Strategic Negotiations Programme Onboarding

In the Launch Week, you will find guidance on how to make the most of the programme, information on certification requirements, and an overview of the learning journey. You will learn how to navigate the platform, get to know your faculty and peers.

You will find information on how to organise your negotiation role play exercises, your coaching sessions and how to complete the Negotiation Preferences Assessment (NPA).

You will also find out about the “Action Learning Project” (ALP). The ALP is an integral part of the online course. It offers you the opportunity to apply your learning and to prepare for an upcoming negotiation. The objective is for you to synthesize your strategic analysis and recommendations on how best to approach it.

Note: In order to successfully pass this programme, you must complete your ALP to a high standard. 

To start, we will look at some of the foundations of the Value Negotiation (VN) system. The VN system has been developed at INSEAD by Prof. Falcao. It builds on several negotiation systems, to create a coherent, effective, strategic, and international negotiation system. Ultimately, the VN system aims to help negotiators maximize rewards at minimum risk in the widest range of situations. 

Learning Objectives:

• Define negotiation, win-win, win-lose, value and power correctly as fundamental concepts.
• Identify the risk and reward of different negotiation choices.
• Apply the best communication strategies right from the start of a negotiation.
• Practice substituting crippling assumptions for empowering ones.
   

During week 2 we cover VN’s main framework: the 7 elements. This framework helps us become more disciplined in our views of negotiation, more precise and thus efficient with our language, and overall better negotiators. We apply the 7 elements as a structure to the several steps in a negotiation, from preparing, to defining your mandate and your preferred outcome (your vision of success), to diagnosing the different challenges and opportunities, to negotiating with confidence and clarity, to debriefing and learning from your experience, all the way to successfully reporting your outcome back to your constituents.

Learning Objectives:

• Define what success means in a negotiation.
• Identify ways to define success that can make your negotiation easier or harder to succeed.
• Apply a 7 element framework to create a clear yet flexible vision of success.
• Practice thinking, talking and diagnosing the 7 elements.

In week 3, we dive into the more strategic nature of the VN system and introduce its 2nd main framework: the 3 negotiations. The 3 negotiations framework improves our ability to align our moves and diagnose our counterparty patterns according to win-win or win-lose strategies. Being consistent and understanding our trade-offs is paramount to choosing moves that build of each other and improve our odds of reaching our desired outcome.

Learning Objectives:

• Define the three negotiations, and their respective win-lose and win-win strategies.
• Learn how to strategically frame negotiations before you reach the table.
• Understand; the connection, opportunities, and traps between the 3 negotiations.
• Lead and balance all strategic aspects of your negotiation and minimise last minute surprises.

Many argue that negotiations require trust, especially when negotiating win-win. While that statement is not true, and a skilled negotiator can negotiate win-win successfully without trust, trust does make negotiation and win-win strategies significantly easier to implement. As such, relationship and trust building are great assets for any negotiator’s toolbox. During this week, we will breakdown relationship and trust building into small, replicable, and detailed moves that any learned negotiator can implement independently of their previous ability.

Learning Objectives:

• Defining trust and what a good relationship really means.
• Recognise relationship building mistakes in negotiation that cost money or fail to build trust.
• Learn efficient and positive short and long-term relationship building strategies.
• Practice how to counter aggressive or manipulative moves.

Every negotiation presents the value tension as one of its main challenges: do I help create value, but in the process share information that risks helping my counterparty claim more value at my expense; or do I skip value creation, but in doing so have a smaller pie to claim from? It seems like a Catch 22, where you are doomed if you do or doomed if you don’t. In week 5, we cover how you can negotiate that tension so that you can maximize value creation and still position yourself for a successful value claiming exercise, thus allowing you to claim your fair share from a bigger pie for a superior outcome.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the tension between value creation & claiming, and how to minimise it.
• Learn advanced value creation and claiming techniques.
• Prepare to overcome the main value creation enemies or obstacles within and surrounding your negotiation.
• Learn how to claim value consistently with a win-win process and without bargaining.

The last two weeks are for you to synthesise your learning from the programme into a compelling Final ALP submission, building on your reflections from your weekly ALPs. Throughout the programme, you will have the opportunity to receive guidance from your coach, and draw from that feedback and experience to develop and fine tune your execution plan.  

This programme includes 5 one-on-one role-play exercises. These simulated negotiations will offer you an opportunity to practice various tactics in a low-risk setting that not only helps improve your skills, but also boosts your confidence, a key ingredient to negotiation success. You will also have the opportunity to observe recordings of negotiations with the expert commentary of Professor Falcao. Each case is designed to help you focus on the key concepts covered in the corresponding week. Please note that these role-plays are mandatory for your programme completion. More details will be provided during the kick-off call.