Training Framework 3:
Planning for a Specific, Important Negotiation

The third framework is useful if your firm or organization is heading into a particularly challenging or important negotiation. Whether this involves a merger or transaction with another corporation, a lawsuit, collective bargaining or another matter entirely, we can design a training/consultation to prepare specifically for the substantive issues and practical problems that will likely arise, but which are often obscure to those without long experience of this field.

Convenor consultants Chris Honeyman and Bernie Mayer have decades of experience as working mediators; Andrea Schneider and Julie Macfarlane are accomplished empirical researchers. Training in this area is most effective when it not only draws from deep experience with real-world negotiating problems, but also translates from thoroughly grounded research, turning it into practical methods for negotiation. Schneider's and Macfarlane's work has been relied on by government agencies for policy changes as well as by practitioners seeking to understand the negotiation process better and enhance their skills. Over the last ten years Macfarlane’s empirical research, for example, has examined the effectiveness of lawyers in mediation; the goals and expectations of clients in facilitated negotiation processes; and what makes consensus-seeking processes work – and what makes them fail.

But we do not rely just on our own researches: CONVENOR consultants are leading participants in research networks. We often know of new research well before it is published, and a look at the Contributors list in the Negotiator's Fieldbook will suggest the depth and breadth of our array of colleagues. The Fieldbook is merely the most obvious illustration of our extensive experience at integrating many disciplines' contributions into a rounded understanding of negotiation and conflict management. Other examples can be found throughout the pages describing the Broad Field and Theory to Practice projects.

Other training frameworks:

1. Negotiating Everything You Negotiate Now, Only Better
2. Negotiating With People Who Are Not Like You

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