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So far we have considered what are often the hidden reasons for the failure of negotiations. They have been presented first because we as psychotherapists claim a special skill at dealing with what is hidden from other people. However there are more overt cause of negotiation failure, of which the one that may be most obvious to observers is a failure to communicate effectively. Communication failures occur during agenda setting, dialogue, and resolution stages of negotiation. Good communication is a skill that can be broken down into component parts. Like any skill, the secret of good communication is the efficient application of available resources. The scarce resource in the case of conflict is good will. Communications during conflict, to be efficient applications of goodwill, need to be focussed on what is need to resolve the current situation. Generalization from the conflict to the character or history of the parties in the conflict, bringing in past conflicts, or linking conflict solutions to other current conflicts by offering trade-offs, all result in the ineffective dissipation of goodwill. Generalization is one example of a malignant consequence of communication, which is that open-ness leads to more and more negativity being expression. This may lead to the parties becoming increasingly defensive, and polarized. We have already referred to this in the section on negativity, and it may be worth reviewing that now to consider how that process can be avoided. Frame Another reason for a failure of negotiation is that key parties are excluded from the negotiations or, more rarely, uninvolved parties, who inhibit open discussion, are included. Family therapists imagine that a frame is drawn around the right combination of people (and, even, sometimes the right issues); so the decision about who to include is termed 'framing'. Any psychotherapist who works with systems will know about framing, but one of the most systematic discussions, linking framing with 'depth' of therapy, with structure, and with the 'frontier' of individual participants can be found in Stock Whitaker.
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This project
is funded by the Leonardo da Vinci programme, project number UK/01/B/F/PP/129_387,
2000-2003 |