Dear Clients and Friends,

Many of us will never be involved in negotiations as complex as Brexit, but we will certainly face our challenging situations. Perhaps mergers or acquisitions, joint ventures, labor negotiations or any other multi-party, multi-issue negotiations.

In this November '17 edition of Negotiation Strategies I am happy to share my thoughts about navigating any complex negotiations, using Brexit as a poignant case study.

The column is also summarized in the Lessons Learned bullet points at the bottom of the column.

We have created a new look for our Negotiation Strategies column to match the look and feel of our website, and it is now responsive to both mobile and desktop views. We hope that you find it as visually appealing as you find the content useful!

With Best Wishes

Raphael Lapin

Our work as negotiation consultants involves not only the negotiation process itself, but we are often required to design an overall negotiation structure with which to facilitate productive negotiations. This is particularly true of highly complex negotiations where multiple interest groups must be engaged, and many complex issues need to be resolved. Examples might be land usage and environmental negotiations, policy and regulation negotiations, and peace negotiations in conflict-infested regions.

In these kinds of negotiations, success is largely contingent upon how the negotiating structure is setup: who will be represented and who will represent; how will discussions and dialogue be managed; how will information be shared; what should the sequence of the issues be; how will decisions be made and ratified, and so on.

The design of the negotiation structure is, in itself, a complex negotiation which needs to precede the later substantive negotiations so as to increase the chance of overall success.

Perhaps the paradigm of extremely complex negotiations today is the Brexit negotiations – the “divorce” and untangling between England and the European Union. There are many stakeholders both in Europe and the United Kingdom, with a plethora of very complicated issues that need to be resolved in a way that all parties can live with. Issues include the looming questions of: trade; migration; Britain meeting her financial commitments to the EU budget; rights of citizens and workers; the border within Ireland (between the Republic of Ireland which will remain in the EU and Northern Ireland which will leave the bloc as part of the UK). These together with many other thorny issues will need to be negotiated.

Although most of us will never be involved in complexities of this degree, we may be involved in sufficiently complex negotiations such as mergers and acquisitions, labor/union disputes and forming or dismantling of global joint ventures.

How then do we structure these negotiations to maximize efficiency, productivity and outcomes?

To navigate these highly complex negotiations we recommend our Two-tier Negotiation Structure™ model.

Using Brexit as our example, tier-one negotiations occurs at a lower diplomatic level. 

The negotiations are broken down into their various components such as trade, migration, EU budget commitments, etc. Then, small work groups made up of representatives from all sides, with subject matter expertise, are assigned to each particular component of the negotiation. One group might work on trade negotiations, another on migration and yet another on movement of labor, and so on.

These tier-one negotiations however, differ greatly from conventional negotiations. Whereas in conventional negotiations, the objective is to reach an agreement, the purpose of these tier-one negotiations is only to invent two or three innovative and creative options for each component, which all parties feel have good potential. No agreement should be reached and no commitment obtained.

At the conclusion of these negotiations, the tier-one negotiators present the two or three options for each component to the higher level tier-two negotiators for the next phase of talks.