Negotiation and design thinking
Recently, I am taking another summer course, Power, Negotiation, and Influence. Like other human resource classes, good observation could lead to the satisfied settlement with your counterpart. During the whole negotiation process, both parties use their insufficient information and limited observation to make the deal done. Sometimes it is good to leave the environment to fresh your own mind during the negotiation process. Then, I keep thinking that is there any connection between the negotiation process and the design thinking? For design thinking, observation is also an important step to begin the whole process. Interviewing different people could stimulate some new ideas or even open a new window for us. Also, when a project becomes difficult to keep running, it is always good to leave it and walk away for a while. Like the cabinet we saw in IDEO’s office, all the stuff put there may be a failure piece in the past or just wait for the right moment to be used, which encourage people to play with it and then think with it and, more important, help people to refresh their mind to see things in different angle. “Look at the big picture” is what Porf. Yoo told us in class, which is also be told in my negotiation class. The reason why we need to think something broad is there are always more options and solutions when we stop staring at only one point. Either design thinking or negotiation process is a path to creating a perfect solution for the current situation. Also, both process need to try different models and to respond different interaction before the finial solution comes out. Negotiation looks for an unexpected strike to win the settlement and design thinking leads to an unexpected strike for that.
June 16th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
An example of finding a solution with more options can be found on the role playing car sales exercise that we did in the Negotiations class. In the exercise, both sides (the buyer and the seller) received a set of common shared information about the model of the car (Ford Escape), the mileage, the condition and age, etc… In addition, the private seller was given the information that he wanted to sell the car so that he can buy a new car, a Lexus asap because he needed the cash to put the down car so that he won’t have to pay additional interest. The buyer was given the information that she wanted to buy a new car because she totaled her car and need a car ASAP. It also mentioned that money has been tight for her. She only saved $7000 for vacation for her family because her family hasn’t gone on one in such a very long time. They usually just stay locally by going down to the shore house.
As you can imagine, most of us in class came to a negotiated deal averaging around $17,000. However, one person in the class (her name is Julia) thought out of the box and she got the best deal of all. She got the car for around $16,000 and she gave the seller a week of free rental at her shore house. I thought that was a creative solution where she wouldn’t have to pull out or lose any money by giving up her shore house for a week.
That was a great example of thinking outside of the box and looking at the big picture which allows us to come up with more options and solutions a dn not just look at one point of view.