More on Getting to Yes

The idea of interest based negotiation is a really important one, it underpins really good mediation for a whole range of reasons.

It leads us away from what we want and helps us to explore what is important to us and others, this can give rise to more choices, more options for the future and the potential for solutions that work better for everyone.

Fisher, Ury and Patton also call it principled negotiation because it seeks out opportunities for shared value.  Of course, it doesn’t always make sense that we might “win” an argument by giving something away or spending more time thinking about what the other person needs but here it is, the Harvard Negotiation Project has been teaching this since Getting to Yes was first published back in 1981.

This short clip illustrates a fairly straight forward and a more complicated example.