Y12W15WR Negotiation as design

Design
The writing prompt

Design a specific approach for a negotiation you’re likely to face in the next few years — a salary, a housing contract, a significant purchase — drawing on the research.

1Retrieval check

Q1.What does Fisher and Ury’s principled-negotiation framework recommend?

  • AHard bargaining first, soft concessions later
  • BSeparate people from problem, focus on interests not positions, invent options for mutual gain, use objective criteria
  • CNever reveal anything
  • DAlways accept the first offer

Q2.What is the article’s counter-thread about principled negotiation?

  • AIt always works
  • BIt works less well when the other party is genuinely bad-faith or has overwhelming power asymmetry
  • CIt is illegal
  • DIt was disproved
Show answer key

Q1 → B. Separate people from problem, focus on interests not positions, invent options for mutual gain, use objective criteria.Voss’s research adds tactical empathy and calibrated questions; Harvard Negotiation Project emphasises preparation and BATNA.

Q2 → B. It works less well when the other party is genuinely bad-faith or has overwhelming power asymmetry.Collaborative problem-solving assumes a minimum threshold of good-faith engagement; design for the case where it isn’t there.

2Prompt deconstruction

Command verb
DESIGN a usable plan for a specific likely negotiation
Must reference
Fisher and Ury; Voss; the bad-faith caveat
Must specify
preparation, BATNA, opening move, likely difficult counter-moves, walk-away point
Honesty requirement
what you’d do if the other side doesn’t reciprocate the principled approach

3Position nudge

Where on the range does your proposal sit?

Pole A
Pole B

Pole Aminimally prepared (one-page plan, rough BATNA)

Pole Bheavily prepared (full BATNA analysis, scripted opening, anticipated counter-moves)

Commit to a specific point; defend it in your planner.

4Planner — design the thing, then the trade-offs

The negotiation
A specific likely case — salary, rental, significant purchase.
Preparation
Research, BATNA, identification of your interests vs. positions.
Opening and questions
How you’d open; three calibrated questions you’d ask early.
Difficult counter-moves
Hard bargaining, emotional pressure, misinformation — how you’d respond to each.
Walk-away point
Where you stop, and what you’d do if the other side is bad-faith.

5Sentence stems

  • My proposal is ___.
  • I am grounding this in [researcher]’s finding that ___.
  • The main trade-off is ___: this design gains ___ but loses ___.
  • The most predictable objection is ___, and my response is ___.
  • I would know it was working after [time] if ___.
  • What I am most likely to abandon is ___, so I will build in ___ to prevent that.

6Exemplar paragraph (not about this article)

(1) My proposal is a negotiation plan for my first professional rental, likely in two to three years. (2) I am grounding this in Fisher and Ury’s principled-negotiation framework, Voss’s tactical empathy, and the article’s bad-faith caveat. My preparation step is to research the market rate for comparable units within a 2-km radius, so my BATNA is ‘walk and take the third-best option I’ve seen’. (3) My opening would name the range I have researched and ask, calibrated-question style, ‘how did you arrive at the listed price?’ — not to challenge, but to learn. (4) The main trade-off is that principled negotiation takes more preparation time than just making an offer; my response is that the preparation is one-way and cheap. The most predictable difficult counter-move is hard-bargaining anchoring on the original price; my response is to return to objective criteria (the comparables I researched) rather than meeting it with a counter-anchor. (5) I would know the design had worked if I closed within my range with the relationship intact. (6) What I am most likely to abandon is the calibrated-question move under pressure, so I will write out the three questions in advance and keep them in front of me.

What this paragraph does, move by move

  1. Names the negotiation concretely.
  2. Specifies the BATNA.
  3. Grounds the opening in both frameworks.
  4. Handles a specific difficult counter-move.
  5. Defines the measurable success.
  6. Pre-commits to the specific move you’re most likely to drop.