Avoid These Traps When Negotiating in a Crisis

Avoid These Traps When Negotiating in a Crisis

by Adil Najam - March 24, 2020

Right now, around the world, countless negotiations are underway, and the results will literally influence life and death. Leaders and their advisers at innumerable school boards, town halls, universities, C-suites and boardrooms, governors’ mansions, and presidential palaces are desperately deliberating over policies for social distancing, reducing density, setting restrictions, relaxing standard procedures, working remotely, teaching online, and much more that will determine the ultimate outcome of this pandemic.

In times of crisis, a great deal of decision-making is done through negotiation. Some crises - market crashes, natural disasters, even wars - can, to a degree, be anticipated and prepared for. The Covid-19 pandemic is not one of these cases. The speed and severity of its potential threats, uncertainty of information patterns, and, most importantly, its novelty, make it feel very different. These factors will lead many to panic. They also heighten the need for people to debate and decide on potential solutions together.

Indeed, the accumulated wisdom of negotiation theory and practice can and typically should be applied to such situations. However, in times of panic, there are at least two important “traps” that make this difficult or, worse, inappropriate.

Move From Definitive to Contingent Measures

Time warps in all crises, but during panics it tends to be counted in moments; thinking beyond the immediate can feel outright vulgar. Once I am convinced that a crisis is existential, I concentrate entirely on securing the immediate – even if that means hoarding toilet paper – because tomorrow may not come. This is entirely expected and not at all unreasonable. Timeliness of action is paramount, especially in a crisis like Covid-19 where precaution and early measures can make all the difference.

However, standard negotiating advice is to think about the long term. What will be the impact, including unintended consequences, of what I decide today? Political scientist Robert Axelrod called this notion the “shadow of the future.”

Of course, at high noon, there are no shadows. In moments of panic, tomorrow seems too far away. And, in a crisis such as Covid-19, different stakeholders can have very different time horizons: experts driven by emerging evidence, citizens by media hype, politicians by electoral cycles, employers by business models, boards by liability concerns.

Still, a crisis is as terrible a time as any to ignore the long term. Coronavirus will eventually (and hopefully soon) recede, and interim decisions that ignore medium- and long-term implications can leave institutions unprepared, and sometimes impaired, for return to post-crisis normalcy.

Possible Fix: Difficult as it may seem, we do not have to choose between the immediate and the long term. We should not. It may be useful, for example, to identify what Lawrence Susskind would call “contingent measures.”

For example, let’s say that you are on a school board committee, and you’ve decided to transition to virtual instruction for the rest of the semester.  Your immediate concerns are the health and safety of your students, faculty, and staff.  Students and parents are wondering whether there will still be a graduation, what impact the change will have on grades, and how this might affect their future goals, such as college admissions or employment?

In your negotiation, the immediate goals are safety, and, despite the uncertainties, to plan the path to graduation. What are your contingent measures? If it is looking like a short lockout, maybe you close school for a week with homework. If it goes beyond two weeks, you gear up for remote teaching. If longer, you plan for remote exams and full-scale online classes. As you’re weighing each of these moves, think about the short- and long-term implications.

At the same time, you need to map out a contingent path to return. At what point do essential staff start coming back to ready the school for opening? At what point does some on-campus activity begin? At what point is everything back to normal? What are the preparatory measures for each stage?

Move Towards Collaborative Decision-Making

The concept of BATNA - the best alternative to a negotiated agreement - introduced in the seminal book Getting to Yes, has become a central touchstone of most win-win negotiation strategies. The idea is to get to an agreement that is better than the best you can do without an agreement. This focuses the mind on how we can maximize potential gains.

However, in times of grave crisis, decision-making is motivated much more by wanting to avoid the “worst” alternative (WATNA), than improving on the BATNA.

That is how it should be. A primary responsibility of any institution’s Covid-19 response has to be to minimize risk and avoid catastrophic loss. But once the framework moves to concentrating on the worst that can happen, anxiety sets in, and our usual habits of negotiation can seem useless. Familiar tools of analysis - the impulse to maximize gains, analyze costs and benefits, distribute risks, bargain for advantage, trade across differently valued interests - are hard to employ in a climate of fear where the goal is not to seek mutual gain but to avoid mutual loss.

The problem is compounded because our negotiation habits tend to be so deep-seated that an inability to retort to familiar frameworks can trigger discomfort - certainly anxiety, possibly fear and panic - and breed doubt and distrust in the intent of others.

If this was not already bad enough, much of our interaction in this age of Covid-19 is happening virtually, as we practice “social distancing” to avoid the spread of the disease. The unprecedented and unrehearsed spike in remote work arrangements could multiply our stresses and further increase the need for negotiation. But research has found that distance is particularly ill-suited for difficult conversations.

Possible Fix: Extracting ourselves from a negotiation mindset and moving into what Howard Raiffa calls “collaborative decision making,” as well as helping others to do so, can be invaluable in panic situations. His call to approach negotiation “with full, open, truthful exchanges” in search of joint gains can sometimes seem like an unrealistically idealistic quest in everyday negotiations, but in times of crisis it is both useful and absolutely necessary. The situation is already stressful; adding doubt, distrust and distance does not help anyone. So we must continue to focus together on maximizing gains.

Moving from definitive to contingent measures and from a negotiation mindset into collaborative decision making can be helpful in many, if not most, situations. But these strategies are particularly pertinent - maybe critical – for those currently having to negotiate a Covid-19 response in myriad institutional settings. These two lessons are also relevant, I believe, to anyone who has to negotiate in other instances of panic-prone crises, which, unfortunately, happen far more often than any one of us would wish.

Adil Najam is the dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and a scholar of international negotiation. In 2011, as the then Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), in Pakistan, he had to deal with a dengue outbreak and make the difficult call to close down that university for the first time in its history, and then to lead it back to normalcy post-crisis.