Why Hasn't the World Gotten to Yes? an Appreciation and Some

Why Hasn’t the World Gotten to Yes? An Appreciation and Some Reflections Carrie Menkel-Meadow A Revolutionary Agenda Some years ago at a conference of negotiation teachers sponsored by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Hewlett Founda- tion, Roger Fisher, speaking with some regret, remarked that he had hoped to change the world with the publication of Getting to Yes (Fisher and Ury 1981; Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991). Yet, he said, the ways in which both world leaders and ordinary people had interacted with each other when in conflict seemed to have changed so little. I rose to remind him that Getting to Yes had been published in more than thirty different languages, had sold millions of copies (and, as of this writing, is in its fortieth printing), and had revolutionized how negotiation is taught in law schools, business, public policy and planning, and in international relations and government departments. (Many of these places, in fact, had never even taught negotiation before the book’s publication.) In addition, thousands of lawyers, diplomats, business people, labor negotiators, managers, and educators around the world have been trained in the book’s concepts of “interest-based” bargaining, to think about “interests, not positions,”to “separate the people from the problem,”to “invent options for mutual gain,” and to “use objective criteria” to productively resolve their disputes and conflicts. These have become the four golden rules of principled negotiation and Getting to Yes has become the canon. Students of the book’s authors, Roger Fisher,Bill Ury,and Bruce Patton, have learned not only these four methods of approaching others with the goal of improving the prospects of both parties via their negotiation. They Carrie Menkel-Meadow is the A. B. Chettle Jr. Professor of Dispute Resolution, Civil Procedure, and Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and the director of the Georgetown-Hewlett Program in Conflict Resolution and Legal Problem Solving. Her e-mail address is meadow@ law.georgetown.edu. 10.1111/j.1571-9979.2006.00119.x © 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard College Negotiation Journal October 2006 485 have also mastered the “seven elements” of problem solving: learning how to diagnose and frame a problem, how to brainstorm multiple possible solutions, how to decide what information is necessary to develop solutions, and how to choose, implement, and evaluate actions taken. In negotiation classes throughout the world,students consider what they“did well” or what they would “do differently next time” as they navigate the experi- ential and behavioral components of the Getting to Yes conceptual frame- works,learning to improve behavior through on-going self-reflection and by constantly reapplying conceptual templates to the messiness and chaos of human communications and interactions. In additional books, “spin-offs” of Getting to Yes, the authors have expanded the principles and elements to human relationships (Getting Together: Building Relationships as We Negotiate 1989); international relations (Beyond Machiavelli:Tools for Coping with Conflict by Fisher, Kopel- man, and Schneider 1994); preparing for negotiation (Getting Ready to Negotiate by Fisher and Ertel 1995);designing systems of dispute resolution (Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Cost of Conflict by Ury, Brett, and Goldberg 1988); dealing with difficult people (Getting Past No: Negotiating with Difficult People by Ury 1991) or difficult issues (Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Stone, Patton, and Heen 1999); leadership (Getting It Done: How to Lead When You are Not in Charge by Fisher and Sharp 1999); and most recently, emotions (Beyond Reason: Using Emotions asYou Negotiate by Fisher and Shapiro 2005). All of these books were coauthored or heavily influenced by Fisher, Ury, and Patton, working with an ever-expanding group of the next generation of negotiation theorists, teachers, and practitioners. The Getting to Yes influence has extended to the production of new theories, many books and articles, laboratory and empirical studies of actual or simulated negotiation behavior, and countless applications of the basic interest-based or principled model of negotiation for mutual gain in actual negotiations, both dyadic and multipartied. Getting to Yes did not create a field per se, because others had gone before and were the sources of many of the book’s insights. Notable among these sources were Boston educator Mary Parker Follett, who in the 1920s had developed important ideas about constructive and integrative conflict resolution, and Richard Walton and Robert McKersie (1965), who developed the basic model of integrative, interest-based bargaining for labor relations in the 1960s. The authors of Getting to Yes also drew on the many constituent disciplines of negotiation theory and practice, including eco- nomics, game theory, psychology, anthropology, political science, sociology, decision sciences,communications,and planning,to name some,but not all, of the bodies of knowledge that have contributed ideas or “memes” (cul- tural genes) about negotiation. However, the publication of Getting to Yes heralded the birth of a newly invigorated interdisciplinary, behavioral, and 486 Carrie Menkel-Meadow Why Hasn’t the World Gotten to Yes? conceptual field, whose theorists and practitioners hoped, as Roger has said,“to change the world” through ideas, teaching, and action. In this retrospective essay, I seek to appreciate and celebrate the achievement of Getting to Yes and its progeny, to explore the ideas it has contributed to what we know and what we do, and to consider the new frontiers of knowledge that are being explored in its name.In addition,I will reflect on what was missing in the original conceptions (some of which has been added in more recent work) and on what remains to be done. Finally, — and,more poignantly — I will take up Roger Fisher’s question of why the world has not changed enough so that we explore every situation of conflict as an opportunity to get to some kind of “Yes” with the others we are involved with. Whether lamenting the absence of world peace or more constructive ordinary human interaction, I fear that ideas of adversarialism, competition for seemingly scarce resources, individual or national maximi- zation strategies, so-called“clashes”of competing interests and cultures, and vested interests in competitive habits — rather than cooperation or collabo- ration — continue to thrive and to blunt the great vision of human potential that lies at the heart of Getting to Yes. Why this is so should be one of the most important subjects in the study of human interaction. Roots and Sources: Intellectual Convergences This essay is a personal appreciation as well as my attempt to both assess and advance the intellectual and practical impact of a body of work aimed at changing intellectual and behavioral worldviews (or paradigms, if you prefer the now trite reference to the work of Thomas Kuhn (1962)). What produces paradigm shifts, or more modestly, new ideas or conceptions of human reality? Moreover,what allows them to take hold or not at particular moments in time? Consider my first encounter with Getting to Yes. It was 1982 and I had just completed the first draft of my own attempt to transform the adver- sarial mindset with which lawyers approach legal disputes, a work titled Toward Another View of Legal Negotiation: The Structure of Problem Solving (see Menkel-Meadow 1984). I was in a bookstore in Manhattan, visiting my hometown from my academic home three thousand miles away in “touchy-feely” California. I spotted a new book whose cover announced in bold green letters that one can “negotiate agreement without giving in.” I began to read and my professional self felt a knot in her stomach — the advantage of thinking that you are writing something new (or noncase- oriented in law) is that you cannot, in law review terms, be intellectually or legally “preempted.”I read the four principles of “principled negotiation” as Fisher and Ury articulated them and saw an amazing likeness to my own “problem-solving” conception of negotiation, involving consideration of “needs and interests” not legal positions, a search for “creative solutions” that“meet the needs of all parties”by“expanding resources”and an attempt Negotiation Journal October 2006 487 to persuade competitive individual maximizers — whose lawyer ethics require negotiators to be zealous advocates, to instead“focus on solving the underlying problem of both parties.” In the important four maxims of Getting to Yes, I saw an elegant, pithy, and compressed template, distilled from thousands of words and ideas from the “shoulders of giants” who had gone before (Merton 1993). I also began to see some places where I differed from this spare but wise text. No “separating the people from the problem” for me — the people are too often the problem to be solved — and negotiation is more like a set of simultaneous equations that require a focus both on the substantive problem and on the human relations problems (now concep- tualized by other negotiation theorists as “the negotiation across the table” and “behind the table” [Mnookin, Peppet, and Tulumello 2000]). And, while the pithy, elegant spareness of the prose aspires to universal or generaliz- able principles of negotiation, I wondered how “insisting on and using objective criteria” can function in legal negotiations where both parties appeal to “objective” legal principles as they seek settlements of contested lawsuits or argue about the appropriate language for an administrative regulation. However, with my new book in hand and remembering Thomas Kuhn’s shifting paradigms, I emerged from the bookstore with the knot in my stomach loosened, believing that I was witnessing a particular, propi- tious, and exciting moment of human insight. What I had been thinking and studying on the West Coast at the University of California, I discovered, was simultaneously being explored in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in other places, and by those in countless other disciplines outside of the law.

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