Getting to Yes Essay

Getting to yes paper

        Fisher and Ury explain that a good agreement is one which is wise and efficient, and which improves the parties' relationship. Wise agreements satisfy the parties' interests and are fair and lasting. The authors were also the first to coin the acronym BATNA which stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. This term essentially describes the need to conceive of creating and developing back up plans when all else fails. Invariably, not even our best intentions to find agreement will necessarily come to fruition. Haggling over a price is a typical example of positional bargaining. Fisher and Ury argue that positional bargaining does not tend to produce good agreements. It is an inefficient means of reaching agreements, and the agreements tend to neglect the parties' interests. It encourages stubbornness and so tends to harm the parties' relationship. Principled negotiation provides a better way of reaching good agreements. Fisher and Ury develop four principles of negotiation.

The first citation is The Problem. There are 3 conversations that make up the difficult conversations: The What Happened Conversation, The Feeling Conversation, and The Identity Conversation. The “What Happened?” Conversation, it has three parts, (1) the Truth Assumption: This is about beliefs, clarification, views and what’s important; it is not about what is true; (2) The Intention Invention: you have to know the other person’s intentions, and know their interests are invisible. (3) The Blame Frame: we often focus on who’s to blame instead of saying it is our mistake. It distracts us from knowing why things went wrong. In the second part “The Feeling Conversation” we need to know what we should do with our emotions. The third part “The Identity Conversation”, this one is the most subtle and most challenging and about who we are and how we see ourselves.

The second citation is “The Method”. There are four parts of this citation. First one is “Separate people from the problem”, Negotiators are emotional people first, and every negotiator has two kinds of interest - substance: wants to reach agreement that satisfies substantive interests; and relationship: turn into regular customer, maintain working relationship. But relationship gets connected with or without problem. In the part of 3 categories of people problems, the first category is Perception: other side’s thinking is the problem, differences defined by gap between your and their thinking, to resolve; the second is Emotion: feeling may be more important than talk; the third is communicating. There are three ways to focus on interests not positions :( 1) for a wise solution reconcile interest not positions; (2) How define interests: ask why, ask why not and analyze the consequences of decisions on interests; (3) Talking about interests. The other two parts are Invent options for mutual growth and Insist on using objective criteria, talk about creative options can make the difference between deadlock & agreement and deciding on basis of will is costly, use objective criteria.