Musings on the School Board vs. Teachers Negotiation

This negotiation was one of the most difficult role-playing exercises that we've had to do so far. There were so many variables and some information was unobtainable, such as how much we could save by cutting specific benefits.  This causes us to flounder a bit.

To start off,  my group's role was the School Board and it seems like the role of the school board had so many really negative negotiating points.  It made it hard to make any starting offer that didn't sound like we were jerks.

Another problem we had was our three members were never on the same page.  This was because we ran out of time in the preparation phase. Therefore, sometimes one of us would make an offer,or concede to something, that the others did not actually want to agree to.

A third problem was that I felt that one member of our group simply wanted the best alternative for us in EVERY category.  This person did not seem to want give the teacher's union ANY part of the pie!  This person, in caucus, told me that I was "being too nice" because I wanted allow the teachers a longer notice time.  Meanwhile, I felt that the longer notice time was in our the teachers' interest, our interest and the students' interest, since the teachers would be able to work through the semester causing less disruption.

We came to agreements on some issues, but never came to a complete agreement.  The teacher's union group, I felt, started to become annoyed with us because we had such extreme positions.

One thing I feel that has been happening in some of the successful negotiations though, is that the groups get together and simply "give away the role" so to speak.  For instance, they might say "Our most important thing is this, what is your most important thing?". And then they simply decide to split the issues based on that rather than actually role-playing the scene out.  In a real negotiation, should we give away that info right off?  I thought not, because I thought that if you kept some of that to yourself, then you would APPEAR to be giving ground when really it didn't matter anyway.

For example, in a negotiation for a phone deal, if I don't care about a texting plan, in a real negotiation I don't think I'd come right out to the phone company and say "Texting is not important to me but getting a low monthly total price is very important to me"  Wouldn't I instead say, I really need my monthly bill to be X dollars.  Is there any way I we can get to that price?"   And then maybe the phone company might say, "Well we cannot give you a low rate with unlimited everything, but you could get a lower rate for voice and data only".  At this point we'd agree, it would look like I gave something up and it would look like the phone company gained something, but in reality I never cared about texting in the first place.  Maybe it's the same thing, I don't know.  Feel free to set me straight on this in the comment section of this blog.

Our group (both sides) on the other hand did not come right out and say what the rankings were for our roles.  We were definitely taking the role play seriously and seemed to realistically assume the roles.