Tactics

In recent times, since the advent of Getting to Yes, collaborative bargaining and principled negotiation, tactics have been viewed as dirty tricks or deceptions that legitimate negotiators should avoid. software views tactics differently. A tactic is simply any statement or action that people commonly use to affect each other’s perception of value.

Envision a negotiation in which you are selling a piece of property. At the beginning of the negotiation the other person may have a very limited, even incorrect, perception of your property’s value. Should you tell them about it? Should you show it to them? Should you provide them expert reports? Each of these actions is a tactic for affecting the other person’s perception of your property’s value. Inspections, demonstrations, endorsements, samples, testimonials, guarantees, and contingencies are just a few of the legitimate tactics used to improve the other person’s perception of value. Altogether it catalogues more than 600 tactics.

The final idea is to classify tactics by activity. Traditionally, negotiations have been described as occurring in discreet stages, starting with preparation and ending with concession. Very few negotiations, however, proceed in such a neat, orderly fashion. Some begin with a proposal and proceed directly to a concession with no exchange of information or debate. Others vacillate repeatedly between information gathering and debate before any proposal is ever extended.

To avoid any imprecision arising from the sequence of events, software classifies tactics by activity rather than phase or stage. Software defines an "activity" as any of the six actions in which parties engage during a typical negotiation. The six activities consist of:

Preparation Make changes to the actual value of objects or resources.
Exchange Information Obtain or withhold information from the other party.
Make Proposal Communicate demand or offer to the other party.
Debate Proposal Dispute or defend a proposal.
Sell Proposal Persuade the other party to accept your proposal.
Make Concession Accept the other party's proposal.

Activities may occur separately, simultaneously, or repeatedly - depending on the negotiation. Not all activities will occur in every negotiation, but all successful negotiations will include Make Proposal and Make Concession.

Importantly, software considers Sell Proposal a distinct activity. Unlike the debate tactics, sales tactics are not designed to prove either person right or wrong, but to persuade the other person to say "yes".

Software also classifies tactics so that they are unique to one negotiation activity. This classification scheme results in "families" of related tactics. For example, the following tactics, occurring in different activities, are all related by the technique of repeating an action:

Come Again: Ask same question repeatedly
Repetition: Make same statement repeatedly
Persistence: State same proposal repeatedly
Tenacity: Make same argument repeatedly
Stonewall: Reject same proposal repeatedly

The redefinition of tactics as actions used to affect the perception of value, and the structured classification of tactics by activity, allows the computer to analyze the tactics in relationship to the properties of the negotiation objects. If the object’s perceived quality is low, the computer will select tactics that show how the object meets the standards of the other party. If the object’s perceived usefulness is low, the computer will select tactics that show how the object fulfills the motivations of the other party. Software evaluates and weighs 12 different properties in making its tactic recommendations.