The Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki

Negotiation Basics

If Extraverted attitudes show you the world primarily as a place to negotiate (as proposed on Negotiation Exegesis and Saints-and-Politicians Exegesis), maybe we could learn something about Lenore's ideas by looking at different ways to negotiate.

Know your alternatives

The basic principle of negotiation is to know your alternatives. If you know of another offer, you know for sure when to leave the negotiation table: if the other person refuses to give you at least that much.

It follows, then, that to negotiate, you need to know what else is available for you in the world right now. You also need to know how you rank those options.

Negotiation is empirical discovery

A deep principle of negotiation is that it's a process of discovery, not simply a process of getting your way. You can find out how much someone is willing to bend only by pushing them that far. You take what's takable, not what you've decided is proper by some kind of a priori criteria.

Force a choice

Negotiation is forcing a choice. You take a position; the other party must accept, refuse, or counteroffer. You could take other positions, of course. But you don't. You take a position that favors your self-interest as far as you think you can push it while still offering the best alternative for the other party.

Different interests

Your interests and those of the other party are not the same. There is some commonality, which you exploit to make a deal, but each of you has different options available to you and different ways of ranking them. In contrast to an Introverted approach, the object of negotiation is not to find a right way of valuing things, which everyone should see and conform to, it's to exploit the existing differences and commonalities between the way you and the other party really value things.


See also the Negotiating Pattern Language, a set of wiki pages mostly written by an ENTP (Peter Merel, a friend of Ben Kovitz; the type guess is just my call).

Version 2 2003-Aug-19 20:24 UTC

Last edit by 66.215.85.114