How to lose big
The delicate art of negotiations requires dedication, fortitude, preparation, anticipation and creativity. And the ability to lose.
Wow. That was quick. Two of the world’s most important negotiations, about Grexit and nukes in Iran, were seemingly and unexpectedly solved this week. It’s a rare, wonderful moment; we should all feel a glow of warmth about the nascent human facility for ultimately reaching the rational conclusion, given the right circumstances.
There are of course plenty of criticisms, nay-sayers and cynics. But the world is definitely a better place this week compared to last week. The agreements pose a fascinating question: why do some negotiations work and some not?
The question has fascinated me since the days of SA’s transition, during which I spent years as a young-ish reporter driving to the fancifully named World Trade Centre past the airport to report on the constitutional negotiations.
They were a great lesson in how to negotiate — partly because, as so many people have now forgotten, they took place in two phases, and the first failed. Consequently, we could compare the unsuccessful and successful phases.
The first, the Codesa phase, began in rancour with ANC president Nelson Mandela upbraiding then-president FW de Klerk and ended in turmoil when the ANC pulled out after the Boipatong massacre in 1992. The consensus among journalists at that stage was that we were doomed. Both sides were entrenched in their positions and neither had any real incentive to change, particularly since conceding to the ANC’s main demand, a democratic system, would mean the National Party would have to give up power.
Yet, towards the end of the year, negotiations began again, and in a comparatively short time, they ended successfully. It was widely described as a “miracle” but I always thought this description was designed to get the stories of foreign correspondents onto the front page rather than capture the moment. In a very unacknowledged sense, the result was not miraculous at all; it was decidedly functional.
This was partly because one of the small acts of genius between the first round and the second was the extension of the role and function of something called the “technical committees”. They weren’t “technical” at all, but they were cast that way to pretend they were merely functional. But importantly, they were responsible to the forum, not to parts of it.
Some of the key aspects of Roger Fisher and William Ury’s famous book Getting to YES were also present: notably the focus on objective criteria (hence the “technical committees”) and inventing options for mutual gain. How else does one explain the idea of one of the most internationally despised regimes on earth being granted a position in a future government of national unity?
After the settlement, there was immediately a battle over who had “won” the negotiations, stimulated mainly by the ANC, who were already looking forward to the elections and who quickly claimed that in the final days, the National Party had “caved”. Famously, many international observers agreed.
But the idea made me deeply uncomfortable. Much later, I reported very briefly on the Northern Ireland peace process in Belfast, and was amazed to discover “technical committees” and a whole bunch of similar techniques were being used. The IRA delegates were actively modelling themselves on the ANC, saying their organisation was made up of socialist freedom fighters.
These negotiations also proved successful and I asked an Irish journalist if the SA example had played any role. His reply was memorable: the SA negotiations had shown the IRA it could win by losing.
In both the Greek and Iranian negotiations, I bet something similar happened: the side that was destined to lose, somewhere in the process, realised that the way things were panning out, losing might be preferable to winning.