Core Concerns
Because it is proported to be about emotions I have been looking forward to getting my hands on the new book out of the Harvard Negotiation community (Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as you negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro). Most books about emotions written by rational intellectual people are crap, so it’s a relief that this book is pretty good.
It’s not without it’s flaws. It does tend to revisit a lot of ground covered in the other books from their negotiation community. There is a certain disconnect between the power of emotions and the advice the book gives. Sure, it is a good thing to find common ground with your partner. Discover shared hobbies! On the one hand that’s all well and good because it is these small building blocks from whence real common ground is assembled. On the other other hand it continues a the tradition found in most geek written books of excessive distance and reductionism when talking about emotions.
Having gotten that out of the way - the structure of the book is just marvelous.
They avoid one of the more common traps of writing about emotions, e.g. enumerating them like a butterfly collector pinning each one down and drying it out. Instead they note that humans have some very core concerns, to find a fulfilling role for example. If these core concerns are not being met then strong negative emotions will follow. If they are met, strong positive ones will rise. Skilled negotiators entice the positive emotions out, and avoid baiting the negative ones. Their reward: productive flexible creative problem solving sessions.
I particularly liked that they complement each core concern with a verb; so here they are:
- Appreciation - which is expressed.
- Affiliation - which is built.
- Autonomy - which is respected.
- Status - which is acknowledged.
- Role - which is chosen and fulfilling.
While this book is written with negotiation in mind - i.e. an episodic attempt to engage in collaboration - these issues clearly arise across the spectrum of collaborative effort. Keep a score card with every participant (individual and institutional) v.s. each of the five. Encourage action, via those verbs.
All this has triggered a number of insights I’ve been enjoying. I’m much enjoying the insight that if you struggle and win a particular role there is the risk that there will be negative emotions created - because winning is not choosing.
It is particularly fascinating to me that role and status are pulled apart here, because they are so often casually treated as synonymous. Similarly it is quite generative that affiliation and autonomy appear rather than the more commonly used term - loyalty with it’s implication of hierarchy.
People often fall into the trap of simple hierarchical thinking and presume that role is equivalent to status. Who knows, maybe that’s because role sounds like royal. Maybe it’s because you can’t fulfill a social role unless other actors fufill their complementary roles (e.g. you can’t take up the role of seller without buyers, or follower without leaders) and complementary sounds like it’s equivalent to acknowledging status. Roles, as the word suggests, are like the parts in life’s many plays. In a collaborative context it’s productive to acknowledge the role of all parties but only when your role interfaces with theirs do you begin to tap into the issues of how to collaborate in particular - efficiently, while leaving them maximum choice, and striving to be fulfill both parities role. These are two very different emotional trigger points. Only in the most primitive of power hierarchies to they pretend that you can collapse the two together.
Affiliation is, I’m reasonably sure, another way to look at the issue that in community dynamics I call common cause. It’s binding force of the collaborative effort, like gravity. And people get very emotional about it for all the reasons that people guard the public goods of their communities thru scolding, patriotism, loyalty, etc. etc.
Part of what creates the freedom is a rich pool of public goods and the only way to create those is thru communities of common cause. In the context of this book, i.e. negotiation, autonomy means something else as well. It means the scope of freedom of the other side in the negotiation is presumed to have because their are limits to the reach of the negotiation.
In business jargon they sometimes talk about the nature of the power between the supplier and consumers along the supply chain. It’s a pain to be a buyer when the supplier has all the power, and via versa. One way to visualize that is to think about the arcs in the supply chain graph. If you have a single supplier for a key component, for example funding, then that supplier will be powerful. You might say that you are tightly affiliated. If you have billions of tiny customers then no one of them has much power and you autonomy is protected. Some of the forces that lead to firms merging arise out of this. In a simple example two firms A &B that discover that A’s only customer is B and that B is dependent on A for a critical component are very likely to merge. Or in a more complex example two firms will often merge to reduce the power of their overlapping customers or suppliers.
I found it fascinating to realize that all that is very analogous to the Affiliation/Autonomy pair enumerated in the core concerns above. Clearly there is something deep running thru the dynamics of all exchange networks that these five issues can help to inform.