The Cambridge Negotiations Lab

Hello, my name is Mark de Rond. I am Professor of Organisational Ethnography at Cambridge Judge Business School. Research-wise, what I do is very old-fashioned. I study people like you by living with you full time. And I’ve done this mostly with people that tend to do very difficult work, in really challenging circumstances.

Some examples of that are doctors and nurses, at work, during the bloodiest year of the war in Afghanistan. Adventurers trying to set a world record by rowing the length of the Amazon River. Peace activists walking from Berlin all the way to Aleppo. Elite rowers in Cambridge preparing to race the Boat Race against Oxford. And for the past 4 years, with paedophile hunters who make it their mission to try and smoke out and publicly expose child predators.

And so what it means is that I see quite a lot of conflict. I also work as a mediator for the University. And what it means is that I help people negotiate their way towards a more amicable working relationship. And so again, I tend to see quite a lot of conflict.

And the reason I tell you this is because what we’ll do here in the Cambridge Negotiations Lab has relevance not just to commercial negotiations, but in fact, it’s relevant to everyday life. And the skills you’ll pick up are skills you’ll be able to use right away in your everyday life.

So let me tell you something about the Cambridge Negotiations Lab. What we’ll do is we’ll make it very, very practical moving from very simple negotiating simulations, to really, really complex ones. In fact, the first one we’ll do is the simplest I can give you, but it has a sting in the tail. And I can’t tell you what it is, but you’ll find out when you arrive.

After that first negotiation, we’ll move on to 3 further negotiations that become increasingly more complex, partly because they’ll involve more people. And again, I think these are negotiations you’ll enjoy, but beyond that, that you’ll learn from, including learning about yourself. What we’ll give you is feedback on how you show up as a negotiator, which in real life is actually quite hard to come by. And we’ll let you do these negotiations in a perfectly safe space.

And what it means is that you can experiment. You can do things you may normally not do just to see if it works for you. And finding out through your feedback, whether you are more and also less effective. Even if you hit some very experienced negotiators on the course, the course is really designed for people that have very little or no experience at all with negotiating. Or indeed for people that have some experience in negotiating, but aren’t all that confident about their ability to negotiate effectively. And if that’s you, this course is designed just for you.

So as a way of closing, let me leave you with a story that is very well known in negotiating circles. It’s a story of an old man who had 3 daughters and 17 camels. And one day the old man woke up and wasn’t feeling too good, and he didn’t think he’d be around much longer. So he did what you and I would do, which is to call his daughters into his room one by one.

So he calls in the oldest daughter and says, “Listen. Your dad isn’t feeling very well today, and I don’t think I’ll be around much longer, and you know what? There’s not much I can leave you when I’m gone. All I have are my camels. So what I’ll do is I’ll give you half of my 17 camels.” She leaves the room, the middle daughter comes in and says, “Listen. Not feeling too well today, won’t be around much longer, and you know what? There’s not much I can give you except a share of my camels. You know camels, you tended to them when you were younger. Of these 17 camels, I’ll let you have one third.”

The youngest daughter comes in and he says, “Listen. I won’t be around much longer, and there’s not much I can leave you except a share of my camels. How about of the 17 camels I have, you can have one ninth.” And then he dies. So the 3 daughters have no father, 17 camels, of which the oldest daughter owns half, the middle daughter a third, and the youngest daughter one ninth.

Well, the problem is you can’t cleanly divide 17 by 2, nor by 3, nor by 9. So what did they do? They can’t figure it out. And so they go and visit the oldest woman in the village and say, “Can you help us out?” And tell her what the problem is, and the oldest woman says, “Listen. How about you come back same time tomorrow, we’ll sit down, and I’ll tell you what I figured we could do.” Something like that.

So the girls return, they sit down with the woman, and the woman says, “I’ve thought about your problem for a long time, and you know what? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to solve your problem. But there is something I’m willing to try. As you know,” she said, “I have one camel of my own. What if we add that to the kitty?”

So suddenly the girls end up with 18 camels. Now what it means is that the oldest girl walks away with 18 divided by two, is 9 camels. The middle girl is 6 camels, the youngest with 2. Now 9 plus 6 is 15, plus 2, 17, and so they end up giving back the 18th camel.

What we’ll do in this course is to find that 18th camel. Negotiating is very much about that. And it’s often not by finding out what you and I have in common, but actually by accepting that you are different from me. You have different interests from mine. And to say, that is OK. Let’s be creative.

It’d be lovely to have some of you join us here for a few days in Cambridge as part of the Negotiations Lab.