Stuart Albert

Negotiation Theatre

How do we help students apply the principles that they study in our courses?  Associate Professor Stuart Albert has developed an engaging and entertaining activity that fosters the students’ evolving understanding of how to employ the negotiation principles in his “Managing People and Organizations” course (MGMT 6110).  As a culmination to the negotiation unit, student groups write and present a two-act play.

Genesis of the Idea

Stuart has always been fascinated by Sartre’s play No Exit.  In the play, the characters are ushered into a room without any way of leaving it, and subjected to a hell inflicted by the verbal assaults of the other characters.  At the time he was reading the play, he was editing a book on ending the Vietnam War, a conflict seemingly without exit, and also writing a series of papers on how closure is achieved; how closing down the past opens up possibilities for the future-  The idea of using a dramatic context in which students could grapple with problems of negotiation was born.

How it works

1. Stuart outlines the group assignment the first night of class:
   • Teams are to write a two-act play using the principles in Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Fisher and Ury, 1991);
   • The first act  presents a failed negotiation that identifies points of leverage and releases emotions;
   • The second act begins in an identical fashion as the first and shows how the negotiation might succeed if one character uses the principles of Fisher and Ury;
   • The character using Fisher and Ury principles should be the one with the least power, and
   • Each team will perform their play and turn in a paper that includes an introduction to the play’s situation and a section on timing.
2. Although Stuart allows his students some latitude in their use of the other four assigned texts, he expects students to read Fisher and Ury cover to cover.  Through this, students familiarize themselves with principles of negotiation.
3. As a part of the class session on negotiation, Stuart shows the students a film that depicts the use of the Fisher and Ury principles during a modified roll play negotiation.  He follows with a discussion of integrity-preserving compromises.
4. As the student teams are writing the play, Stuart is available to offer feedback.  When a team asks him to look at a draft, he offers suggestions on how to apply the principles..
5. One class session is devoted to the teams’ presentation of their plays. Stuart leads the class through such questions as “Would that character really act that way?” and “How might that phrasing work better?”.  This discussion helps the team identify ways to strengthen the application of negotiation principles.
6. Following the class session, teams consider the input they’ve received from the “audience” to strengthen the play prior to turning it in (as a part of a paper) for grading.

Effect on Learning

Stuart has found this technique to be particularly effective with helping students to contextualize the principles developed by Fisher and Ury.  The activity forces the students to move beyond rote memorization through an imaginative, inventive task that yields engaging conversations among team members about the pragmatics of applying negotiation principles.  The iterative nature of play writing also ensures that students must compare and contrast alternative applications, analyze aspects of the models they are basing the play on, evaluate effectiveness and believability and, ultimately, synthesize their understanding into a coherent story.

In other words, this activity promotes the Significant Learning Dee Fink described in the seminar he gave at CSOM in Spring 06.  The term “significant learning” refers to the idea that as teachers, we want to affect lasting changes in our students’ thinking and abilities:

For learning to occur, there has to be some kind of change in the learner. No change, no learning. And significant learning requires that there be some kind of lasting change that is important in terms of the learner’s life.[1]

Certainly, the practice and intense reflection embodied in this exercise do assure that the students will not approach negotiations as they may have before Stuart’s class.  Not only do they have knowledge about negotiation principles, they’ve internalized an approach to their application that encourages continued reflection and analysis – and growth.

A Taxonomy of Significant Learning

This taxonomy, developed through years of conversations and research, defines six kinds of significant learning tasks.  Each kind of learning is interactive, meaning that it can stimulate other kinds of learning.