Dear All,
Sorry to have dropped from the Blogosphere. Too much going on in the world and in the Crawf household, and not enough to say.
I had an interesting few days giving a Negotiation Skills masterclass at the IAEA in Vienna, then a shorter one-day version of the same to a sassy group of young Poles and Russians in Gdansk under the auspices of the Polish Russia Dialogue Centre.
The interesting thing about all this negotiation skills work is how difficult people seem to find it to push hard for the best possible result - soggy compromise comes much too easy.
I boil a negotiation down to the following options that anyone has: Yes - Maybe - No. The skill of a negotiator is not to get into the Maybe territory - it's to push relentlessly to the Yes end of the Maybe Zone and see if a deal can be struck there that gives you more and others (probably) less. There are ways to do this that come down to raw technique (bluff, intensity, persuasion, open questions, active listening and so on, but above all determination to succeed in this sense).
These points are always understood by course participants, but then promptly forgotten in the ensuing roleplays.
Anyway, it has been good to see the OPCW winning this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Such international organisations deploy clever diligent experts from around the planet to do hard-edge inspection work that almost never gets acknowledged even though it helps keep states honest. These inspections are part of the arms control ideas that emerged during the Cold War, namely to build trust through verification - checking that what a state said is happening is in fact happening, including by spot-check inspections of highly sensitive installations. This work trundles on unobtrusively and largely unrecognised, until now.
Perhaps some of the OPCW inspectors now going into Syria will have been through one of our Ambassador Partnership masterclasses. If so, they just need to remember to push to the Yes end of that Maybe Zone as they search for illicit weapons or processes. While, of course, staying alive.
On returning from all that I have been giving Public Speaking coaching to a senior businessman. Another interesting piece of work, that reinforced my belief that a speechwriter has to focus above all on helping a speaker get the right tone and structure if a speech is to be successful. It's not mainly about the actual words of a speech; they in fact are the easy bit, once the basic message has been identified. Basically, a speaker either strikes the right sort of conversational tone for the occasion, or not.The skill of a speechwriter is to help make that happen...
Anyone wanting a proper taste of all this has Options. Namely my two upcoming Guardian masterclasses, one on Negotiation next weekend and the other in November on Public Speaking. Places are going fast, so sign up now.
The BBC World Service World Have Your Say radio programme invited me on the other day to look at the US federal government shutdown in terms of negotiation technique. An interesting subject.
As usual the issue has Shrek-like layers. The alarming trajectory of US and Western public debt. Obamacare. The reputations of the key politicians involved. And, probably above all, the hopes of both Republicans and Democrats to 'frame' the issues and their opponents with a view to prevailing in the 2014 round of elections.
Thus President Obama accuses the Republicans of 'extortion' and the Republicans retort that Obama is ready to negotiate with all sorts of ghastly world leaders but not with them (this, by the way, is a fine example of using a visual prop to get across a message during a speech). Zzzzzz
Back in real life, the attempts by some parts of the US federal system to demonstrate the evil effects of the shutdown by oppressing people wanting to see national parks have reached stunning East German proportions:
But perhaps the most extraordinary story to emerge from the NPS is that of the tour group of foreign seniors whose bus was trapped in Yellowstone Park on the day the shutdown began. They were pulled over photographing a herd of bison when an armed ranger informed them, with the insouciant ad-hoc unilateral lawmaking to which the armed bureaucrat is distressingly prone, that taking photographs counts as illegal “recreation.” “Sir, you are recreating,” the ranger informed the tour guide.
And we can’t have that, can we? They were ordered back to the Old Faithful Inn, next to the geyser of the same name, but forbidden to leave said inn to look at said geyser. Armed rangers were posted at the doors, and, just in case one of the wily Japanese or Aussies managed to outwit his captors by escaping through one of the inn’s air ducts and down to the geyser, a fleet of NPS SUVs showed up every hour and a half throughout the day, ten minutes before Old Faithful was due to blow, to surround the geyser and additionally ensure that any of America’s foreign visitors trying to photograph the impressive natural phenomenon from a second-floor hotel window would still wind up with a picture full of government officials.
The following morning the bus made the two-and-a-half-hour journey to the park boundary but was prevented from using any of the bathrooms en route, including at a private dude ranch whose owner was threatened with the loss of his license if he allowed any tourist to use the facilities.
It's raining. And the dawg needs a walk.
