Npl and Negotiations

Abstract

Negotiating has become a part of our daily routine. Most of us enter into at least two significant negotiation situations daily where positive outcomes are very important for us. Our negotiation partners include colleagues, friends, bosses, business associates, customers and vendors. In all these settings we use a variety of persuasion techniques to get our own way. We will explore in this paper Neuro-linguistic Programming and its use in negotiations.

Introduction

Neuro-Linguistic Programming can be broken down to three distinct words:

1. Neuro

2. linguistic

3. programming

Neuro refers to the brain and neural network feeding into the brain. Neurons or nerve cells are the working units used by the nervous system to send, receive, and store signals that add up to information.

Linguistic(s) refer content, both verbal and non-verbal, that moves across and through these pathways.

Programming is the way the content or signal is manipulated to convert it into useful information. The brain may direct the signal, sequence it, change it based on our prior experience, or connect it to some other experience we have stored in our brain to convert it into thinking patterns and behaviors that are the essence of our experience of life.

Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) refers to a training philosophy and a set of training techniques first developed by John Grindler and Richard Bandler in the mid-1970s as an alternative form of therapy. Grindler (a psychologist) and Bandler (a student of linguistics) were interested in how people influence each other and in how the behaviors of very effective people could be duplicated. They were essentially interested in discovering how successful communicators achieved their success. They studied how successful therapists and concluded that they followed similar patterns in relating to their clients and in the language they used, and that they all held similar beliefs about themselves and what they were doing. Grindler and Bandler developed NLP as a system of techniques therapists could use in building rapport with clients, gathering information about their internal and external views of the world, and helping them achieve goals and bring about personal change. They sought to fill what they perceived to be a gap in psychological thinking and practice of the early 1970s by developing a series of step-by-step procedures that would enable people to improve themselves.

The Role of NLP in Negotiation

Around the same time NLP was originated The Harvard Negotiation Project, spearheaded by William Ury and Roger Fisher sought to answer the question, What is the best way for people to deal with their differences?” Through their project, Ury and Fisher discovered that the traditional model of bargaining was both inefficient and unneccearily hostile to both parties. They realized the best way to facilitiate an agreement was not through positional bargaining, but rather through mutual understanding of interests and cooperative bargaining.

One practitioner of NLP, Ian Ross, created his own model for Conflict Resolution. He combined a systematic approach to NLP with the academic de rigour of the Harvard approach to conflict resolution. He believes within a negotiation there are 6 steps to resolving conflicts, deadlocks and unachieved outcomes. Those steps include:

1. Define the issue and the stated positions of all the main parties involved in the situation, problem or unachieved outcome.

2. Chunk up' by seeking the higher level 'interests' of all parties.

3. Chunk down' by asking what stops the parties from resolving this issue.

4. Define the single 'leverage point' for action.

5. Create a new goal based on addressing the leverage point.

6. Check that the achievement of the new goal meets the interests of all key players.

First They Must Buy You!

Experienced sales people know that customers are unlikely to buy your product or service or idea if they don't like you.

First your customer must 'buy' you - only then will they consider 'buying' your product or service or idea. NLP in selling is so powerful that, even where you are at a price or a technical specifications’ disadvantage, you can often get the order if your relationship with your customer is right!

NLP: