The win/win negotiator's approach

During the early part of the 20th century, academics such as Mary Parker Follett developed ideas suggesting that agreement often can be reached if parties look not at their stated positions but rather at their underlying interests and requirements.

During the 1960s, Gerard I. Nierenberg recognized the role of negotiation in resolving disputes in personal, business and international relations. He published The Art of Negotiation, where he states that the philosophies of the negotiators determine the direction a negotiation takes. His Everybody Wins philosophy assures that all parties benefit from the negotiation process which also produces more successful outcomes than the adversarial “winner takes all� approach.

In the 1970s, practitioners and researchers began to develop win-win approaches to negotiation, including the publication of Getting to YES by Harvard's Roger Fisher and William Ury. The book's approach, referred to as Principled Negotiation, is also sometimes called mutual gains bargaining. The mutual gains approach has been effectively applied in environmental situations (see Lawrence Susskind and Adil Najam) as well as labor relations where the parties (e.g. management and a labor union) frame the negotiation as "problem solving".

In 2005, Harvard's Roger Fisher published a follow-up to Getting to YES called Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate (with co-author Daniel Shapiro, a Harvard psychologist). Beyond Reason identifies five "core concerns" that everyone cares about: autonomy, affiliation, appreciation, status, and role.

The book shows how to use the core concerns to stimulate helpful emotions in negotiations ranging from the personal to international. In Beyond Reason, Fisher documents many of his first-hand experiences negotiating around the world, from his involvement in negotiating the Iran-Hostage situation to his advisory role in helping Jamil Mahuad, President of Ecuador (1998-2000), resolve a long-standing international border dispute.

There are a tremendous number of other scholars who have contributed to the field of negotiation, including Sara Cobb at George Mason University, Len Riskin at the University of Missouri, Howard Raiffa at Harvard, Robert McKersie and Lawrence Susskind at MIT, and Adil Najam and Jeswald Salacuse at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Each in their own right is a leader in the field.