND ITS LIMITATIONS
If negotiation is one of the main tools in conflict management, then the first question to be asked should be: can we learn to do better? If it is a skill (science), then we can learn to do better.
If it is in-born (art), not much can be done. Is negotiation art or science? One might solve this problem by writing a book titled ‘The Art and Science of Negotiation' (Raiffa 1982) as PIN's father has done, suggesting that negotiation in conflict resolution is both an art and a science. It may not be in-born, but at least the skill of effective negotiation behavior is fostered by culture (Faure 2003). In my own experience over the last three decades, negotiators can be trained to do better.Impact of training
It is best seen in courses with a duration of several months. From 1967 till 1982, the Society of International Affairs of The Netherlands organized a ‘Course on International Relations' (LBB) for young Dutch diplomats, navy officers, post-academic civil servants and post-graduate students. At the very start, a simulation exercise (NATO or EEC) was introduced as a tool to get more grip on substance (Lipschits 1971). This game started at the beginning of the six- month course, ran parallel to the regular lectures, and served as its one-week finale. Chaired by an experienced diplomat (a high level ambassador or a former Minister of Foreign Affairs), it focused on content, but nevertheless participants had to negotiate a common document or a full night— starting at eight o'clock in the evening, and finishing at eight o'clock the next morning. At the time the author of this chapter took responsibility (end of the 1970s), the course was down to three/four months. Nothing was done on training in negotiation. For five years, I watched ten courses struggling with the negotiation process, people being chaotic, non-procedural, non-relational, distributional, positional, inflexible and aggressive.
Outcomes were meager or never came about. Participants complained about lack of negotiation skills and lack of training. But in all those years, no trainers could be hired to do the job. This was partly because they were too expensive, and partly because commercial trainers were abundant but trainers on diplomatic negotiations were absent—at least on the continent of Europe.In 1983, the Society merged with three other institutions into the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, ‘Clingendael', and the training problem was tackled right away. Having more budget space as Director of Training and Education, I could invite expensive private sector negotiation trainers, work with them and share our public sector simulation games, thereby training Clingen- dael staff in interstate negotiation processes. This took some seven years and the effects on the course members of the LBB were amazing: more effective negotiation processes, better outcomes. Sincethelate 1980s, separate specific negotiation seminars were created and exported to diplomatic academies (Meerts 1992) outside The Netherlands. Diplomatic institutes were—and still are—in need of training in diplomatic skills like negotiation but lacked appropriate trainers and exercises. A special workbook was created to overcome the shortage of exercises in training negotiation techniques (Meerts 2007). The specific negotiation seminars were also used to update LBB alumni. LBB course members from the period 1983-1993 did better on average than those from the 1972-1982 period who had not been trained in negotiation techniques. These are observations by the author, however, and cannot be sustained by hard data. But other analyses about the potential contribution of training to resolve international conflict underscore the opinion that training does make a difference (Fisher 1997, 471-486).
Impact of culture
Another observation by the author is on the difference of behavior of students and professionals in regular seminars on international negotiation processes since 1989, delivered in some 80 countries around the world. The duration of these seminars is limited to two to four days.
Most ‘seminarists' had never received any formal negotiation training before, and if so, they had been trained in the ‘Harvard Mode'. The individual ‘growth' of participants depends very much, I observed, on their cultural background. As culture is an even more ambivalent subject than negotiation (or processes in general—they are like water: you cannot easily grasp them but they are essentials in life), I will be careful here. Still, my observation in the past fifteen years has been that trainees from low-context cultures were more open to training than those from high-context cultures (Cohen 1991). At the same time, the learning curve went exactly the other way around. Participants from the Balkans, South-Caucasus and Central Asia did much better at the end of the seminar than those from Britain, Germany and France. One could postulate that students form open societies have less problem in absorbing the training sessions but at the same time, they already have an attitude fostering effective negotiation behavior, that is, the management of the process in such a way that it will result in a substantial—in most cases forwardlooking (Zartman 2005)—outcome. Training did make a difference as they were more effective in dealing with the process at the end, than at the beginning of the seminar. But on average, they did not experience the attitudinal change I observed in diplomats from countries in the Middle East or Eastern Europe.In other words, it is more rewarding to work with students and professionals from countries where give-and-take in the interstate sphere is less common, where concession-making is seen as loss-of-face. Losing is of course psychologically more difficult than winning, and this process can create entrapment situations destroying fruitful win/win processes. But as trust is more secured in—for example, European Union negotiations—diplomats from Western (and at a later stage Central) European countries were more easy on give-and-take than their brothers from the outskirts of the Union.
That might be societal culture or political culture. Some behavioral change occurred, but this was not a genuine ‘Aha Erlebnis' as was the case with participants from high-context societies. This difference in training impact might also be linked to the fact that West Europeans—and Americans even more so—are used to modern training methodologies while they are relatively new for East Europeans.These observations are even more interesting as diplomats and civil servants from South-Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and the Middle East are born in high-density bargaining societies. Their context is of an environment where negotiation is part of daily life. In Western Europe, that context withered away in the 19th century. Obviously, bargaining in the soukh is not perceived in the same way as haggling between states. This might have to do with the honor factor. The state should not be corrupted by concession making. Face-saving is essential, thereby concession making is not seen as a viable option. Therefore, negotiators-in- training of the high-context parts of the world will not use their inherent haggling skills to the extend they are capable of doing this, while others lack these skills but compensate for this with their ability to be more open to the process of trading concessions, diagnosing package deals where others don't want to see them. Training can therefore help negotiators form high- context cultures to change their perception in such a way that they feel concessionexchange between states can be legitimate. As soon as they are made aware of this, their reservoir of haggling skills will help them to become a much more effective bargainer on the international platform—maybe more effective then their low-context colleagues, but training is a prerequisite here.