Participatory Action Research (PAR) vs. Applied Social Science as We Know It

There are a number of authors like Bent Flyvbjerg who have done a masterful job spelling out all the reasons why social scientists should stop aspiring to be natural scientists.  See his books Real Social Science and Making Social Science Matter for a full explanation.  The statistical tools available in the social sciences can only help us understand, not prove, why things happen.  Natural science, because of the elegance of the scientific method, can generate causal generalizations ("proofs")  that apply reliably across time and place.  Social scientists only know something about very specific situations. Generalizing across people, organizations, communities, and countries is a lost cause. The differences outweigh the commonalities, and efforts to "control" everything but the one thing we want to study are either unethical or impossible. This is not to say that social science isn't important.  On the contrary, the most serious problems we face are social and political, not physical.  "We have met the enemy and it is us." So, it is important to understand how to push social science in a useful direction and produce helpful prescriptive advice for those interested in social change.

There are some social scientists, mostly economists, who aspire to the mathematical rigor of the
natural sciences.  They undertake "double blind" controlled experiments. They give half a community something and not the other half, and see if they can detect statistical differences that prove the poverty-relieving effectiveness of a specific policy or program.  First,  you've got to believe that the two halves of the community are initially the same (and stay the same) during the course of the experiment. Second, you've got to believe that everything else stays constant during the course of the experiment. Third, you've got to believe that the experimental effort and not something else caused what statistically significant outcome might be found. Mere correlation, though,  isn't a basis for reshaping public policy or interfering with people's lives. So, whatever appears to be statistically relevant still doesn't explain why good or bad things happen. Put aside whatever concerns you might have about withholding something good or imposing something bad on half a community so that social scientists can test their ideas or a new practice. My view is that social scientists should stop pretending that correlation equals causation. They should admit that the complexity and uncertainty involved make science-like generalizations about people, communities and institutions extremely unreliable.

Instead, social scientists should work harder to make connections to client-communities, agencies and government entities that want help figuring out what they should about a specific problem  (or how they should alter their policies and practices).  And, they should team up with these groups to figure out how to make sense of past and current practices or events.  Alliances of this sort, in which the client calls the shots, may seem less than ideal for scholars who want to make a name for themselves by calling into question the conventional wisdom about some aspect of everyday life or current public policy. Social science scholars who want to be able to frame their own research questions, use methods of analysis that peer-reviewers will approve, remain entirely detached from the places or groups they are studying, and draw whatever conclusions make sense to them are in a special category.  They want to continue following the "lets-pretend-we-are scientists"approach to applied social research.  Instead, I would suggest a very different approach called Participatory Acton Research (PAR).

PAR as described by Action Research and Action Science specialists was developed, in part, by
my MIT colleague, the late Donald Schon. Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change do a nice job of summarizing the current state-of-the-art.  PAR can produce meaningful results even though it tends to focus on individual cases rather than statistical analyses, large samples or controlled experiments.  PAR puts a premium on local knowledge (what people in the actual situation know from their first-hand experience), not just expert knowledge. And, PAR measures its success by the way in which client-communities feel about the "results"of the research  and its usefulness rather than the way in which peer-reviewers in the social science community feel about its methodological rigor (in traditional terms) or the replicability of the findings. All PAR knowledge is "situated."  That means it is place or case specific.  The goal isn't to come up with provable generalizations.  Quite the contrary, the objective of PAR is to generate what Aristotle would have called "practical wisdom" or useable knowledge, believable to those who have to take action if social change is going to occur.

I will be teaching PAR seminars for the first time at MIT next year. I'm sure there will be an extended discussion of whether PHD candidates will be allowed to substitute these classes for more traditional research methods classes. From my standpoint, there are three reasons why PAR methods should be accepted as a viable alternative to the usual applied social research (read statistical) methods that doctoral students in applied social sciences are normally expected to master.  First, unless graduate students learn how to interact with a client-community from the beginning of a research effort, they will never learn how to communicate "with" rather than send messages "to" agencies, groups, organizations and institutions seeking to promote social change. And, I would argue, the only ethically defensible role for social scientists is as partners to those who want to promote social change. Second, unless they learn how to make sense of what is happening in a specific case or context (rather than in a randomly drawn sample of places or situations),  they will always be limited to analyzing superficial correlatiosn when what they are really interested in is causation. One has to "go deep" to have any hope of diagnosing what is actually going on. Third, unless they learn how to build relationships with the users of actionable knowledge, they will always be offering pronouncements to the "cognizanti," not collaborating with the people who have the authority to make change.

There are all kinds of dilemmas that surround participatory action research.  Who represents the community, the agency or the client?  What if power is maldistributed inside the client-community? How does a "friendly outsider" (i.e. a PAR researcher) convince a client-community that he or she can be trusted? Who makes the final decision about which data that will be gathered and how findings will be analyzed or interpreted?  How should case specific information be integrated with findings from other cases or even more general findings produced by traditional applied social scientists?  What role should PAR researchers have in formulating prescriptions for action?  Is some kind of collaborative adaptive management possible, in which the PAR researcher stays involved with a client-community as its seeks to monitor results and make ongoing adjustments?

The resistance to PAR is strongest among social scientists who yearn to be part of the natural science fraternity.  The traditional types are more concerned about being respected by other academics than they are about "doing social change."   They fear that advocates of PAR feed right into the hands of natural science skeptics who think putting "social" in front of scientist is equivalent to putting "witch" in front of "doctor."  PAR practitioners, for their part, are worried that traditional social scientists are oblivious to the harm that they do when they generalize about social and political phenomenon and fail to appreciate the case specific implications of their findings.

We need to start a different conversation.   PAR teachers and practitioners should focus on explaining to their potential client communities what they do, and why they do it (and why it would be best to work with PAR researchers, not traditional social scientists).  They should codify the ethical norms that guide PAR in practice so they can be held accountable.  They should think hard about the best ways of integrating what PAR teaches about case specific situations with the kinds of generalizations that traditional social scientists produce. It may be that graduate students interested in PAR will also have to master traditional science research methods if they want to be taken seriously in the university. That's twice as much work, but it may be necessary.

An Online University? Are you Crazy?

I wish some of the people who are so excited about the prospect of online college courses being taught by famous faculty members understood a little bit more about what a university education is really supposed to accomplish.  The reason students (ought to) go to college is to enhance their capacity to function in the world-at-large once they graduate -- to function as citizens, productive workers, parents and as potential leaders in all walks of life.  When colleges do their job, students learn fundamental skills (like how to master a new body of knowledge, express their views effectively in writing and in spoken terms, and how to listen and respond to others with very different values and beliefs). They are also expected to familiarize themselves with a substantial body of knowledge (the Cannon of Western Literature? Great Books? Key Concepts in Science and Math? Great Moments in History? Competing Theories of Social Change and  Human Progress? ) that educated people use to make sense of what is going on around them.

You can read about all of these things.  There's nothing new about that. And, now we can put these materials and study guides on line.  Big deal.  And, we can capture the best lecturers in the world presenting these materials and post them online so that people all around the world can listen and watch without having to relocate. We certainly do that with recorded music.  But that doesn't a university make!  We wouldn't imagine giving someone a degree in music theory or performance because they had listened to long list of records or disks. Any anyone who thinks that open on-line enrollment in a catalogue of college-level classes equals a college degree, is sadly mistaken.  And, even if we add computer-graded exams to be sure that the many thousands of people taking these on-line courses have read the material, we will still be nowhere near what it takes to master fundamental skills and use a substantial body of knowledge.  Mastery requires real-time interaction with other learners and hands-on coaching by skilled teachers.  It requires, trial and error, feedback and reflective discussion. That's why large lecture classes are almost always supplemented by small sections in which students try to use the skills and knowledge they are reading or hearing about in collaboration with other students and teachers.

There are three reasons that on-line universities or efforts to approximate them will fail.  First, the most important feedback students need takes the form of questions asked, answered and reconsidered in real-time with a cohort of other learners. A list of Frequently Asked Questions with standards responses pre-prepared by instructors won't give each student the opportunity and responsibility they need to try formulating their own questions as they grapple with the material.  Second, students invariably learn more from other students than they do from faculty as they try wrestle with the materials they are trying to learn.  This, in turn, requires a safe and supportive environment in which students dare to ask questions (even if they feel foolish revealing what they don't know) or offer tentative answers to questions posed by others.  This works best when students meet outside of class on a regular basis, study together and  earn each other's trust.  They also need one-on-one time with faculty (or teaching assistants) to talk about assigned materials, review work in progress or get feedback that puts exam results in context and makes sure they figure out why they got something wrong.  Grades (especially when they are machine-generated) can't do that.  Third, when skill development and not just knowledge acquisition is the goal, students need repeated opportunities to try-fail-reflect- and discuss to achieve mastery. Multiple choice, machine-graded exams will never be able to substitute for hands-on faculty coaching and real-time interaction with peer learners.  That's why we need smaller not larger classes (or cohorts of students).

My own university (MIT) is poised to invest tens of millions of dollars in on-line education for the world-at-large. There are some ways in which this could be enormously helpful (and could strengthen residential learning), but merely recording and transmitting on line (even for free) the "best" course in various fields is not going to help very much.  We tried that in the past by writing text books.  People all over the world were encouraged to use the basic economics and physics textbooks developed by MIT faculty. Did that improve and sustain the quality of teaching in other universities?  I don't think so.  The only way to do that is by enhancing the capacity of teachers in those other places and help them enhance their teaching skills.  On-line courses are going to be used as an excuse by college administrators in other parts of the world (and even in the US) to fire faculty members and give students credit for taking on-line courses (offered by MIT and others).  That won't strengthen education in the developing world, for example, it will weaken it.  On the other hand, we could use MITx to create an on-line learning community for economics or physics faculty members around the world.  It would need to be highly interactive.  The focus should probably be on how to meet the culturally-defined learning needs of the students each of these faculty members is trying to teach. An on-line forum -- with the capacity to upload teaching demonstrations by one participant that could become the focus for the larger group to review--would aim to share what we know about teaching key concepts or using various teaching methods.  Strengthening teaching capacity in as many places as possible ought to be our goal, not reducing or eliminating teaching capacity.

I can imagine giving students a lot more video material to look at before classes begin.  I teach city planners about the way certain kinds of resource management challenges can and should be handled.  Seeing detailed video accounts prepared by colleagues all over the world, showing how certain problems were handled, would be a wonderful supplement to the readings I assign.  But, when students come to my class, I will still pose hypothetical scenarios to see if they can use what they have been viewing and reading.  I want each student to be ready to respond to any question another student might ask, or that I might ask.  I want to give them collective feedback on their latest assignment.  I want them to react to the feedback I provided to them individually on the quiz or exam they recently completed. Then, I will ask them to work in teams or small groups to come up with the best response to still another hypothetical situation I have proposed. Finally, I want to gather them together for a cross-group discussion where one person from each group presents their group's "best advice" to the hypothetical client (using everything they viewed or read before class, as well as the ideas that came up during their small group discussion). This is the only way I can help my students master the material I am presenting.

On-line video and other interactive materials can help students prepare for a class or review what
happened in a class, but it can't substitute for the real-time group learning that college education is meant to offer.  Similarly, on-line course, if used correctly by qualified faculty members, can supplement what it taught -- especially if it is accompanied by on-line forums that explain to faculty how they can use new materials to teach their particular students. But, online courses can't substitute for residential (i.e. face-to-face, real-time) learning.

There will never be an on-line university that offers more than minimal vocational training -- learning the material, step-by-step, by yourself, at your own pace and taking a machine-graded test.  That doesn't come close to generating mastery (i.e. an ability to use concepts and methods in an improvisational way). Mastery can only be achieved through trial-and-error-and-coaching-and-correction-and-question-asking in a continuing group of trusted peer learners. 

Hydropower Conflicts in Southern Chile

Chile is now relying on hydropower to support its amazing economic growth.  It is a country without oil, gas or coal reserves of its own.  Liquified natural gas (LNG) and coal imports are being increased, and there is some talk of expanding non-conventional renewable resources, but hydro represents at least 35% of the current energy mix and is likely to grow.  Somehow Chile needs to generate an additional 8000 MW of new power  by 2020 -- that's a 6% - 7% increase per year in electricity generation. The problem is, hydro has a variety of harsh impacts, especially when electricity has to be shipped 1,000 miles along an "electricity highway" that cuts through some of the most ecologically important areas in the world,  as well as the homelands of hundreds of thousands of indigenous (Mapuche) people.

I just spent several weeks with colleagues in northern and southern Chile (i.e. Patagonia) as part of an ongoing partnership between MISTI (MIT Science and Technology Initiative) and Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh).  In conjunction with the Consensus Building Institute we organized a Devising Seminar to explore the possibility of expanding opportunities for local and indigenous communities to participate in decisions about hydropower development that affects them.  A Devising Seminar is an informal event (usually a half day to a day) that brings together representatives (not in any official sense) of government, industry and civil society to hear each other out and think strategically about a difficult public policy question.  In our case, the question was, "How can communities, indigenous groups and environmental interests be given more of an opportunity to raise concerns and participate in hydro power decisions in a timely fashion?" The Devising Seminar, in Santiago, was facilitated (in Spanish) by skilled public dispute mediators. Before the event, confidential interviews were completed with carefully selected individuals. These were incorporated into a Background Document in which no one was quoted directly, but the scope and content of major disagreements was spelled out.  During the dialogue, points were raised in a respectful but passionate way. By the end of the discussion, the participants were surprised, I think, to discover more common ground than expected.  Everyone will benefit from early and constructive consultation with those likely to be effected by further hydropower development.  How such consultation ought to be structured, though, (i.e., should the laws regulating the scope and timing of Environmental Impact Assessment be changed?) will require further conversation.

Laws in Chile do not guarantee stakeholders much of a voice prior to final decisions being made about energy projects.  And, the country's Environmental Impact Assessment laws allow only 30 days for concerned citizens to review thousands of pages of technical material before decisions are finalized. While international law requires that indigenous people be consulted prior to decisions being made that might adversely affect them, Chile has been unclear about when and how this is supposed to happen. And, some indigenous leaders have made it clear that they expect to be on a more equal footing with the national officials when they meet to talk about such matters.

In some instances, the courts in Chile have stepped in, questioning the adequacy of regulatory reviews, even halting ongoing dam-building projects. But,  massive projects to which the government is committed will probably just be delayed temporarily.

Some way must be found, not just in Chile, to create a public space (I don't mean this in a literal sense) where energy policy-making and problem-solving can take place in a truly collaborative way.  There are certain projects that should probably not go ahead at all (in the locations proposed or in the manner  suggested). Affected groups should be able to point this out, early on, without having to argue that nothing of the sort should proceed anywhere.  Nor should they have to come up with technical solutions to all a country's problems in order to be taken seriously.  On the other hand, industry and government must be able to act after they have done everything they can to minimize and mitigate the adverse impacts of projects that are clearly in the public interest. Compensation might be required. In Canada, indigenous peoples are equity partners in certain energy projects. This gives them much more control over what happens as well as a share in the profits.  The ground rules for joint problem-solving need to be spelled out legislatively and administratively. Once they are, capacity building help (including money) must to be provided to communities of all kinds so they are ready to present their own view effectively.

I'm optimistic that Chile will make progress in the near future.  Public opposition to hydro development is growing. There is a chance this will spill over into growing opposition to all forms of energy development.  Energy companies are aware of this. They know they need to engage stakeholders in a timely way. Some experiments along these lines may be in the works.  A few successful efforts (even if they are not required by law) could pave the way for new legislation that would be probably be supported by all sides.  I'm hoping that my colleagues at UACh can assist energy companies and state and national agencies that want to pilot test new forms of collaborative problem-solving over energy development of all kinds.  I'm confident, from what I recently heard, that there are Mapuche and environmental leaders ready to partner if an offer to collaborate is made in good faith.

Can Games Really Change the Course of History?

At a recent meeting at Sciences Po in Paris, scholars and practitioners from a number of countries heard about a very elaborate game in which more than 150 students played the parts of climate change negotiators from all over the world.  We watched a video highlighting their intense and emotional interactions on the "last night" before their version of the Copenhagan climate change negotiations came to an end.  Some of the students were present; recounting their frustration at not being able to come up with an agreement that would demonstrate to the real climate change negotiators (one of whom was present) what they could have and should have accomplished.  The person behind this game, Professor Bruno Latour, had convinced the students that their simulated success might influence subsequent rounds of actual climate negotiations.  No wonder they were frustrated.

There are various ways games can be used to inform,  and even alter,  high-stakes policy negotiations. I'm going to describe several of them below,  but this only works when the actual negotiators take part in the game in advance of undertaking their own "real life" interactions.  I'm not convinced that the results of role-play simulations involving students or other stand-ins will mean much to senior government representatives. I say this for three reasons.  First, real life negotiators are under enormous pressure to "stick to the script" worked out in national capitols before they are sent off to an international venue.  Every word in the formal statements they present is carefully measured to satisfy competing constituencies at home.  Negotiators do not have the authority to depart from these scripts.  Students, on the other hand, are under no such pressure.  Even when games provide Confidential Instructions meant to mimic "back-table" demands from various internal constituencies, students don't feel the same pressure that real negotiators feel.  Second, real life negotiators care about their long-term careers. They are less likely to get caught up in the spirt of a last-minute or all-night negotiating session in which students throw out the rule book in an effort to reward everyone's hard work or show (their teachers) they can reach agreement. Experienced negotiators have been down the same road many times.  Larger principles -- like national sovereignty and the obligations of the North to assist the nations of the South before asking the developing world to take on more responsibilities -- outweigh any short-term considerations or the pressures of the moment.  Finally, particularly articulate and persuasive students can win over a crowd, regardless of the (relatively less politically powerful) role they have been assigned.  In real-life negotiations, this is much less likely to happen.  However creative the agreement might be that students are able to reach at the end of a role-play, it is not likely to be taken seriously by the real-life negotiators in such situations.

Role-play simulations can be used in three ways.  First, they can be used to give students a chance to experience situations in which they might someday find themselves, offering a quasi-realistic chance to apply what they have learned in class.  When used properly, with the help of skilled instructors, role-play simulations can be very effective educational tools.  Role-play simulations can also be used as part of a research agenda (especially in the negotiation field).   In the same way carefully structured laboratory experiments (involving students) are often used to test psychological hypotheses, role-play simulations, run repeatedly with similar sets of players -- some of whom are instructed behind-the-scenes to try different negotiating techniques -- are being used to determine the efficacy of various negotiating strategies. In my own work, we are using role -play simulations in coastal communities to see whether a particular approach to adaptation planning is likely to change public perceptions about the best ways of responding to climate change risks. (Susskind and Paul, "Winning Public Support for Addressing Climate Change, Solutions Magazine, 2010, pp. 44-48).  Role-play simulations work as a research tool when a game creates a context that can be held constant, while carefully instructed (and matched) participants try different negotiation strategies.  The third use of role-play simulations, that I want to focus on in the rest of this piece, is as an intervention tool in real-life negotiations.  While there may be some overlap with the first two uses, interventions of the sort I am about to describe take an enormous amount of work to arrange and are almost always "one-off."

The United States Environmental Protection Agency decided to experiment with a new way of involving stakeholders in the process of drafting regulations.  They called this Negotiated Rule-making or "Reg-Neg." (Phillip Harter, "Negotiating Regulation:A Cure for the Malaise," 71 Georgetown Law Journal,l:  1982) Without going into too much detail, their basic idea was to recruit a cross-section of relevant stakeholders, with the help of a professional mediator, and see if all the parties likely to complain about any new environmental regulation the Agency issued, could reach agreement on what they thought the new regulations should require. After a quite a few successful experiments (Jody Freeman and Laura Langbein, "Regulatory Negotiation and the Legitimacy Benefit," New York University Environmental Law Journal, 9 (2000) pp. 60 - 151) , the U. S. Congress decided to change America's Administrative Procedure Act so that negotiated rule making is now a normal option. Along the way, several of us made a game called Dirty Stuff (downloadable from www.pon.org) for the participants in each new negotiated rule-making to play the night before their first formal negotiating session. The game takes several hours to play. Participants are asked to begin by reading both General Instructions (that set the stage) and Confidential Instructions (to ensure that they play their assigned role in the same way that "real" participants in that role would proceed). Typically, they are asked to play a role quite different from their real-life role (so no one has to worry that they will inadvertently reveal what they intend to do when the formal negotiations begin the next day).   The results are profound.  During the debriefings of the Dirty Stuff game,  participants almost always note the opportunities for cooperation (and not just competition) they now see on the horizon.  During the actual negotiations, I have often heard participants refer to what happened in the game. They do this when they want to gently chide their real-life negotiating partners to work harder to reach a mutually advantageous agreement.  The game provides a common language.  It allows newcomers to get a sense of what lies ahead, thereby increasing their comfort level. It hints at a range of possible options that the parties might never discover under normal circumstances,  in much the way that Bruno Latour was hoping the Climate Change game would.  The key, though, is that the actual negotiators must play the game together and talk together about the results with the help of a trained facilitator.

Here's a second example. The participants in a global treaty negotiation concerning Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) were convinced by one of their members to meet before the official opening of their formal talks,  to play a game.  We had designed a game, called the Global Management of Organochlorines, otherwise known as the Chlorine Game (which can be downloaded from www.pon.org with the relevant teaching notes) simulating a treaty-making effort a lot like the POPs negotiation.  While I was not present at that event, it is my understanding, from talking to several of the participants, that the game helped those unfamiliar with the dynamics of global treaty-negotaition to get their footing.  It also made clear that the negotiators, even thought they were under strict orders from their home countries, could find room to maneuver if they shifted into an informal problem-solving mode prior to making formal demands or commitments. (For more on global environmental treaty-making see Lawrence Susskind, Environmental Diplomacy, Oxford University Press, 1995.)

The Consensus Building Institute, the not-for-profit mediating organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts that I founded twenty years ago, has run role-play simulations for a variety of national and international agencies and organizations preparing to engage in national and global treaty negotiations. (David Plumb, Elizabeth Fierman, and Todd Schenk, "Role Play Simulations and Managing Climate Change Risks," Cambridge, MA, Consensus Building Institute, http://cbuilding.org/tools/bpcs/role-play-simulations-and-managing-climate-change-risks). In my new book with Shafiqul Islam, entitled, Water Diplomacy, Resources for the Future, 2012) we include four linked games we use each year at the Water Diplomacy Workshop (www.waterdiplomacy.org/workshop) to train senior water professionals so that they can use these games in their countries to help those involved in upcoming transboundary water negotiations approach them in a more collaborative way.

Role-play simulations can be used as a means of intervening in real-life negotiations, but only if they are (1) crafted in a very realistic way; (2) presented by a skilled instructor who can help the participants reflect on their results together; (3) include both General and Confidential Instructions so that participants feel the strong pressure to stick with the script that they will feel in real life; and (4) invited by the participants in real-life negotiations because those individuals want an opportunity to explore options that might otherwise never get considered. 

Learning from Games: The Debate over Role-Play Simulations

Many of us teach negotiation skills and strategy using role-play simulations (RPSs).  These are "paper" games (not computer games) that put participants in assigned roles and ask them to negotiate with one or more counterparts. Unlike the case teaching method pioneered at Harvard Business School (HBS), RPSs not only describe a situation in some detail (General Instructions), but also provide Confidential Instructions for each player.  HBS cases don't come with confidential instructions. We want to ensure that certain negotiation puzzles or challenges will emerge (as each player seeks to achieve the interests spell out in their Confidential Instructions, using the information provided to them). While business school instructors ask students "to imagine" they are the various characters in a real case, RPSs constrain much more tightly what a role player can advocate or accept in a hypothetical situation.  By carefully sequencing RPSs over several days or weeks, an instructor can provide numerous opportunities for students to "try out" a variety of negotiating techniques and build their negotiating prowess. Even though games of this sort have been used for quite some time in numerous settings, including K-12 education, professional degree programs, and military training -- with documented results -- there is a recent backlash of sorts.  I want to summarize the arguments for and against using RPSs to teach negotiation (and other complex skills), and suggest that recent doubts about their effectiveness are misplaced.

The RPSs I'm talking about are based on real cases. (You can download inspection copies for free of more than 100 RPSs from the Clearinghouse of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School along with teaching notes at www.pon.org.)  The Background and Confidential Instructions portray the attitudes expressed by actual negotiators involved in similar situations.  This distinguishes RPSs from other kinds of negotiation exercises that are highly simplified and entirely fictional, like "Win As Much As You Can" or "Oil Pricing." Also, the RPSs I use to teach environmental dispute resolution techniques include scientific information that has been carefully vetted by experts. While we are eager to teach conflict resolution skills, we also want to convey technically correct information about the "systems" or situations involved.  Many RPSs are designed to "fit" a typical 90 minute or two hour instructional window. Others are intended to be played over several days or in segments over several weeks.  Usually, students receive General and Confidential Instructions ahead of time, negotiate during class time, discuss the results (often comparing outcomes among different pairs or groups) in instructor-led Debriefing Sessions, and prepare Reflective Memos analyzing what worked, what didn't work and what they might try next time. Recently, some of us have added video highlights to our Debriefings.  (My colleague, Michael Moffitt, Dean of the Law School at the University of Oregon, has developed very effective software for students to use in capturing and annotating elements of video-recordings of their negotiations.)

The pedagogical assumptions behind using RPSs are spelled out in a range of publications.  Instead of just listening to lectures, students get to try their hand at negotiating in situations like those they will face at some point in the future. In the protected setting of the classroom (or a professional training workshop), students can experiment with unfamiliar negotiating tactics and strategies with little or no risk to their reputations or financial well-being. By having multiple pairs or groups run the same RPS simultaneously, results can be compared during a Debriefing Session. When video of each negotiation is available, students can clearly see how someone else played the same role with the same Confidential Instructions, but achieved a different result. Assigned Reflective Memos are sometimes used to ask students to consider the cumulative results they have achieved over a sequence of negotiation assignments. Sometimes it takes more than one effort to master a strategic behavior. It is important the students get both personal and group feedback from qualified instructors along the way; the experience of an RPS is only relevant if it is combined with experienced coaching.

As compared to lectures, RPSs offer exciting learning opportunities.  Well-designed and sequenced RPSs, combined with feedback from an experienced instructor, can help students master complex skills. The face-to-face nature of RPSs (as compared to on-line self-instruction) emphasizes that all negotiations involve dyadic interaction.  Feedback from someone with whom you just negotiated is invaluable.  Group comparisons during Debriefing Sessions are often where learning solidifies. Students and instructors who have used RPSs for some time, can see clearly that they help students develop confidence and competence in ways that other teaching strategies don't.

The criticisms of RPSs are mostly theoretical. That is, there have been few, if any, controlled experiments comparing the efficacy of RPSs to other pedagogical options for teaching negotiation.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine which student attributes and contextual variables would need to be held constant, and which measures of performance can be used,  to gauge results.  Nevertheless, there are three conceptual criticisms raised in recent publications.  First, games are unrealistic.  Students are under no pressure to behave or perform in a game as they would in "real life."  Second, only if a student repeats the same game many times will he or she be able to master specific skills.  And, by definition, once the results of a game have been debriefed, there is no way to run it a second time.  Third, students learn in different ways, and some might be better off observing real negotiations than playing games.

Some of the people who say that games are unrealistic don't realize how much work goes into developing serious RPSs.  Those of who design RPSs often base them on our involvement in actual negotiating situations, and build on authentic fact patterns and interviews with real-life role players. While it is true that 90 minutes may pose an unrealistic time constraint, we usually zoom in on just one aspect of a negotiation or a conflict situation so that the "work" required in a game can fit the time available.  We do a lot of pre-testing of RPSs to be sure that the average student will be able to handle the assigned tasks.

The question of whether or not student behavior in an RPS mimics real-life negotiating behavior is more interesting.  Most instructors will not base a student's grade on the outcome they achieve in a game.  We want them to take risks and be prepared to fail.  Does this mean that students don't take their roles seriously, or are they inclined to search for easy compromises when there are no real-life stakes o the line?  It may be true in some instances. On the other hand, I have tried offering financial incentives to students assigned spoiler roles in certain games.  I don't see much effect.  In general, as long as everyone can "blame" their Confidential Instructions or the instructor's mandate to do the best for himself in the game that he can, most students seem willing to negotiate aggressively.  By the way, grades are based on the progress we can track in the Reflective Memos along with a more traditional exam aimed at (1) gauging a student's ability to formulate a negotiation strategy given the facts of a situation; or (2) assessing another negotiator's tactics and strategies.

Do students need to play the same game many times before they can master a particular negotiation lesson?  I doubt it. While it would be possible to keep a "fact pattern"constant and hand out slightly different Confidential Instructions for successive plays of the same game, I don't think it is necessary. Debriefings, Reflective Memos and repetition of earlier lessons in a sequence of games appear to me to be sufficient to "lock in" the lessons we are trying to teach. When I encounter students months or years after they have taken a negotiation course, many are quick to recount the overwhelming significance of a particular game that taught them a life-long lesson.

I don't doubt that students learn in different ways. RPSs need to be packaged with assigned readings, introductory lectures, carefully selected case studies, well organized feedback and analysis of scripted start-stop video involving professionally-actors.  But, RPSs -- when presented properly -- add something to a class that no other teaching tool can match. Learning complex skills requires trial-and-error, reflection, adjustment and more trial-and-error. We could send students out each week to undertake negotiations with their roommates, various commercial vendors, or their parents. Unfortunately, this probably wouldn't get past the Institutional Review Board in my university. Moreover, RPSs allow me to guarantee that specific negotiation challenges will arise from week to week.  I'd rather students faced a range of carefully controlled negotiating situations that we can reflect on together. This should not be to the exclusion, though, of other teaching tools.

Finally, Professor Dan Druckman and his colleagues argue that students probably get more out of designing games than playing them.  There may be something to that.  But, you have to master a great deal of negotiation theory to be able to design an effective RPS.  And, then, you've just learned one key lesson.  On the other hand, I don't think designing a single game is a substitute for first-hand participation in the multiple interactions required by a sequence of well-tested games taught by a qualified instructor.

In a subsequent blog entry, I will review the other uses of RPSs, including helping the participants in high-level negotiations prepare for their upcoming interactions

   

How to Give Negotiation Advice

I was asked to comment on a series of presentations being made by students in a class at Harvard Law School.  Their assignment was to generate advice to the head of one of the major sports leagues in America facing a tricky international problem. The student team with the best presentation was going to have a chance to offer their ideas to the Commissioner. I watched as the student teams talked through elaborate power point presentations loaded with detail and elegant visual gimmicks. That's when it struck me that we are not developing or sharing with our students a very clear idea about how to give negotiation advice.

Having been in the same situation (of giving negotiation advice) many times, I tried to step back and summarize what I think I know, especially in light of how my advice has been received and when, in retrospect, it has proven useful. First, negotiation advice needs to be short and sweet.  (Maybe ghe same thing is true with regard to advice on any subject.) When the presentation gets too complicated, the whole message just washes over the recipient. Anything more than a handful of power point slides (if you use them at all!), is too many.  I would suggest starting with a very short statement of the negotiator's problem as you understand it and the gist of your advice in just a few sentences. I would look right in the recipients eye so they are convinced that (1) you understand the problem and the pressures they are facing; (2) you empathize, and you've thought long and hard about what you are going to say; and (3) you have confidence in what you are suggesting.  The student teams I watched, divided up their presentations so that each member of the team had some air time.  Don't do that. It is hard enough establishing personal contact with the person you are advising.

Second, don't try to explain the theory behind your prescriptive advice. Again, this is probably true of any kind of advice, not just negotiation advice. How I reached my conclusions is my business.  If they are asking me for my advice, they don't need to hear everything I've thought about and everything I know, just my conclusions.  Negotiation advisors who are not confident about the advice they are giving are likely to share everything they know with the people they are advising.  In my experience, that just makes recipients uneasy.

Third, stop along the way and make sure that the person you are advising understands each of your key points. When a recipient get's stuck on something I've said -- if they don't understand it, or it doesn't sound right to them -- they stop listening.  So, it's better if I break what I'm going to say into a few short pieces, and then check to be certain they've understood each point before I go on.

Fourth, emphasize the possibility that additional value can almost always be created, and suggest ways of reframing a negotiation in terms of all-gain solution.  Most people entering a negotiation are likely to be thinking in zero-sum terms (i.e. whatever my negotiation counterpart gets, I lose; and, vice versa).  A skilled negotiation advisor, however,  is ready to point out ways that more value can be created.  This can take a lot of pointed questions and several rehearsals.  Nervous negotiators are often unable to hear the kinds of questions that lead to "all gain" solutions.  For example, I often press people seeking negotiation advice to put themselves in the shoes of the person with whom they are about to negotiate:  "What do you think the key interests are on the other side?  What's most important to them? What can you offer them (at low cost to you), in exchange for things you want from them?"  In other words, I try to frame my advice in terms of possible trades or packages that will be mutually advantageous.  And, I ask the person I'm advising to play the role of their negotiation counterpart as we search for value creating possibilities.

Fifth, it's OK to offer contingent advice if there are major uncertainties or assumptions which, if handled differently, would lead to different suggestions.  I think this is especially relevant to negotiation advice. While I'm trying to keep my suggestions as compact and simple as possible, it is, in my experience, appropriate to say: "If X turns out to be true, as I think it will, then my advice to you is this.  However, if Y happens instead, then my advice would change in the following way."  I wouldn't do too much of this, but one or two contingencies will add to, rather than subtract from, your credibility as a negotiation advisor.

Next,  a diagram can be useful. But elaborate power point presentations or complex conceptual schemas are a distraction.  Diagrams summarizing prescriptive advice need to be anchored to real events, dates or steps that make it clear the order in which things need to be done.  Elaborate conceptual diagrams, spelling out theoretical ideas or summarizing various schools of thought, should be avoided.  Someone seeking negotiation advice wants to know the most important things they need to do. That's it.  Negotiation advisor need to be ready with short explanations of "why" if they are asked to justify a particular move; but, these should be held in reserve, and offered only when requested. And, "why" answers should always explain the dynamics involved, not the inspiration for what the advisor is suggesting. Why answers are not like footnotes!  They should expose an additional layer of understanding, not cite a source.  So, for example, a suggestion like, "Don't share all the information you have on that subject until you know whether you can trust the other side," should be followed with, if asked why,  "Because they could use that information to "anchor" in the Zone of Possible Agreement at a point that is best for them and worst for you."

I worry about the increasing use of power point presentations in advice-giving situations.  I think it is a mistake.  It puts a barrier between the advice-giver and the recipient.  Rapport is everything, and power point presentations, especially those with glitzy special effects, get in the way of personal connections.  I don't mind a one page handout (that the recipient can annotate as they listen), but it should not be filled with dense text. Just a few bullet points will do.

Let's turn the tables for a minute.  If you are the one seeking negotiation advice, how ought you to frame your request for assistance?  I might ask:  "I'm heading into a salary negotiation with a prospective employer, and its making me nervous. I don't want to lose the job, but I also want get a fair salary. What's your advice?"  In this situation, I don't want general negotiation advice. I want specific suggestions tailored to my salary negotiation. I want my negotiation advisor to acknowledge my priorities and my state of mind:  I don't want a prospective employer to give someone else the job. But, I also don't want to settle for less money than I deserve. A skilled negotiation advisor knows how to ask for advice, not just give it.

The things unique to giving or getting negotiation advice (as opposed to any other kind of advice) are: (1) general rules, and the theory behind them, are a lot less helpful than suggestions tailored to the specifics of the situation; (2) sensitivity to the way an advice recipient is feeling may be as important as any substantive insight an advisor can offer; and (3) it is important to emphasize the possibility that additional value can be created and almost every negotiation can be reframed in non-zero sum terms.

How negotiation advice is offered is as important as the substance of the advice.  If negotiation advice is offered in the wrong way, it is not going to be very valuable.

Informal Problem-solving: Get Help!

Public officials and corporate leaders have to deal with all kinds of conflict (both internal and external). Because they see themselves as leaders, though, they don't want to admit they might need help handling  these situations. For some reason, its OK to hire a lawyer if you are facing a lawsuit, but it's not OK to ask for informal problem-solving help before things go from bad to worse.  Why is that?

Consider the following examples.  Mr. Bigshot is the CEO of a large company.  He is under substantial pressure from his Board of Directors to increase profitability in the near term and increase market share in the long term.  He faces opposition at every turn. Most of his efforts to reform long-standing operating procedures are being opposed by department and division heads.  He wants to look tough to impress his Board, but the only way he can come up with to push his agenda is to replace people who don't do what he wants.  Now he faces a backlash. Efforts to force long-time partners in the company's "supply chain" to accept new ground rules, have also backfired.  If the problems he faces were framed purely in organizational development terms, he might think about hiring a management consultant, but the notion that he might need to improve his (and his organization's) informal problem-solving capabilities is the farthest thing from his mind.

Here's a second example. The head of a well-know multinational agency has been trying for several years to get her organization to embrace sustainable development as part of their mission. At one level, everyone agrees.  But, whenever she suggests that this means altering the agency's priorities, shifting the allocation of financial resources and involving long-time critics in redefining the agency's mission, a torrent of tacit and explicit opposition emerges. Endless rounds of one-on-one and group conversation have had no effect.  Ms. Agency Leader might go along with hiring a strategic planning consultant, but she is blissfully unaware that both she and her organization probably need help developing their informal problem-solving capabilities.

One explanation for why these two "leaders" are unlikely to take advantage of professional mediation, facilitation or other informal problem-solving assistance is that they don't want to appear weak (to the people to whom they are accountable). They feel obliged to demonstrate that they can handle whatever adversity comes their way.  But, that can't be right.  Public and private sector leaders are often in a big hurry to hire consultants and expert advisors.  Admitting that they don't know what they need to know, can make a leader look smart; so, why the resistance to hiring informal problem-solving help?

A second explanation is that they aren't aware that such expertise is available.  It may be that they don't realize that informal problem-solving opportunities are embedded in every conflict situations. They may  be unaware there are readily available advisors and intermediaries who can help them avoid unnecessary conflict, engage in collaborative problem-solving and build consensus.

A third explanation is that the providers of informal problem-solving assistance may not be good at
marketing their services.  Indeed, this is probably true. A great many skilled mediators don't know how to describe what they do in ways that connect with what leaders of the sort mentioned above think they need.  Too many dispute resolution professionals don't work on building long-term relationships with potential clients. They can't expect someone to find them in a moment of crisis. They don't invest enough time putting contracts in place so that they can get to work immediately when informal problem-solving help would be useful.

Finally, informal problem-solving experts may not be pricing their services correctly.  Some are charging too little, I think,  and some are charging too much. Leaders in both the public and private sector attach importance to professional services for which they pay enough to notice. On the other hand, exorbitant prices mean that informal problem-solving services will be used far too infrequently. Also, performance-based methods of payments ought to be possible (which is something that most mediators have resisted for fear that an a priori commitment to getting agreement is in appropriate in situations where no agreement might be an appropriate outcome).  And, service bundles also ought to be up for discussion.  For example, training and organizational capacity-building should be part of annual retainers that include a certain number of hours of  consulting services in moments of need.

Informal problem-solving is a potential growth industry. However, there are three important considerations that providers of these services ought to keep in mind.  First, trust is absolutely crucial. If potential clients are worried that informal problem-solving advisors don't appreciate the pressures they are under, can't guarantee confidentiality or have possible conflicts of interest, they won't seek their help. Second, specialized knowledge is crucial. Clients need to be convinced the informal problem-solving advisors are entirely familiar with what's going on in their"sector." They are not interested in general "process" advice, they want help generating workable solutions.  While service providers should not advocate a specific solution in each situation, they should be able to generate an inventory of numerous ideas that have worked in similar situations. Also, leaders are looking for advisors who have the ability to improvise. They don't want informal problem-solvising assistance from advisors who are "selling" an inflexible method. They need help from advisors who can adapt.

Informal problem-solving can add value in almost any situation. We need to make it easy for leaders in both public and private organizations to seek informal problem-solving assistance on a regular basis.