Hey Teacher! Leave Those Kids Alone (Because It’s an Arbitrator’s Job)
Relations take on many different forms, grocery clerks can become customers of the store they work in, a firefighter can move to the city they work in, students can teach in the institutions where they study. What happens when the employment relationship is clouded by an overlapping relationship? This question was recently answered by the […]
What you need to know about Settlement Privilege
“What sensible man would attempt settlement if it could be used against him at trial?”1 This post will explore the development and limits of settlement privilege and how settlement privilege interacts with mediation. Settlement privilege, the ability to shield the deal making and the deal, is essential for negotiations and mediations. This paper is organized […]
Negotiation Strategies
Keeping Your Negotiation Strategies Nimble Negotiation Strategies in the real world need to respond to shifting perceptions of what is happening at the negotiating table and what is happening in real life. This nimbleness works best if all the parties to a negotiation exhibit it; however even when they do not there are tactics that […]
Dispute Resolution Impacts of Bill 57
On November 15, 2018 Doug Ford’s PC Government released Ontario’s Plan for the People. At the same time they introduced Bill 57: Restoring Trust, Transparency and Accountability Act, 2018 in the Legislature. Lots of commentators had plenty to say about the larger changes in this omnibus bill. This is not one of those posts. In […]
What Mediators can Learn from Navy Seals
The US Navy SEALS are one of the most revered fighting forces in the world. As negotiators, there are few things we can take from professional warriors; as a mediator, there is even less, but the thing even the most devout pacifist can take from these special operators is how to deal with stress. In […]
Bottom Lines Are Futile. Assimilate the Resistance Point
In this post I am going to discuss why you should forget a bottom line in your next negotiation and embrace the concept of a resistance point. In my post about ZOPA or the Zone of Potential Agreement, I explain the concept of a range where the parties are willing to settle. The boundary of […]
Costing Uncertainty
Costing Uncertainty This week’s blog is based on a discussion I had with my spouse recently while booking a vacation. It touches on an important negotiation principle: valuing or costing uncertainty. Most labour negotiations involve some degree of uncertainty. The future state of the economy, the performance of the business and labour market conditions all […]
4 Easy Rules for Bargaining Late
Years ago when I first got elected to a union bargaining team, I had images of bargaining late with night bargaining sessions and tense exchanges in the early morning hours. After nearly a decade chairing teams and negotiating agreements worth anywhere from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars, only a few […]
Endowment Bias: I got it & I like it
Our friends at the Harvard Negotiation Project and authors of books like Getting to Yes would have you believe that negotiations is or ought to be a perfectly rational process. We know from our lived experience and countless pop psych books that people are not perfect rational actors. Cognitive biases affect how we process information […]
Define ZOPA: Zone of Potential Agreement
Define ZOPA One of the most popular articles on this blog is my article on the definition of BATNA. This week I thought I would cover another fundamental negotiation term and define ZOPA. ZOPA is an acronym that means zone of potential agreement. Put simply ZOPA is the range where the parties could agree. ZOPA […]