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Introduction:
Single Text Negotiation is a technique in which one party (often the third party) drafts an agreement, and then the parties modify it in turn until agreement is reached. Here Paul Wehr talks about using the
technique in a university conflict intervention.
For the entire story on Paul Wehr's intervention listen to PW3
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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 ???).
Single-Text Agreements
Paul Wehr
Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Colorado
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The next step was the single text agreement where you draft from the
suggestions of the mappers of what could be done to resolve it. You draft an
agreement, a set of rules of communication for example, rules by which people
agree to behave in the future. It could be as simple as don't email someone, go
and talk to him or her. Because part of the conflict was all of these aggressive
emails going back and forth, but people afraid to confront one another face to
face. The communication was just horrible. The tension level was very high. Here
were two people, who's offices were side by side, who weren't really speaking to
each other in the halls, and they would get back to their computers and they
would cuss each other out electronically. So communication was a major part of
this agreement in other words, how were going to communicate with one another.
The first draft of this agreement went out, and I solicited critiques on this,
what would you not accept, what was possible and so forth. We went through
another four drafts of that single text agreement until we finally got to a
point where we could say, ok, I think this is good enough, I could sign this, I
could put my name to this. So we got everyone in the same room, the agreement
for every single party to sign on to it and I brought along a bottle of
champagne. I had a toast, and a peace signing session. That was about five
years ago. And that agreement has held. To this day I see one of the principle
conflicting parties quite often at the recreation center and I ask him how it is going, and
he says fine, so that's a high point.
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