The 6 essential phases of negotiation

A practical proposal for an effective negotiation model

An important part of what you can learn about negotiation, in many of the most read articles and best-selling books, is wrong or incomplete information – except, of course, for honorable exceptions. This can be very detrimental to your interests, because if you apply it in the wrong negotiation it will make the result you achieve a disaster. Let me prove it to you.

I'm convinced you've heard of negotiation win win, whose approach is truly bucolic and which enjoys undisputed popularity among most professionals, authors and trainers of this art. This approach is also often combined with the well-known and distorted “term or midpoint” by Aristotle. In such a way that if we are negotiating, for example, the purchase price of a good, and one of the parties establishes the price as 100 and the other 50, which is “usually wait” is that the agreement be reached in 75, in such a way that both parties “win”… –excuse me for using such a simplistic example, but I think it is illustrative–.

Let's move on to another fairly everyday situation, let's imagine that two people have decided to go to the movies together. When they arrive, they have to agree on which movie to watch. One of them wants to watch an action movie and the other wants to watch a romantic movie. If we apply the win-win solution, the result could be that they would watch half of the action movie first, leave the screening, and move on to watch the second half of the romantic movie. Absurd, right? Well, this way of negotiating is so dysfunctional, as demonstrated by a simple reductio ad absurdum, You can find it in many more negotiations than is recommended, applied by negotiators who do not fully explain why the negotiation failed when they did everything they “should” do. 

How to face any negotiation successfully?

We saw in the previous article, titled The Triangle of Effective Negotiation, that every negotiation is based on a triangle made up of Strategy, Tactics and Communication and the fundamental ideas that each of them contained. In this same article I committed to sharing with you the structure that, over the last 25 years, I have proven works best in any type of negotiation. Here it is.

The first thing we have to keep in mind is that, although we are going to see the different phases in a linear way, they do not always happen this way. In any human interaction, such as negotiation, it is usual for any process to be systemic and non-linear. Effective negotiation takes place in six essential phases, which we will see below, and these do not always occur one after the other, with the next beginning when the previous one ends, but there can be leaps, setbacks and simultaneous interactions, which makes it essential that Let us be very attentive to what is happening. Despite this, having the structure that we are going to see below in mind serves as a map with which to orient ourselves – keeping in mind that, as Neurolinguistic Programming says, “The map is not the territory"–.

Essential phases of negotiation

The six essential phases of negotiation They are: perception, discrepancy, conflict, concessions, agreement and compliance. Let's see what each of them consists of.

1. The perception. It is the moment in which we find ourselves in the negotiation. We must know where we are starting from and where we want to go, clearly establishing the objective we want to achieve. What are the strengths and weaknesses of our counterpart and our own. The idiosyncrasy of the organization with which we are negotiating and the defining traits of its negotiators, in order to find the most effective levers with which to rationally, emotionally and instinctively impact the other, to achieve our objective. In this phase listening, observing and visualizing are of special importance.
2. The discrepancy. Every negotiation starts from a discrepancy, from one or several points of disagreement, without which the negotiation would not make sense because, if it did not exist, we would be facing an agreement. This discrepancy is usually determined by a different perception of the situation by the negotiators, which may be caused by how they interpret the past, present or future situation. Discrepancies usually arise from what is said and how it is interpreted, so language and intention are of paramount importance.
3. The conflict. Based on any discrepancy, agreement can only be achieved through conflict – understood from a very broad point of view – and whose existence does not necessarily imply negative feelings or emotions. In this phase, strategic vision and emotional intelligence are essential, since we must very precisely weigh the effective cost of the conflict and the value of assuming the risks that manifest themselves in any negotiation.
4. The concessions. The only way to solve a conflict is for concessions to be made, whether unilateral, bilateral or multilateral, even if the solution is seen in a different scenario than what was established by the parties from the beginning. Trade-offs should always be determined by the relationship between present or future benefit and reduced cost or risk. For optimal management of this phase we must have high personal self-esteem, which allows us to fluctuate before our adversary from a symmetrical position to a complementary one when appropriate, without this being interfered with by our ego. 
5. The agreement. It is only achieved when we have considered the costs and/or risk that we must assume as inevitable and less harmful, compared to another possible agreement; when we have completely eliminated those or achieved the objectives we had set for ourselves. In this phase it is necessary that we be able to understand how the different cognitive biases work and the persuasion maneuvers that can be used when we let our guard down in the face of an agreement in principle. Because seemingly small, unimportant details can make the difference in the suitability or otherwise of the final result.
6. Compliance. We live in a time where the personal brand permeates almost everything, especially in the professional field, so the correct management of compliance with what has been agreed is decisive for future results, with the same interlocutor or with a different one. We must be able to correctly manage not only what is formally agreed upon, but also the more or less manifest expectations that the other party has beyond what is “signed” in the agreement.

In the next articles in this series we will delve into the different phases that we have just seen.