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Introduction:
Most people familiar with interest-based bargaining are familiar
with the story in which two people are fighting over an orange, and finding the best
solution is a matter of interests rather than positions. Silke Hansen of
Community Relations Service suggests that a good mediator will take this
approach one step further. Focusing on underlying needs can generate a wide range
of possible solutions.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Interest-Based Bargaining
Silke Hansen
Senior Conciliation Specialist, Community Relations Service
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A: My favorite illustration of that is the story about the mom who comes in when
the girls are fighting about the orange. Everybody thinks they know that story
but they don't. She splits it in half and they each get half. After the mom does
that she sees that one squeezes it for juice and the other grates the peel. So if the mom would of recognized their interests, they both would have
gotten all of what they wanted. A good mediator will understand the concept
behind that but a great mediator will take the illustration one step further and
say OK one girl wanted juice, but her need isn't orange juice it was needing a
beverage. She might have been happy with water or milk, or my personal favorite beer, or coffee or whatever.
The other girl needed a seasoning. So if it wasn't orange, it could have been
maple or vanilla. Any number of options there.
If you really talk and focus on what the needs are, the orange is one possible
solution, but there are lots of others. Beginning mediators are so focused on
the orange and who is going to get the orange that they lose out on a whole
spectrum of other possibilities because they are allowing the party's to limit
the discussion around who gets the orange and what's parts of it. In fact
the possibilities of resolving this conflict are much broader. We are not even
getting into the possibility that the girls were not really fighting about the
orange, but the orange was just a convenient object at that point because they fight over
everything. I'm not even going to go there but that might be another piece of
it. Regardless, if we just focus on the orange, we are limiting their possiblities, and we are limiting our abilities to
help them deal with the conflict.
Q: I've never heard the orange metaphor taken so far.
A: That's exactly my point. Everybody thinks about the orange and what piece
of it do you want. But there are some cases, when you spend the most part of the
fight discussing the orage, and you're not going to get the orange. But to that
people say," I don't know how to resolve that", I think you're selling
yourself short. You are not allowing the parties to explore as many options as
there really are. You're allowing the orange to limit where we look for possible solutions.
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