Let’s Just Start with Plan B: A Simpler Guide to Negotiating Co-opetition
Things They Forgot To Tell Me in Business School
 
When navigating business life’s various challenges it is always helpful to have a Plan A in mind to start with - an ideal case, a data-driven model, a textbook example - and then figure out whether it, or a functional facsimile thereof, will solve your particular problem. One reoccurring challenge that gets lots of attention is the art of conducting a successful negotiation. Life is a constant stream of negotiations in many ways, and none more so, or more formally so, than in corporate business environments. You cannot go wrong learning from the experts and trying to up your game in this department. One of the best guides to negotiations I have read recently lists seven key elements to a successful negotiation process and does a cracking job at weaving these seven elements together. Successful negotiations must:
 
1. Satisfy the underlying interests of all parties
2. Be demonstrably the best of multiple possible options
3. Use external data points and standards where possible as measures to ensure transparency
4. Be better than other alternatives
5. Contain clear and realistic commitments for all parties
6. Be the result of clear communication
7. Help build the desired relationships between parties
[Jeffrey Weiss, Vantage Partners, Harvard Business Review Guide to Negotiating]
 
All good here from my perspective, except for one small wrinkle. While they are all seamlessly interconnected, my memory isn’t great and seven elements are just too many to remember without having the list in front of me. So, in the interests of absent-minded simplicity, I have distilled these down to a more manageable three things to remember. We’ll call this Plan B. Focusing on these three allows the others to be accomplished in due course, without cluttering up the list.
 
Plan B, the three keys to successful negotiation:
1. Move beyond stated positions to address underlying interests
2. Provide all-sides with defensible outcomes
3. Be respectful
 
Way easier.
 
But my problems [professional at least] run wider than just a faulty memory, in that most of my negotiations don’t come within a formal corporate negotiating framework that allows for complex or ritualistic processes to unfold.
 
Negotiating in Co-opetition
 
I work in the design profession where active multi-party, multi-disciplinary, design exercises are the normal milieu, where projects are fast-moving, and where there are a long series of such decisions, most taken quickly and in a spirit of co-opetition. A silly neologism, competitive cooperation means, in this case, that the principal parties are operating in anything from a forced alliance to a strategic partnership, i.e. there is a degree of shared purpose with formal business arrangements, but there may also be strong competition either around resources within the project or in the broader marketplace.
 
While most decisions are taken without any formalization, every twice in a while you run into a log jam that threatens to halt forward progress. So how do you keep things moving when this happens in a fast-paced competitive/ cooperative environment?
 
One way to do so is to follow this handy four-step Plan B process, a take on the circle of value approach, best done as a group exercise: 

















Co-opetition Model of Rapid Multi-Party Negotiation:
 
Step 0: Identify the issue[s] requiring resolution clearly and concisely.

Step 1: Make individual lists of stated positions for each party as well as any outside influencers that must be taken into account.

Step 2: Together, make a single list of underlying interests that account for all stated positions. Look for both overlap and cross-over, retain all identifying information. Making a single list of underlying interests is critical as it helps unite the parties by highlighting commonalities.

Step 3: Brainstorm a number of resolution scenarios that address these underlying interests, focusing on common interests. Provide clear benefits, costs, and commitments for each party for each scenario.

Step 4: Reach a resolution by adopting a preferred scenario or create a preferred scenario from parts. If a final resolution cannot be achieved, re-examine the underlying interests and revamp the scenarios until a final resolution is attained. Make the final resolution clear, concise, and measurable; most importantly, make the outcomes defensible for all parties.

During longer projects, a series of these situations can arise. What tends to happen is that if one party needs to «take one for the team» in order to keep things moving this is recognized openly and addressed during a subsequent round.

While hardly foolproof, using Plan B when you hit a log jam helps parties quickly clear it and continue rowing in the same direction in a competitive/ cooperative environment, a critical win when generalized agreement on key issues between autonomous parties is critical for the project’s overall success.