Review of Beyond Reason - by Fisher and Shapiro

Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and co-authors of the best-selling book Getting to Yes, have come out with a new and important book - Beyond Reason - Using Emotions as you Negotiate.

A review of the book by "Negotiator" magazine is here, which concludes:

This is one of those unusual works that is so carefully constructed and written that you may find yourself praising its common sense and nodding easily in concurrence. It may even seem that you knew it all as you read along. Perhaps, of course, you did. And yet, more likely, you will decide as this reviewer came to do that you have just read a new and valuable contribution to the literature of negotiation. It is a book to reflect upon and that belongs on every negotiator's reference shelf.

The book includes an extensive and well-chosen bibliography, a glossary and a full index which will please both practitioners and scholars.

Highly Recommended.

John Baker, Ph.D.
Editor

This book is relevant here, because the authors have enormous experience with what it takes to make successful negotiations, particularly on a global scale. So, let me move on from the review and author's words to my own discussion of how this subject is relevant

And one of the most important realizations is that humans are not machines. We are not little cognitive processors that just happen to be superimposed on top of animal bodies. Humans have a rich depth that is sloppily called "emotional", and too often treated with disdain by Science -- as if it's left over baggage from our grandparents that we wish we didn't have.

Human emotions are a "feature" not a "bug".

It seems that these "emotions" have a lot to do with social relationships, and with the establishing and maintenance of "social capital" and the fabric that underlays the rest of our lives, commerce, etc. The emotions have a lot to do with preventing (or causing) the kind of ripping apart that was described in the prior post.

Like "Religion", "Emotions" are often slammed for their visible downside, while failing to take into account their upside. Remember that the core problem I'm discussing now has to do with a very subtle, relatively distant breakdown in global coherence, but one that turns out to result in a series of "unavoidable" system errors that just keep on happening.

And, as Commerce has been increasingly noticing, if you want a productive labor force, it really helps if they are a happy labor force, and truly enjoy working together. Positive Psychology makes a tremendous impact on the bottom line, not just on "safety" or reliability or error reduction or mission completion. It also turns out to make a tremendous difference in the physiological health and mental health of the workforce. So, it cannot be left out in the hopes of having a "more efficient" company. The maximally efficient sustainable operating point for a group of people includes joyous interactions. Stripping out the emotions and the side conversations makes the output substantially worse in quality and quantity.

People are capable of working together side by side, they can enjoy doing it, and they need to be encouraged continually to do so, or the "silo" effect will dominate.

Very briefly, let's review Fisher and Shapiro's summary of "human needs" of negotiators (who we assume are already well up on Maslow's Hierarchy, breathing, healthy, fed, etc.)

The often overlooked human needs they focus on are these:

• Express Appreciation
• Build Affiliation
• Respect Autonomy
• Acknowledge Status
• Choose a Fulfilling Role

They end with an account of using these ideas in the real world, by Jamil Mahuad, the Former President of Ecuador.

I'll end my quotes from the book with one from the very start of the book:

We cannot stop having emotions any more than we can stop having thoughts. The challenge is learning to stimulate helpful emotions in those with whom we negotiate - and in ourselves.

Again, I'll emphasize that the world we live in is multi-level, and the operational laws of levels outside our own are often very hard to see, but are every bit as important as the laws of the level we inhabit and can see so clearly. Just because something is distant from us does not make it "small". Mount Everest and the Sun are distant from us - but they are huge.

Emotional couplings can go dramatically wrong, but they can also go dramatically right. There is, in the words of Professor Kim Cameron - "Positive Deviance." We desperately need the "going right" part, because simple cognitive processes (thinking, symbol string processing) just doesn't have the oomph and motivational power to get actual hard work done in a sustainable way. Dispassionate thoughts can help us analyze situations, but are powerless to generate actual sustainable uphill driving action. For that we need emotional power and passion. Again, these are not "bugs" but "features" of the way humans and our society are designed.

The fact that emotions don't fit neatly into the cold, mechanical, "Scientific" model is an indictment of the limits of the model, not an indictment of emotions. Like Religion, Emotions deal with wavelengths and frequencies that are outside the historical Scientific linear model of "things-that-can-be neatly isolated from context and continue to operate".

Not only can they not be separated from context - they are the very stuff and substance of context.

Note that this is true on two different levels. I came to the topic on the social level, on what makes us tick, on what makes an organization capable of highly accurate, highly productive activity, day after day.

But it's true on a personal physiological level. Our brain, and neurons, are literally swimming and bathed in a different dimensional context of chemicals that form the context for our neural activity and "thinking." This context should not be seen as something that only has two states, namely working (or neutral, not interfering with thought) and broken (interacting with thought.)

Our brain is exquisitely wired for certain kinds of computations, such as "vision". Similarly, our bodies and emotions are exquisitely hard-wired for other kinds of computations involved in keeping our society functioning. Similarly, our own gut has its own neural system and pretty well runs itself, being visible only when something goes wrong - but that doesn't make it any less important to our well-being.

IN the book Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman discusses the role of "mirror neurons", and a whole shadow array of processes that take place outside our awareness whenever two people meet or interact. (An TV interview by Nova with Goleman can be viewed here.) Here again we have a whole set of important systems that are almost invisible to our consciousness, except that they aren't invisible and are just critical to successful interactions. I'll quote from the cover of the book:

Our reactions to others and theirs on us have a far-reaching biological impact, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate everything from our hearts to our immune systems, making good relationships act like vitamins- and bad relationships like poisons. We can "catch" other people's emotions the way we catch a cold, and the consequence of isolation or relentless social stress can be life-shortening.

So, again, these are not factors that "interfere with" the management and operation of groups of people. These factors are the empowering forces that need to be orchestrated and "managed" in the best sense of that word. And, as with growing crops or healing bodies -

the natural processes do the hard stuff and the heavy lifting here, and mostly we need to just get obstacles out of the way of those natural processes.

It is like the concept that Alex Baldwin comes up with in the movie Red October, basically, "Hey. We don't need to solve this problem. We just need to realize how Captain Ramius has already solved this problem and go along with that." We don't need to create the concept of massive parallel computational power and add some "plug-in" to humans to make it work, although wireless connectivity and cell phones certainly should help -- we just need to open the floodgates and let it happen.

Actually, there is one step we could take to massively increase that effect, nationally. We could subsidize phone conversations and make them totally free. We could remove the last financial barrier to people talking to other people. Years ago, Japan basically did this, and made the cost of any phone call something like 5 cents. Of all the places where we do not want to slow things down, interpersonal communication is tops. There are billions of other places to make money, but charging people to talk to each other is the most economically damaging one I can think of. This models seriously suggests subsidizing those conversations, and not trying to profit from free Internet conversations.

Or, in our workplace design, we could be sure to include employee lounges with whiteboards, where people can mix and run into each other. One study I heard reported that something like 2/3 of the barrier-cracking solutions to problems arose "spontaneously" when people just happened to come by when others were talking about something. This was way more powerful than formal "project meetings" for solving hard problems. Removing the kitchens and lounges is not a step to improved efficiency or effectiveness, and if it appears to be so, we need to re-validate our metrics.

We have no way to predict which two people need to meet and exchange views to hold together the fabric that I showed in my last post being ripped apart. We know that we will need many such interactions, and that we need to facilitate interactions that cross gaps, cross silos, and cross social classes and not let everyone spend all day just inter-breeding mentally and psychologically. Too much inbreeding causes birth defects and production defects.

It is necessary to "stir the pot" and not let the natural forces that cause separation and clumping to "win" the day. We need to actively celebrate diversity, not "tolerate it" one day a year.

In a complete system, every part resonates to every other part. We are not sure how to "cause" that to occur, but we know a lot about ways to be sure it does not occur. One way to be sure it won't occur is to break the world into segments and not let them talk to each other socially, especially if the segments break along racial, caste, or social-status lines.

Central planning the details of human interactions won't work. Central planning and environment that will nurture human relations is critical.

Maybe, breaking the workspace up into cubicles, and putting one person per cubicle and not letting them see each other or talk to each other is not the best way to accomplish that. The human interactions being squelched are the ones that the company needs to operate. There's even death-spiral possible here, where, the more in trouble the company is, the more "management" prevents people from "wasting time" talking to each other -- which, in turn, reduces morale and efficiency even more, which makes the company more in trouble, etc.

People are an asset, but the most important part of people is not N-people taken as "individuals" but a dynamic emergent "us" that can and will show up if people with a common purpose are allowed to interact and encouraged to support each other and find corporate support for such on-going "social" interactions.

The classic concept of checking your guns and your emotions and, basically, your life at the door because we should be "professional" because this is a "work place" produces not neutrality, but a workplace that is dismally depressing and just sucks the life-force out of the employees who try to work there. Phrases like "I'm going home so I can get some work done" start sounding familiar. What those classical techniques produce, time after time, are "anti-work places" where the work cannot possibly get done and cannot possibly get done well in a sustainable fashion.

The old model, the "Theory X" model of employees, doesn't actually work in practice. We need to be looking at "Theory Y" instead, that seems to fit reality and be much more productive in both human and commercial senses. Ben-Sharar teaches Harvard's most popular course, Positive Psychology, and teaches that this is productive for everything from health care to the Israeli Army. Theory Y actually works and works way better than Theory X. That's the take home message.

We are not machines. That's the better model.