How to Implement Negotiation Planning

Tiffany Kemp from Devant, Ltd. and I held an IACCM teleconference on May 19, 2009 about change management problems when implementing negotiation planning.  Tiffany’s writeup is here.  You can hear the entire call here.

We concluded that there are at least 4 key issues faced when trying to implement a global negotiation planning process in an organization:

(1) Gradient: People tend to fall along a gradient, with 1 pole reflecting the idea that everything is new (the “fly by the seat of your pants” approach), vs. the other pole where people tend to think that there is hardly anything new under the sun (the “knowledge management” approach).  Most people are closer to the “everything is new” pole.  This makes implementing a defined process and ensuring compliance quite challenging.

(2) Sales: A very good idea to get people to embrace a negotiating process is to make a business case as to how it would improve sales.

(3) Meme: Another good idea to advance implementation would be to come up with a unique cultural artifact that people can gravitate towards.

(4) Short Term vs. Long Term Efficiency: People naturally put off to tomorrow what they don’t want to focus on today, even if putting things off means more work in the long run.  A major challenge in implementing a negotiation process is overcoming the omnipresent tendency to overvalue this short term efficiency (commonly stated as, “I don’t have time to plan.“).

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