Negotiation & Influence

Sea-Change Partners offers a complete curriculum of interactive courses that, together, comprise all the skills you need to be a truly successful negotiator.

Strategic Negotiation — The Fundamentals:

This foundation course, based on the ground-breaking approaches of the Harvard Negotiation Project, is designed to enhance your skills as a negotiator and your understanding of any negotiating situation; whether at work or at home. You will learn essential tools and practical ideas that will improve your results and make you more confident as a negotiator.  No matter how good – or experienced – a negotiator you are, this course will help you to get better results, and to improve your performance over time.

 

Communication Tools for Negotiators & The Art of Difficult Conversations:

Communication is the means by which we negotiate. One of the most important skills a negotiator can develop is the ability to communicate effectively for expression and understanding. This course equips negotiators with practical tools for turning debate into dialogue, for clarifying misunderstandings, and for overcoming differences of opinion. Participants will also learn why understanding others is often the key to influencing them effectively.  Participants will also learn how to be more effective at “difficult conversations;” essentially, any conversation you find difficult – from talking about relationships, to giving or receiving feedback, to asserting yourself when you know it will make you, and others, uncomfortable.  These are the most essential communication skills for any negotiator – and for anyone exercising leadership.

Negotiation Self-Defense:

Have you ever felt “under attack” in a negotiation? Have people ever tried to manipulate you (and succeeded)?  Negotiation Self-Defense is the art of dealing skilfully with extremely difficult negotiators and their tactics. Learn the tricks used by the most challenging negotiators — and what to do when you have to face them. This course includes simulated difficult negotiations with professionals who are expert at using the tricks and traps. Practice negotiating in the “hot seat” so that when you have to face the real thing; you’ll feel more confident, and you’ll know what to do to protect yourself and succeed.

A Strategic Approach to Persuasion:

Have you ever had trouble getting someone to make the decision you want them to make? Have you ever had to sell an idea – or a proposal — to a group of people?  Influence is almost never a “one-size-fits-all” proposition.  If you want to be effective, you need a strategic approach to these situations. This workshop will help you to improve your chances of getting a “yes” when it counts.  The course includes choice analysis tools and strategic approaches to influencing individual decision-makers, as well as strategic approaches to influencing a group.  It includes training in the art of sequencing and tipping points in influence strategies, and in the skills of being more effective without being confrontational.

Negotiating Inside & Out — Managing Internal & External Negotiations:

Have your internal negotiations – those with your superiors, subordinates, other departments, or other colleagues – ever made it harder for you to negotiate with customers or others outside your organization?  Do you find it harder to negotiate with your family members, boss, or your colleagues than with strangers? This course gives you practical advice on how to negotiate effectively on “your own side of the table,” and on how to use your external negotiations to help you internally, and vice versa.

Managing Complex Multi-Party Negotiations:

Whether you are negotiating a new project with multiple stakeholders, a trade agreement, or an international treaty on climate change, this course will help you to understand your negotiating environment and to be more effective in a multi-party setting.  The course will use multi-party role-play simulations and practical lectures to help participants learn how to diagnose the challenges, design processes, deploy strategies, and achieve better results in a complex multi-party negotiating environment.

Hostage and Crisis Negotiation:

Crisis situations place very specific demands on negotiators. Negotiating effectively in a high-stakes crisis takes special training. Sea-Change professionals are highly-experienced crisis negotiators who can help you negotiate more effectively when the stakes are high and the pressure is on.  Our courses are based on years of practice negotiating with terrorists, militants, and hostage-takers and advising police, military, and diplomats, and executives on high-stakes crisis negotiations.  Sea-Change routinely trains many of the world’s top counter-terrorism police forces in crisis and hostage negotiation.  Sea-Change senior consultants, Adam Dolnik and Keith Fitzgerald are co-authors of Negotiating Hostage Crises with the New Terrorists, which is required reading in many top police and counter-terrorism organizations worldwide.

Sea-Change Partners professionals act as advisors and coaches to negotiators worldwide to improve bottom-line return on negotiated outcomes via the following applied services:

Negotiation Simulations: Tools for Practice

Simulations exist to allow people to practice and to experiment – that is, to try new things in a learning environment where consequences are minimal. Participants can engage each other – and our professionals – in simulated, role-play negotiations in order to learn their strengths and weaknesses, improve their habits, refine their skills, and design better strategies.  In short, there is no better way to learn and practice negotiation than to do it, with professional coaching and feedback.
(Video-recording of simulations with professional feedback and coaching is available).

 

Applied Strategies for Influence:

Sea-Change professionals will help clients to conduct systematic choice analysis in order to develop more effective influence and communication strategies for an upcoming negotiation.  This may involve applying choice analysis tools, conducting role-reversal negotiations, and/or practicing conversations with professional coaching before you go for the real thing.  There is no substitute for coming to the table confident and prepared.

Systematic Preparation for an Upcoming Negotiation:

Sea-Change can help individuals and teams of negotiators take the opportunity to prepare systematically for a given negotiation – with professional strategic assistance. Preparation will include a structured approach, using a comprehensive framework and scenario-based practice before the real negotiation.  Much of your success in any important negotiation begins with how – and how well — you prepare.  Professional help in preparation will make you both more confident – and more successful – at the table.

Advice for Difficult Situations:

We all face difficult negotiation situations. And there is no substitute for preparation.  Negotiators who are prepared for challenges are simply going to be much more successful than those who are forced to deal with difficulties “on the spot.”  Sea-Change Partners professionals will work with clients in order to prepare them for especially challenging negotiations (in general and/or for specific cases) and to achieve better-than-expected results, when it matters most.

Conflict Management & Relationship Management Strategies:

Often the most challenging parts of any negotiation are coping with conflict and dealing with relationship issues (that is, dealing with emotions, personal history, or the friction created by argument).  Sea-Change Partners experts are among the world’s most experienced conflict managers.  That experience includes direct assistance to leaders and negotiators in costly commercial disputes, civil wars, peace processes, diplomatic crises, hostage situations, and other intense conflicts – at the interpersonal and international levels.  Our approaches have been proven to work in some of the world’s most intense conflicts.  Surely we can help you…

Facilitated Brainstorming for Negotiated Solutions:

Sea-Change helps clients to think of the best possible substantive outcomes in a negotiation; exploring joint gains for maximum value, negotiating appropriate trade-offs, or the brainstorming of options and criteria to make them persuasive.  If you are working with a team – or with clients – to solve important problems, overcome deadlock, or to take full advantage of strategic opportunities, then Sea-Change can help you to work effectively as a group and achieve superior outcomes.

Negotiation Process Design:

One of the most common reasons for poor outcomes in negotiations — and why negotiations lead to damaged relationships — is actually bad process.  Yet most people do not choose – or design – a process for their negotiations, beyond – perhaps – setting an agenda.  Professional negotiators know better, and the best negotiators are also good “process thinkers.”  Even the world’s best negotiators cannot overcome the limits of bad process.  And good process is often the key to success in any negotiation.  Sea-Change professionals work with our clients as “negotiation architects” to improve the processes our clients use when they negotiate – leading to better outcomes, and unleashing the potential of their most skilled negotiators.

Enhanced Practice with Counterpart Experts

With advance preparation, Sea-Change Partners professionals will work with our clients who are facing an important negotiation by simulating that specific, upcoming negotiation and even hiring industry experts to play the role of the opposing side.  In fact, where possible, we will help our clients to find actual people who have spent time negotiating on behalf of their counterparties in past negotiations.  There is, quite simply, no better way to prepare for an important negotiation than to practice in a realistic simulation.  This is the equivalent of lawyers using mock trials before actually going to court.

Because Negotiation and Influence are activities, like a sport, practice is an essential part of improving skills, designing strategies, and exercising your “negotiation muscles.”  Practice means actually negotiating.  However, the risk of “learning-by-doing” in real negotiations tends to be high; because there are real stakes in most of your negotiations – and, therefore, real consequences.  We help our clients benefit from “real” practice, but without the real risk, by developing customized simulations and realistic negotiation scenarios that are based on our clients’ actual negotiations.
Sea-Change works with our clients to create simulations of their most common negotiations, their most important negotiations, and/or their most challenging negotiations.

• By simulating their most common negotiations, clients have useful internal training tools that can be used again and again, over time, to train new recruits, to practice new strategies, to experiment with new approaches, and to maintain the skill sets of all the people in the organization who negotiate.
• By simulating their most important negotiations, clients can improve their chances of success when the stakes are highest by making mistakes less likely and by sending people into the negotiation who are truly well-prepared.  When you are facing an important negotiation, you should never be having it for real the first time.  Good negotiators make sure they have experienced the negotiation in a role-play simulation before they actually get to the table.
• By simulating their most challenging negotiations, clients can make sure they are doing everything possible to overcome the obstacles they face — even before they actually face them.  It is often far more difficult to solve a problem, or overcome an obstacle, while you’re under pressure at the table, than it is to do so with the pressures removed.  Often the best way to design an approach to deal with challenges is in a simulation, where clients can adjust variables, experiment with different approaches, and better estimate potential consequences.  And by practicing challenging negotiations, our clients develop the kinds of skills — and confidence – that make most routine negotiations far easier.

We want our clients to feel like they have “seen it all” by the time they get to the table.