Off to a flying start

I was planning a visit to my daughter overseas in two months.  With half a million frequent flyer points earned over the years I decided to use them to pay for the air travel.  I thought this would be a relatively simple process as I was travelling in non-peak season and have flexibility on dates and stopovers. 

Silly me, after four hours of keyboard work by a skilled travel agent I was totally frustrated. The availability of suitable flights was a shifting target that meant by the time a departure was available it could not be matched with a suitable return. In desperation I even tried to fly the in the opposite direction and sneak up on my destination. All this work resulted in the following; we would leave later than we wanted, have two enforced stopovers in places we did not want to visit, spend less time in the places we wanted to visit and return home earlier. It was a dogs breakfast.
Then suddenly it hit me; what was a trying to do? I had completely lost sight of my objective, which was to have a relaxing holiday, visit my daughter and spend time in some places I had not seen. I had become so focused on using the frequent flyer points, my strategy, that I had completely lost sight of my original objective.

Given my strategy was not working I needed a new strategy. I paid cash for the dates I wanted to destinations I wanted and I am much happier as a result. The frequent flyer points remain unused as so many of them do, I wonder why?

The real lesson is never to confuse strategy with objective. The latter is fixed the former flexible.

Keith Stacey – Scotwork, Australia

It's All About Packaging!

Most of you have followed (to some extent at least) the negotiations between the recently elected Greek government and its European partners. Depending on his or her political persuasion, an observer may feel in a number of ways regarding the outcome.

So was the agreement a huge success, or was it a full capitulation of the Greek government? I believe that most of us would agree that it was neither. A negotiation is not a battle where either side emerges victorious, having beaten to death the other side. Negotiations are about compromise where the parties concede on issues of lesser importance in order to gain on issues of major importance. True, when issues are considered to be of major importance for all sides, and differences exist, it takes skilled negotiators to move the process forward.

So if no one was a clear winner, was this a good deal? Before giving my opinion, let me define what is “a good deal”. Two criteria have to be fulfilled, to render a deal “good”. The first criterion has to do with content. The final agreement must at least cater for the most important requirements in a sustainable way for all sides. This is rather obvious.

The most important however, is the second criterion. This has to do with packaging. That is, making sure that all parties save face and are allowed to claim some gains if not clear victory. This is what allows politicians to “sell” a deal to their constituents and keep going, even when the actual content of the final agreement leaves a lot to be desired. So, as strange as it may sound, packaging is often the most crucial element in a deal.

Considering these two criteria, content and (mainly) packaging, I can now answer the question whether this was a good deal between Greece and its EU partners. YES it was a good deal. Both sides can live with the content (at least for the next few months). Both sides can claim that they preserved the spirit of the previous memorandum (EU partners) or that they considerably improved the status quo they inherited from their predecessors (Greek government). All you have to do is choose what filter you want to use, when forming your opinion.

Yannis Dimarakis
Managing Partner, Scotwork Hellas

Good Negotiators are Good Listeners

 Good Negotiators are Good Listeners

  

A recent article in the New York Times a comparison between the physiological aspects of hearing and listening.  In brief the author, neuroscientist Professor Seth Horowitz, says that the process of hearing works from our ears to an area in the brain which is automatically able to register and then tune out background noise. Listening, he says, is different; when our attention is grabbed the electrical impulses from our ears take a pathway to a different area of the brain, associated with computation. At a basic level this allows our defence mechanisms to fire up. We describe this as being startled - and this overrides the background noise and allows us to focus on what we are hearing and process it accordingly. That's listening!

We find it more and more difficult to actively listen because of the overload of background noise which we hear (just stop reading and describe to yourself what you can hear right now - your computer humming maybe? Distant traffic? The TV in the next room?) The hearing pathway is so active at tuning out the yada yada of everyday life that the skill of listening is in danger of being lost.

His interesting conclusion is that we need to improve our listening skills, and we can do that with some simple activities which train our brain to use the listening pathway more effectively. Playing new music on the MP3 player when out for a jog or at the gym, rather than listening to the old favourites; becoming more aware of changes in the timbre and emotional undercurrent of the words of your partner or children or colleagues, being curious when sounds from a familiar source (the dog?, the washing machine?) are different from those we expect.

It's obvious that listening skills are important to negotiators. For example in recognising words which are indicators of flexibility - 'We would like…….', 'somewhere in the region of…..', and so on. The skilled negotiator goes further. Why was a particular form of words used? What was the relevance of the unusual inflection in the voice of the speaker? Why a hesitation when the response should have been easy and instant? One great technique which good negotiators use is to ask the speaker to repeat a statement which is recognisable as being significant in the negotiation; for example a proposal or counter-proposal. Listening to the original and the repeat very carefully, spotting any differences in language or inflection, and then being curious about these differences will reveal information about priorities, motives and power which can be game-changers.

So listen up!      

                                                                                      

Stephen White – Scotwork, UK