Quickthink

One of the most difficult parts of a negotiation training course is to think properly about planning. It’s very easy to say (and I say it again and again) that one should never negotiate without a plan. But people do it all the time. It is not so easy to say, however, what is a good plan.  What’s the point of wasting a lot of time on planning if the plan that you come up with has no relevance to the chit chat in the negotiation? Yeah, that happens a lot too. You get a result like this

Image from The Journey of Diabetes From a Mom’s Eyes. 

So, it was fun today to see a post from Managing Product Developmentabout strategic planning ( with some do’s and don’t’s). There are similarities between strategic planning sessions for management and negotiation planning, and I totally agree with Johanna Rothman that the SWOT approach is usually not very useful. Nor am I overly persuaded that the Harvard Negotiation Project identification of “interests” is all that helpful beyond the basics.

Drucker had it right when he emphasized that planning (all planning) is about the future — something we cannot know with certainty. That is what makes negotiation as a topic so interesting —- it can be a learning tool that we use to break out of unproductive patterns of behavior and shape a better future …… ERRRRRR….. if we can plan and implement property.

So back to Johanna (the author of the above post on strategic planning). I’m not so sure that it is just a matter of “hard work”. I think manicures and relaxing can help. And anyway, I would recommend Seth Godin’s view of what effort is all about when we start up on theat “hard work”.  It’s  a lot more fun to put in “hard work” to realize our “vision of success” rather than to do no work, but open our eyes to risk and uncertainty.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Professional Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.