Beyond Intractability: A Free Knowledge Base on More Constructive Approaches to Destructive Conflict

Introduction: Jayne Docherty's advice to interveners: Be cognizant of the fact that your intervention will never be perfect. She has done extensive research on the FBI-Branch Davidian standoff at Waco. She says that though they had the best negotiation technology available at the time, their intervention was far from perfect.

This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

Advice to Interveners
Jayne Docherty
Eastern Mennonite University

Interviewed by
Julian Portilla
2003

Don't think you're ever going to do the perfect process; nobody ever will. One of the things I've tried to be extremely clear with the FBI negotiators, is they were using in 1993 the very best barricade negotiating processes and practices that were available. We didn't know what we know now. Nobody — if they had gone to the negotiation literature, if they'd gone to the Harvard Negotiation Project, if they'd gone to George Mason's Conflict Resolution Program — nobody had a step-by-step easy answer for them. And the difference between their failure and the mistakes that they made and the mistakes that I might make in an environmental conflict is that they have dead people and I have dead trees, and nobody notices the dead trees, and everybody notices the dead people. So let us all be clear that we will never run a perfect process.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France

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Beyond Intractability Version IV
Copyright © 2003-2007 The Beyond Intractability Project
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