HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Roger Fisher (left), director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, isn't afraid to show his feelings, and neither is associate director Daniel Shapiro. The two have recently co-authored 'Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.' (Staff photo Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office)

In any negotiation, says Fisher, the Samuel Williston Professor Emeritus of Law and the director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, "there are a handful of things you can easily do, and you'd be dumb not to do them." Expressing appreciation for one's interlocutor is one of them.

And appreciation is one of the five "core concerns" that Fisher and his co-author Daniel Shapiro, associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, have identified as essential to address whenever parties get together to work out a deal, whether it's the handoff of children by one half of a divorced couple to the other or a labor contract or a peace treaty.

Anyone in a negotiation wants to feel appreciated, Fisher and Shapiro maintain. They also want to feel "affiliated," want to feel some personal connection to others. Negotiators also want to preserve, and preferably expand, their autonomy. They want their status acknowledged: Perhaps this is a function of their rank within an organization, or of their specialized knowledge or institutional memory. And they want to choose and play a fulfilling role within the negotiation.

When either side in a negotiation feels these core concerns are not being addressed, the result is negative emotions, such as anger, fear, and guilt, which trigger competitive action - including old-style "I want mine" kind of bargaining. When those core concerns are addressed, positive emotions, leading to cooperative action, are fostered, and the result is much likelier to be a "win-win" agreement.

It appears that emotion has become respectable. "I don't have people criticize me for talking about emotions," says Fisher. "No one says it's a soft, fuzzy area."

Shapiro notes that just as the behavioral revolution was succeeded by the cognitive revolution, since the late 1980s and early '90s there has been increased interest, in the field of psychology, in the role of emotions, and this has been mirrored within the field of conflict resolution. Although psychology and the mental health field generally have tended to focus on the pathologies of the human mind, the past 15 years or so have seen increased interest in positive emotions and in the value of gratitude and the power of appreciation. Daniel Goleman's 1995 best-selling book "Emotional Intelligence" was a milestone in this trend.

Shapiro points out that as organizational hierarchies have become flatter, more work is being done by horizontal teams that "by definition" have to operate more by negotiation than by fiat from on high, and this has increased the demand for better understanding of how to work with emotions.

But even if people are aware that they should take emotions - their own and others' - into account, it's not always clear just how to do this. "We find people very hungry for information, for practical tools," says Shapiro, in dealing with what he describes as the otherwise often unmanageable "big glob of emotions" in negotiation.

"People are aware of emotion but don't know how to talk about it," says Fisher. "One ambassador can't ask another, 'How are your emotions doing today?'"

Fisher and Shapiro advocate using these five core concerns - appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role - "as a lens and as a lever."

As an example of the power of cultivating a sense of affiliation between negotiating teams, the authors cite the experience of Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer during the long and painstaking discussions to negotiate away South Africa's apartheid regime.

Ramaphosa, secretary-general of the African National Congress, and Meyer, his opposite number in the white minority regime, forged a bond through their common interest in fly-fishing. At one point, Fisher and Shapiro recount, Ramaphosa got a fishhook stuck in his thumb - and Meyer was able to extract it, relatively painlessly. Some weeks later, as Shapiro tells it, the negotiations came to a particular tricky point. Meyer turned to Ramaphosa and said, "Trust me." With the memory of the fishhook fresh in his mind, Ramaphosa was able to trust, and the negotiation proceeded.

As a more current example of a difficult negotiation where emotions come into play, Fisher cites North Korea. "I'm glad we're opening the discussion with North Korea," he says, adding that it's important to "separate the talking from the deciding." He is a great believer in "second-level negotiations" between interlocutors who can talk and brainstorm and invent options that those up the chain of command can then consider.

Shapiro cites President Bush's apology to the nation after the Katrina disaster as another example of acknowledgment of emotion in a situation that is implicitly a negotiation. The president's speech "softened a lot of strong emotions out there," he says. "It said, 'I understand, I see.'"