“When rational men of good will sit down at a table to resolve their difference they can’t.”

“When rational men of good will sit down at a table to resolve their difference they can’t.”

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That’s what I remember Ken Hammond saying at a talk during my doctoral studies at the Univ. of Illinois 1966-69. Colleagues who know his work better than I do tell me they can’t find it written. Neither could Bard, who suggested:

1. Harold Lasswell: "Politics: Who Gets What, When, How" was first published in 1936. Lasswell wrote, “Men of good will often disagree about how to make the world a better place.” And,

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2. John Kenneth Galbraith: "The Affluent Society" was first published in 1958. “The difficulty of agreeing on a solution is compounded by the difficulty of agreeing on the problem.”

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So, the thoughts were current in the later 1960s, as was the overt sexism that assumed only men could make decisions. I remember the sentence clearly, though, since it tapped deeply into the work I was doing in perceptual mapping, preference mapping, and multivariate individual-differences models, my dissertation areas. It related my psychometric efforts to the Brunswick Lens Model, the framework that drove Hammond’s work on human decision making in small groups. While my research focused on individual and aggregate decision making, Hammond worked on bargaining, negotiation, and mediation derived from Egon Brunswick’s work. People see the world through different lenses. The mapping from the real world to the lens may be distorted and the cues seen by the individual may be differentially used to compose reality. It gets richer when individual differences in values are included.

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The common steps to reaching agreement involve first agreeing on a common perception of the world and then being disclosing of your values. That’s like the DIY transmission-replacement instructions that start, “First remove the engine.” Then comes de-escalating the intensity of the opposition. The intensity present in much calmer times led me to add a corollary: “If you care enough, nothing can be divided equally.” Think divorce. Then compare that to war.

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Some of my insights come from teaching “Individual Decision-Making” – one of the core courses I taught MBAs in the mid-1970s – we ended with a three-week series of games. The first week, we used one of the many technology-based survival games. Teams were given a list of available materials and personnel, and a survival goal. Surviving a plane crash that left the group stranded in the desert, or in a lifeboat, or in remote Alaska, or on the moon, they had to move to a rescue location, taking only the most necessary equipment. While the exercise was really about some of the issues and traps in task-group communications, the MBA students invariably approached it by seeking some engineering or related expertise, thinking that technology had the right and wrong answers to the proper prioritization, and defending their problem solution as the right one in the face of equally viable, creative alternatives proposed by other teams. Students experientially learned that the agreement on a picture of reality helped them set the priorities and communicate their solutions.

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Equipped with newly minted belief in their group decision-making skills, the students approached Exercise Kolomon. This exercise presented a developing country with a relatively “uneducated population, minimal infrastructure, substantial but undeveloped natural resources, and a potentially hostile set of geopolitical neighbors. Setting national priorities was the nominal group task: determining allocations to the military, the education sector, nascent industry, and infrastructure projects. In this exercise, students learned that establishing a common picture of reality was a necessary but not sufficient condition for problem solving.

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They struggled with intractable conflicts until they took the step back to ask about values. Only after seeking a consensus on the value issues involved could the group move toward a solution.

Now armed with task-group skills and aware of the need to share not only pictures of reality but basic values as a prelude to problem solving, MBA students entered the third week of exercises.

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The final exercise, called Star Power, sets up a rigged game: a three-tiered, low mobility, hierarchical society in which arbitrary teams traded with other teams. Depending on the arbitrary assignment to a tier, the different teams started with varying levels of initial endowments – conveying a covert and unearned advantage that tended to persist in the trading game. After a number of trading rounds, the team that was ahead got to rewrite the trading rules for the next set of rounds. The sense of entitlement, justified or not, that went with success in the early rounds translated into a new set of rules that would make Machiavellians blush. The rules went from “You must agree to any trade we demand” to “Give us all your coins.” When I, as professor, would confront the winning teams with the obvious greed and short-term thinking inherent in the new rule set, the response, too often, was that I had unfairly tricked them. If you were to line up the candidates that made it into elite MBA programs in the 1970, the mostly male group would come close to rational men of goodwill to most observers.

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I once chaired a committee at UCLA that reviewed and developed management plans for dealing with financial conflicts in sponsored research. The tougher cases, way easier than the conflicts we are currently discussing, we were aided by being overly analytical, parsing the issues into bite-sized pieces to see if pieces of the conflict could be managed. Can you put together a workable solution? That barely works where the stakes are minor compared to what the world faces today.

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These are a few of the reasons to be pessimistic about negotiations with Hamas. If only one outcome is acceptable no compromise is possible. If rational men of good will can’t do it, what chance do we have?

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Portions of this were excerpted my book on Systems Entrepreneurship pp 94-95. The title photo comes from: https://www.manutan.com/blog/en/procurement-strategy/procurement-negotiations-the-ten-best-practices-according-to-harvard-law-school. I hope they don't mind the plug.

Lee G. Cooper