One of my favorite exercises in my conflict managment classes is allowing students to negotiate the assignments of the course.

How do we make decisions?

Is it weird that I teach negotiation in a conflict managment class? Some of my students are thrown off guard. Yes, they need to figure out where they and their spouse want to live after graduation. Yes, they’re frustrated because they’ve been sick this semester and they’re having problems with their instructors. Yes, their roommate is a hot mess, but it’s fine becasue they’ve just decided to move out when the lease ends in 7 months.

But negotiation sounds way too serious.

Negotiation isn’t a term that we use when we’re talking about problems with our partners, family, collegues, or friends. Yet if we borrow some ideas from Negotiation literature to reframe how we go about solving problems with these important people, it opens up more tools we can use to have productive conversations.

Realistic Negotiations

So, I can teach them some Negotiation terms and processes, but have you tried creating a mock negotiation when people are not at all invested? If we don’t care about the other person, or feel something of ours is at risk, or have interest in the problem, there’s not much space to take any of this seriously.

So, we give them something to negotiate that they care about. Their time, their energy, their work, their reputation, their grades.

It works marvelously well to perk their interest.

Modeling Productive Conflict

The key to this is that the instructor needs to be authentic and honest as the other party in the negotiation. I won’t lie to my students here. There are limits and contraints to what I can do (No, my department won’t allow cancelling class as a possible solution) and certain needs and desires that I have (Demonstrations that they’ve learned the content and also, in a way that doesn’t add anything big to my plate, thank you!). We discuss those boundaries and needs in the same way we discuss theirs. Calm assertiveness, humor, and appreciation are help skills to deply here.

What does this look like?