Diatribes of Jay: Why the President and Congress Can’t “Get to Yes”

[For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here. For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here. For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here. For additional reasons, click here. For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here. For Democrats’ core values, click here. The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

Separate the people from the problem
Focus on interests, not positions
Invent options for mutual gain
Insist on using objective criteria
Conclusion

In 1981, two Harvard professors first published what is undoubtedly the best book on negotiation ever written. Called Getting to Yes, it’s short, readable and immensely practical. Amazon now offers it in electronic form for less than two dollars.

The book has been a best seller since its first publication nearly forty years ago. Why? Mostly, it demystifies negotiation and debunks common misconceptions about the process.

Negotiation is not something you “win.” It’s not a battle. It’s not a war. It’s not a game. It’s not the product of some mystical personal “magic,” although empathy and humility can help smooth it. It’s a process by which two or more “sides” develop solutions to problems for mutual gain. It exercises our species’ two greatest biological survival traits: empathy and cooperation.

Negotiation is also a product of the highest attainment of humankind’s intellect: Reason. It doesn’t require some sort of “genius,” just persistence in thinking about all sides and working things through. Anyone can learn how, and anyone with reasonable intelligence and diligence can get good results with practice.

The book states its four basic principles simply in its table of contents. You can read them here (under “The Method”), without even shelling out the two dollars [click on “Look Inside”].

So why can’t the President and Congress negotiate an end to the government shutdown, soon to go into its third week? The answer is pretty simple. Both sides routinely violate every one of the four basic principles of Getting to Yes. And the gravity and frequency of their and all our pols’ violations are getting steadily worse, week by week and year by year.

Our political class is on a downward slide to perdition. Here’s how and why:

1. Separate the people from the problem.

The first principle of Getting to Yes is identifying the problem to be solved and recognizing that it’s not the same as the people you’re bargaining with.

This point is pretty simple. It means understanding that the people on the “other” side of the table have an interest in solving the problems, just as you do. That’s why they’re there. It means treating them with professionalism, humanity, and respect. It means cooperating to solve the problems that brought you to the table. It means showing cordiality and even kindness, which cost nothing.

A moment’s thought suffices to reveal that blame and recrimination are antitheses of this very first principle of Getting to Yes. But what are our President and members of Congress now doing, night and day? What did the President do in his address to the nation Tuesday night, and what did Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Schumer each do in return? Each side is trying to blame the other for the government shutdown and the lack of progress on immigration, rather than trying to resolve them.

It would be hard to imagine a stupider and more counterproductive way to begin negotiation. But here we have our supreme leader and our top elected representatives doing it on national TV, as if they were junior-high-school kids let loose on a playground without adult supervision. And what’s worse: this puerile charade has become a regular feature of our national politics. Pols don’t want solutions; they want “issues” and “wedges” with which to stoke outrage and hammer the “opposition” in the next electoral campaign.

2. Focus on interests, not positions.

If you can get past acting like testosterone-fueled male adolescents, this second principle is the core of Getting to Yes. You try to move beyond fixed bargaining positions. You try to understand what motivates the other side, what it and your own side really want out of the process, i.e., their “interests”. Doing so is critical to the third step, in which you analyze the various interests and figure out how to reconcile and satisfy them with a “win-win” solution.

A pleasant paradox often arises at this point. The more complex and multi-sided the problem, the more interests you can find, and the easier it is to put them together. So paradoxically it can be easier to find “solutions” to complex than to “simple” problems of negotiation.

If all that matters is the price of a single object or commodity, there may be no further interest of the seller than raising it and of the buyer than lowering it. In that case, the negotiation may begin to look like the classic “zero-sum game.”

But even then, competent negotiators can find and work on other interests, such as lead time, flexibility in production, manner of delivery, quality assurance, and future availability. With empathy and intelligence, each side can find additional interests of the other to address in order to make the bargain more attractive and “get to yes.”

In this respect, the “complex problem” of immigration is practically a godsend. There are many aspects to it, and therefore many interests of each side to address. And mirabile dictu, both sides share most, if not all, of the same interests because they are all Americans, although they may not share each interest with the same intensity.

Both sides want to secure our border and cut down illegal immigration. Both sides want to find some way—consistent with Americans’ basic values and traditional humanity—to discourage and deter future illegal immigration. Both sides want to continue renewing our society with beneficial immigration. That means permitting immigration by skilled and highly motivated migrants; it also means weeding out criminals and misfits. Both sides want to make sure that “Dreamers,” or kids brought to America undocumented as minors, who know no other home, get a fair shake. And both have actually said so.

When you look at immigration holistically, with interests, not positions, in mind, you have to wonder why we haven’t found a solution years ago. The only rational thing standing in our way is fixed positions. The President wants his wall or “physical barrier,” or else. Some Democrats want to solve the Dreamers’ problem before even talking about border security. Why not make a grand bargain where everyone gets something? Wouldn’t the fact that everyone wants much the same thing make that easier, not harder?

3. Invent options for mutual gain.

This third step in “getting to yes” is the essence of principled bargaining. It’s what business-schools call seeking a “win-win” solution. You try to think of ways in which every side can realize something of value, so every side has good reason to make a deal. You can’t do this, of course, until you’ve taken the second step: giving up fixed, unreasoning bargaining positions and focusing on the interests behind them.

In the case of our immigration debacle, this ought to be easy. Why? Both sides—all sides—really want much the same things. They just have different priorities and, in some cases, different preferred methods of reaching the goals. (We’ll get to those different methods next.) In the absence of trust, which political posturing has brought to an all-time low, it ought to be easier to make a grand bargain, rather than to ask one side to satisfy the first priority of the other and depend on the other’s promises to satisfy its own.

In fact, the two sides of the immigration debate have come close to a grand bargain several times over the past few years. They have even come close to a “small” grand bargain: improved border security in exchange for rudimentary protection for the Dreamers. But every time, the politics of blame has intruded.

Rightly or wrongly, one side or the other has concluded that it could gain an advantage in future elections by killing the bargain and blaming the other side, thereby violating all three principles mentioned so far. This grossly counterproductive behavior must stop if our nation is ever the return to practical, solution-oriented government for which it once had global respect.

4. Insist on using objective criteria.

We Americans are a realistic, practical, rational people. Or at least we used to be. We used to believe in facts. We used to believe in science. We built our immense power and prestige on technology, business, commerce, and industry—all of which are practical, fact-based things.

What this last principle of Getting to Yes says is that, when bargaining about past performance or future promises, we look to non-subjective verifiable facts. And we depend on neutral, independent experts to provide them.

If a contract involves weights and measures, we used an objective, independent authority or expert, not under the control of either side, to gauge them. If a dispute needs resolving, we used independent, qualified experts as arbitrators.

We rely on experts at every turn because we Americans understand, better than many other people, how specialization and division of labor have built the modern, complex society in which we live. We rely on experts for almost everything in our medicine, air travel, weather prediction, computer systems, traffic control, and design of cities and machines. We also understand the need for independent experts, not under the control of any bargaining side, because we understand conflicts of interest and corruption and want to avoid them.

The President insists on his wall (or “physical barrier”) for two reasons. First, he thinks he promised one. Second, he apparently thinks it’s the best way to keep undocumented migrants out.

But the president is not an expert in border security. He’s never worked in or on border patrol, which is only one of a thousand things that any president is responsible for.

So a good bargainer could solve the “wall impasse” in thirty seconds. He would recognize that we have many experts in border security, of which he is not one. He would then agree to designate one or some of those experts—or to use a designated, objective process to find those experts. Then he would agree to let them decide. He would agree on a suitable amount of money to appropriate for border security and let the experts do their specialized jobs.

Our hypothetical good bargainer would swallow his pride and say he kept his promise by giving the right amount of money and authority to the right people—our own experts! Then he would claim a “win.” He would assert that his reference to a “wall” was allegorical only, and that a combination of technology, barriers and clever use of vehicles and personnel designed by our best experts would work best of all. And good bargainers on the other side would not just let him to do this for the good of the country. They would encourage him.

Conclusion.

It’s a sad thing when valuable expertise lies unused. The book Getting to Yes arose out of decades of research under the Harvard Negotiation Project. It relied on the knowledge and expertise of countless lawyers, politicians, business people and diplomats. Whenever bargaining parties use its methods in good faith, it can produce reliable, durable agreements. It relates to the old “charismatic,” bullying and rug-merchant styles of bargaining as science does to superstition. It works.

But today our pols and diplomats regularly violate virtually every one of its basic principles. They do so not by accident or mistake, but deliberately, as matter of practice. They do so because paid consultants and “political operatives” have enriched themselves—and made professions for themselves—by convincing pols to focus on outraging their “bases” and preserving “wedge” issues for future elections, rather than on resolving issues and actually governing.

The result, in virtually every case, is like our current debacle on immigration. Nothing gets resolved. Our nation gets more divided by the day. Rank and file on the right calls progressives “libtards.” On the left they call conservatives “Repugs.” Name calling, anger, outrage and hate replace Reason. Vladimir Putin laughs uproariously, deeps inside the Kremlin, because he helped speed this cultural degeneration.

But make no mistake about it. This malaise is uniquely home grown. Putin did not cause or start it; he was just clever enough to exploit it opportunistically.

We Americans started and grew it all by ourselves. The pathology of “getting to no” and hating each other in the process is uniquely American and uniquely stupid. It’s the product of a uniquely American class of political parasites and hangers on whom real pols ought to put out to pasture or force to do honest work. It’s been going on now for at least a decade, long before Trump rode the escalator down into political history.

We may have to remove Trump because his narcissistic personality disorder makes him uniquely incapable of getting to yes. But our national pathology is not his fault. If you want to assess blame, you have to go back at least as far as Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove—all evangelists of the gospel that blame can work better (and be easier to place) than results. We won’t throw off our national malaise until we get smart enough to elect a different kind of politician.

If we Americans continue down this road of blame, shame and “getting to no,“ we will experience the most disastrous and precipitous decline of any culture in human history. We will make the decline and fall of the Roman Empire looks like child’s play, and we will and reach that “goal” in about one-tenth the time that Rome took (four centuries, give or take). We are well on our way.

With runaway global warming and nuclear proliferation ever threatening our species’ survival, each human being on this planet has a stake in making sure that doesn’t happen. The first step in our recovery and convalescence as Americans has to be our 2020 presidential election. Whatever else we may do, we have to elect someone who understands “getting to yes.”

That doesn’t mean abandoning your core values; far from it. It means advancing your core values, bit by bit, by allowing others to advance theirs, too. It doesn’t mean the kind of threat- and retribution-based bargaining that passes for politics on TV. Anyone who’s actually experienced real negotiation knows how it’s done.

We need more pols who know, too. As they rid themselves of the parasites of blame, maybe pols ought to increase their staff expertise by hiring experienced negotiators away from business. In doing so, they should avoid dictatorial family businesses like Trump’s, which brag of overpowering smaller and weaker employees and contractors. Instead, they should hire from big public businesses that regularly negotiate with equal counterparts at home and abroad, at least several times per year.

Negotiation is neither a mystical personality trait nor a dark art. It’s a learned skill. If pols can’t learn it themselves, they need to hire experts who have, just as they hire people to put out their press releases and manage their e-mail and social media. In the long run, negotiation is far more important than publicity, and far more deficient in practice today, as the extended government shutdown attests.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Diatribes of Jay

09 January 2019

Why the President and Congress Can’t “Get to Yes”

Links to Popular Recent Posts

0 Comments:

About Me

Previous Posts