Watching the debt negotiations between eurozone leaders and the US’s political parties this past month, I began to wonder whether what they were haggling over was really so important, so epic and definitive. If some of the world’s biggest economies were truly hanging in the balance, could they not find a better way to negotiate? Late night sessions leading up to dubious deadlines are no way to decide anything. It had to be all theatre, because surely no one could be so reckless with the public’s trust.
The study of negotiation between governments, companies and individuals has come a long way in the past 30 years, thanks in large part to the Harvard Negotiation Project, a long-running attempt to make a science out of what had always been considered an art. William Ury, one of the founders of the project and author of the negotiation classic Getting To Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, has looked on aghast at the debt negotiations.
In an ideal process, he told me, the various parties would have assembled months ago, perhaps in a rural location far from Washington, to explore and analyse the issues and invent a variety of solutions, long before they had to decide which to choose. It is what any sensible company would do if it knew a major decision loomed. “Taking it down to the wire,” he says, “makes it all about bargaining and less about creativity.”