4th Module - Turning confrontation into cooperation

From Peacebuilding

Many negotiations seem intractable and agreement looks impossible. William Ury has developed a method he calls “breakthrough negotiation”, he articulates it in five steps:

1. Go to the balcony (don’t control the other person’s behaviour, control your own);
2. Step to their side (create a favourable climate; defuse anger, fear, suspicion and hostility of the other side);
3. Reframe (when the other side digs into position, change the game: reframe to help them deal with the problem);
4. Build them a golden bridge (try to identify and satisfy their interests; help them save face, make the outcome appear as a victory for them);
5. Use power to educate (if they still dig into position and want to win over you, educate them to the contrary, make it hard for them to say no).

Offline

• Ury, William, Getting Past No: Negotiating Your Way From Confrontation To Cooperation, New York: Bantam, 1991.

Online

• Wikipedia contributors, "Getting past NO," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Getting_past_NO&oldid=86154581 (accessed November 15, 2006).

• Glaser, Tanya, Conflict Research Consortium, “Book Summary: Getting Past No: Negotiating With Difficult People”, in International Online Training Program on Intractable Conflict, University of Colorado, URL=<http://www.crinfo.org/booksummary/10438/>.

Activities you can use when working on this content include

• Brainstorming on Confrontation to Cooperation. How can you turn confrontation into cooperation? How can you transform conflicts to be fought into problems to be solved? A classic brainstorming exercise based on these questions.

• Five Barriers to Cooperation. This activitiy - inspired on Ury's text - invites participants to explore real-world barriers that get in the way to cooperation and to devise strategies to break through them. Handouts, quickly describing the five most common barriers, are distributed to participants to introduce basic content necessary for exploration.

• Observing Role-Players. Volunteer role-players are given a scenario and asked to play in front of the rest of participants, who act as observers. Observers are duly briefed on what to look for - barriers to cooperation. The dynamic used is the "fishbowl": role-players at the centre, observers form a circle around them. The experiential activity and the contents introduced boost a discussion that moves from "what actually happened" to "what tends to get in the way to cooperation" and to "what can be done about it".