Importance Of Big Picture Thinking In Negotiation

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Most of the common activities in our daily life present an opportunity to negotiate, whether or not we realise it. Meta-reflecting upon my negotiation experiences during the class and other activities have led me to identify few common themes. In this assignment, the two themes I will be discussing are (1) the importance of being clear on the strategic intent and big picture thinking, and (2) the importance of managing the negotiation process through understanding the various phases and visualising negotiation as a train journey.
The first common theme is the importance of clear strategic intent and big picture thinking in negotiations. Before taking the Negotiation Behaviour unit, I always perceived negotiation as a fixed-pie, a zero-sum gain …show more content…

My perception of fixed-size pie and detailed thinking resulted in a competitive negotiation with no information exchange. As a result, we only realised towards the end that both Arak and Barkan have been tasked to reach the same total points and it was basically not enough points to reach win-win solutions just on Area I. After quick adjournment, in order to avoid war, we settled for equal points in Area I of 124 points each and gave up too much by agreeing to give whole Area II in return for a contractual agreement that Arak will be providing the steel supply for the next 20 years, which mean that we were carrying all the risks if Arak did not do what they had agreed …show more content…

Eventhough we had a fairly robust debate, I learned that once we have a common understanding of the big picture view, we managed to resolve our differences. In the Island Queen negotiation, the big picture thinking led us to an agreement by the cruise ship to dock off-the-island hence not impacting our fishermen’s fishing site; provide employment and education on the island through sharing the costs on building a visitor centre (100% cost borne by Island Queen), building toilet facilities (50% cost), building a college on the island (50% cost); provide a marine scientist to review the conditions of the marine environment; have audits on the cruise ship’s impact on the island’s community every 3 months and ongoing review of the agreements. In return, as these projects are coming online, we would ramp up the number of visits, with the first year at our requirements at 3 visits per year, 1 day per visit, and 300 passengers on the island (therefore getting full council members’ votes and get re-elected) up to the 12 visits per year in the third year, and the Island Queen has the exclusive right, first option to renegotiate post the six-years

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