Negotiation and Social Software

Negotiations are arguments. Agrumentation, not a derogatory term, is a practice of achieving a common sense through parties taking contrary positions. Debate is not only helpful in discovering compacts, but the essence of constructive social interaction.

There are three kinds of arguments: Fact, Value or Policy. You can argue over what is, what should be or how it should be.

In general, determining the winner in an argument of Fact or Policy can be relatively easy with pre-defined criteria. Cases of Value often embroil in emotion and winners are difficult to determine.

Social software can support negotiation, at the least, by revealing what kind of argument is in play. Every argument is different, but bringing parties to the same table, making positions clear, revealing differences and overlaps in preferences provides a basis for debate. Tools that allow mediators the flexibility to structure dialogue while deemphasizing personalities can accelerate constructive conversation. Tools that deemphasize personality and make positions incrementally explicit reveal sidetracking Value-based arguements, allow Fact to be resolved with fact and support collaborative development of Policy.

Michael Helfrich relates a case of using a shared space in support of negotiation:

The Virtual Negotiation Table in Southern Asia/New York/Helsinki: Groove was used less than eight weeks ago to broker peace in a nation in southern Asia. During the mid-80's, tension between the majority and the separatists on this island nation erupted into full blown ethnic war, with 10's of thousands of people losing their lives. Leveraged by some very bright folks from the Nobel Peace Laureate, and with the wisdom and guidance of James A. at Groove, a set of "Peace Tools" was developed and deployed to assist in a new round of peace negotiations.

Peace negotiation is intricate business. Bringing warring factions to a physical table is often tense, and can result in people getting shot. It was envisaged that Groove could bring this nation's leadership to the same "virtual" table as the separatists. It worked. Groove was embraced by both constituencies because of the virtual nature of the shared space. While one shared space served as the meeting place for the factions, each had separate spaces to discuss their positions and provide context for the negotiators. The shared space became the trusted and neutral enclave for all parties involved to lay out their positions, and to jointly work through the options. And no one gets shot.

This is a fantatstic case of social software invoking constructive agreement.

At Socialtext we have found shared wiki spaces for negotiation work well to foster trust because they reveal positions without personality and do not constrain . In a typical negotiation, say with a client and a vendor in a solution sale, no party is in "control," so giving up a little can drive resolution. Peter Morville comments that with wikis: "mutual openness and shared vulnerability led to a strong sense of shared trust."

Negotiation is a fact of life not only for organizations, but people within organizations. Meetings are primarily status contests, office politics perhaps the greatest drain on productivity and tension is often the norm.

Weblogs and Wikis inside organizations are public spaces where participants can undertake activities and communication with full knowledge they are revealing their preferences. The resulting text is an informal common sense. When the activity is developing a social compact itself, by contrast to the chest-thumping patterns of a typical meeting, the focus is constructing something together. Incremental success in construction, taking on increasingly politicized issues, creates shared achievements that turns parties into a group. And groups can achieve compacts.

Comments

[Ulises Mejias]

"Tools that allow mediators the flexibility to structure dialogue while deemphasizing personalities can accelerate constructive conversation. Tools that deemphasize personality and make positions incrementally explicit reveal sidetracking Value-based arguements, allow Fact to be resolved with fact and support collaborative development of Policy."

I would argue that those tools can only be fully productive once a certain threshold of trust is established, and to the extent that trust is partly the result of personality, I'm not sure how much personality can or should be taken out of the equation, at least at the beginning of the process. Negotiation can not unfold in anonymity, and personality is and should be a component of negotiation even if our understanding of each other’s personalities is initially based on erroneous assumptions and stereotypes.

While non-verbal mechanisms exist to assess and express personality in a face-to-face setting, I’m wondering how much explicitly textual or hypermedia mechanisms should be part of the design of an online negotiation and collaboration system.

[DJBarney]

I'm just waking up to this.

Could this be the biggest social revolution since tribes first realised they could swap ideas for mutual benefit ? It's HUGE.

The negotiations remind me of at least one Star Trek episode (from The Next Generation, where a negotiator learns some hard lessons).

This all gives me great hope.

All the best! :-D

DJBarney