Additional Information

Instruction Mode: Hybrid - Online & In Person
This course aims to help students improve their skills in two fundamental ways. One is knowledge-oriented: students learn frameworks and concepts for analyzing conflict. Students acquire terms and models for identifying the type of conflict that exists in a situation and the potential costs and benefits of different strategies and tactics. Based on this, students should be able to interpret situations, plan tactics, and recognize and react to their counterpart’s behavior. A second and complementary route to improving as a negotiator is practice-oriented: students complement their analytical tools with behavioral skills. Negotiation and conflict ultimately come down to behaviors—how a manager opens a potentially volatile conversation, how a mediator uncovers information, how a negotiator frames an offer or a concession. Practicing these behaviors, and understanding how other parties perceive and react to them, is essential to improving as a negotiator. The course provides continuing opportunities for hands-on practice and also provides feedback, discussion, and occasions for reflection. Through role-play exercises, lecture, reading, and discussion, the course begins with basic dynamics in negotiation and adds complexity in stages, including multiple issues, multiple parties, mediation, agents, and coalitions. Some exercises involve numerical analyses, others revolve around qualitative conflicts. By the end of the course, students should be able to comfortably and confidently approach most any conflict or negotiation: analyzing its nature, understanding their own objectives, and plotting an approach that will give them the best shot at achieving their goals.

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