Conflict Resolution Basics: Interest-Based Negotiation

Einstein allegedly said, “if I had 60 minutes to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it.” It’s unclear if he actually said it, though the thinking seems very consistent with his work, and it absolutely applies to conflict resolution and negotiation.

I am not going to claim that every workplace conflict deserves that ratio. But I have a hard time overstating how much of the outcome depends on the definition of the problem. Most of the bad resolutions I have seen in my career were not failures of creativity or goodwill. They were attempts at reasonable solutions to the wrong problem.

The lesson here comes out of the field of interest-based negotiation, introduced in the early 1980s by Roger Fisher and William Ury, both at Harvard, in their book Getting to Yes. If you have ever used the phrase “win-win,” you have them to thank. Before their work, the prevailing model of negotiation was based in zero-sum thinking. You came in with a number, the other side came in with a number, and you fought over the space between them. Winning meant getting more of the pie than they did, and failing to win meant you lost.

Fisher and Ury pushed back on that. Negotiation, they argued, delivers better results when it is based in joint problem solving, and winning means everybody gets what they need.

To get there, they gave us a distinction that is one of the the most useful ideas in the entire negotiation literature: the difference between interests and positions. In this post I’ll cover the basics of interests and positions and give examples ranging from simple workplace disputes to hotly contested international negotiations, and close with some advice about how to apply this idea inside organizations.

Positions and Interests

There is an exercise I run in my conflict resolution training that is a classic in the field. It is a two-person negotiation, and each person has their own context sheet explaining their objectives. In short, they are negotiating to buy a rare crop of oranges that they need for research and development. One side needs them for a pesticide that will save crops all over the region and prevent a famine, and the other side needs them to create a vaccine that will prevent babies from dying in childbirth, and each side needs ALL of the 5,000 oranges in the crop. These are the only oranges of this type in the entire world.

It’s a classic zero-sum game. They each need all 5,000 oranges, but that outcome is impossible, so in the exercise people often resort to compromise: you take 5,000 oranges this year, and I’ll get them next year, or let’s split the difference and each take 2,500 oranges even though it’s not enough for either of us.