Tough Love - Power, Culture and Diversity In Negotiations, Mediation & Conflict Resolution

disputes.

CULTURE, GENDER, RACE AND POWER

When I was a young boy, my parents would take me on regular trips to exotic towns and villages—Plattsburgh, Burlington, Newport and others in upstate New York and Vermont. Although the American border was only an hour or so from our home near Montreal, the people and their communities seemed worlds away. The prosperity, the range of goods in stores, the power and confidence were all evident. Power wafted up from the sidewalks to the tops of the wedding-cake buildings in even the smallest of towns.

On one trip we toured an old house that was for sale in Burlington, Vermont. It was somewhere between house and mansion. It had what seemed to be secret stairways, countless floors and lots of rooms. Years later, I asked my father why we had gone on that tour. Dad said he’d considered moving to the States, especially when he saw what a great house he could buy with about the same amount of money he’d spend on an ordinary house in the suburbs of Montreal.

Why didn’t we do it, then? I asked.

I didn’t know anything about visas and green cards, or how to get my stationary engineer’s tickets transferred, explained my father. So, we led as exotic a life as we could in Canada, where I lived and worked in five provinces, from coast to coast.⁷

But my definition of exotic has changed in my short lifetime. I’ve worked regularly on five continents. Even in the twenty years I’ve been serving clients in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Australia and North America, the so called small world has changed several times. One of my last assignments was helping run a news conference in Tokyo while dealing with a major financial crime in the old Communist East Bloc in the same week. But because of faxes, emails, phones and remote forensic work on computers, I was able to do so from my training centre in Toronto.

In the same way my father found the smaller world that I worked in a source of amazement, I am amazed at my children’s generation. Many engage in very exotic travels to attend far-off universities or for a summer adventure. My son, Michael, is editor of the Near-Eastern Studies journal at the University of Toronto. He has just spent two months in New York at Fordham University followed by an African adventure in Nairobi and up Mount Kilimanjaro. And although my younger son, Christian, is just beginning his university career in archaeology and anthropology, he has already been all through North America, Hong Kong and Southern China with me, and through Europe on his own.

But these days, teachers, bank tellers, garage mechanics and dentists don’t have to wait for annual trips to experience the unusual. The world walks into their lives every day. Their clientele is multicultural. They hear and see a dozen cultures a day.

In this smaller world, we need new skills. These new skills are not just a way to get through the next dinner party with a more modern version of Some of my best friends are ------.⁸ New skills are needed to deal with the roughly 20 million people who are in transit or who are refugees at any given time in the world. New skills are needed to do business in a world where the shirts I bought in Hong Kong may be a product of cotton grown in one country, buttons made in another and thread spun in a third. Those shirts may have crossed several territorial and national boundaries multiple times to be cut, sewn and packaged.

Knowing that new skills are required is much easier than identifying what they are, let alone obtaining them. Most world travellers have tried shouting and gesturing to be understood in another culture.⁹ Some of my sophisticated diplomatic friends recommend reading popular literature, such as the book Shogun, before being posted to Japan. Others suggest movies—Ned Kelly for Australia, for example. Some enjoy tougher reading—Mao for China, Zola for France or Marx for the old Soviet Union.

But then it’s fun to consider just what movies, songs and reading actually do expose about a culture. It’s said you can’t understand America without understanding both the Civil War and New York City. But what is learned about America after reading Gone With the Wind or seeing the PBS documentary on New York? What is learned about the Midwest, California or the Olympic Peninsula in Oregon? What is learned about which America?¹⁰

It’s even more fun to bring the game home to Canada.¹¹ What films reveal Canadians to the world—Goin’ Down the Road, Riel or the award-winning animations from the National Film Board of Canada? What books? Two Solitudes surely ignores the multiple Canadian realities. Max Braithwaite and W.O. Mitchell’s prairie teachers and prairie dogs won’t help someone adjust to Cape Breton. Songs? Mon Pays for Quebec and Four Strong Winds for English Canada?

Culture and diversity seem more often captured in cliché than in their broad and deep nuance. Clichés can build bridges. When we bow in Japan (for respect), don’t clink glasses in Hungary (to prevent another Magyar’s death), avoid the sexually suggestive OK sign among Latinos, and refrain from stretching in Thailand, we are respecting well-known and easily accessible cultural clichés.¹² But how well can we know another culture? How well do we have to?

One foreign minister from a NATO country complained to me about the briefings he received from his staff. These featured lessons on myriad protocol matters and potential pitfalls. My friend the minister would interrupt and say, Fine, but is somebody running a briefing for that delegation on how we do business? He had a point.

What is much clearer than whether I can capture my Canadian culture and customs in a few sentences or artefacts is that I am absolutely certain what Canadian culture is not. My business partner in New York, Ken Kansas, is now 75 years old and has always been very interested in culture. Part of his job for Exxon was funding arts organizations in New York and he is proud of bringing the Shakespeare plays to PBS. When we tour the Frick Gallery together, he is able to provide as good a commentary as I have heard live or on tapes at many of the world’s great galleries. About the highest compliment he has tried to pay me is to say that We Americans view you as just like us. The fact that he cannot see the difference between us has my blood boiling before the compliment has left his lips.¹³ I think most Canadians want to be recognized as distinct. Yet many bristle at the notion of Quebec being a distinct society with Canada.

At a large gathering in Canada, I once gave Ken an old map showing my country when it included much of the US south and Midwest. I indicated I wanted my land back. But in the six seconds it takes to get that story told, I realize that it mainly resonates in Quebec, and the meaning fades as its echoes travel through Western Canada and through younger generations who don’t study history.

The difficulty of culture and diversity doesn’t make the topic any less important. Difficulty isn’t a good excuse to exit the field. My entry is the personal and ethnographic. I have tried to blend in while in Japan and stand out while in America.¹⁴

SIMULATIONS AS A LEARNING TOOL

Teachers of dispute resolution are constantly grappling with the question of best practices and methodologies. One of the most popular methodologies is simulations, whose value is in harnessing different learning styles. Some people learn by reading, some by writing and others by speaking. Some learn through spirituality, emotions, the physical (kinesthetic) and as a result of gender, race or cultural attributes and styles.¹⁵ Probably the most popular notion is that we learn by doing.¹⁶

Many new educational trends come under the general heading of andragogy.¹⁷ Pedagogy, the teaching of children, features the child as empty vessel, with the teacher as authority figure, downloading information. Rote learning of axioms, postulates, times tables and Euclidian geometric forms is typical. Andragogy, or adult learning, features the teacher as co-learner, small group discussions, reporting back to the larger group and the harnessing of the life experiences of students.¹⁸

Simulations are considered active or andragogical learning—the doing part. Simulations can model a complex process or reality, wherein participants are in an assigned role.¹⁹ Rule-based simulations can be real, made-up, or computer-enhanced and are usually face-to-face experiences. They are safe; errors are not costly and experimentation is encouraged.²⁰

Some simulations have elements of games and role-plays.²¹ Confidential instructions give players target outcomes.²² Rewards for players who work together can be featured. In negotiations that are not zero-sum, there is great range for intrigue and enticements.

For some, doing as a learning tool helps internalize lessons into the learner’s cognitive process and yields changed thought patterns and actions.²³ This is sometimes called experiential learning and elevates ordinary experience.²⁴ Incidental or collateral learning similarly elevates happenstance.²⁵ Some contend that we must learn in pairs or groups (ignoring the great solitary achievements of Sir Isaac Newton, among many others).

One of the best justifications for simulations is that the classroom is a great place to show you blew a million dollars in a game with high ersatz expenditures.²⁶ There are various definitions of, and opinions about, the value of realism, role reversals, the necessity of debriefing and so on.²⁷ Some say simulations are not complex enough, because in real life, we are not just the roles we play. Part of the debate involves whether experiential learning is more authentic than learning in laboratory-like settings.²⁸ There’s another debate about how well students can switch gender, race or religion.²⁹ Many teachers advocate supplementing simulations with case studies, videotapes, and even computer-based exercise.³⁰

In the end, one may be left with the obvious notions that there are different learning styles and the more a teacher brings all the senses into play, the better.³¹ The more a teacher engages students on all possible levels, the better. But is there anything new in these concepts?

One hundred years ago, prairie schoolteachers began lessons in this way: Farmer Brown has nine chickens, each laying two eggs a day. Eggs sell for x cents a dozen. Shingles are y cents a square foot. How many days will it take farmer Brown to save enough money to shingle his 100-square-foot barn roof?

This was a simulation, of sorts. Teachers once called this problem-based learning (PBL).³² Problems or simulations have been augmented over the years with real eggs, slate, chalk, teaching machines, mimeographs, films, filmstrips, video and the Internet.³³ The modern educator, while grazing on new ways to motivate a class, teach a concept or even deal with the imperative of occupying time in an interesting way, must consider what is really new and beneficial in a technique.³⁴

Many professionals, not just teachers, have perspectives on simulations.³⁵ The military use war games. Simulating creeping barrages with officers on horseback and elaborate exercises behind the lines for weeks is what won the battle of Vimy Ridge for the Canadians.³⁶ Far from the cheap alternative alluded to above, military exercises are so expensive that many of them are often done in slow motion. In military simulations, you fire a $10,000 shell and then conduct a debriefing. Multiple shells are not fired, as they would be in a real war. Firefighters, the police and some in industry test their abilities to respond to myriad events with real fire, real car chases and the actual deployment of remediation gear.³⁷

It may be that there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction. ³⁸There may also be no substitute for silent reading, writing, speaking, listening, reflection, spirituality, kinesthetic activity or any of the other elements in learning.³⁹ In fact, in face-to-face simulation work, students often begin by listening to a teacher’s lecture, reading instructions on paper, asking questions for clarification, speaking with a fellow role-player, debriefing and joining in a class discussion. In other words, face-to-face interaction is only part of many educational techniques normally in play in every course. Moreover, the growth of distance education may be testimony to the ability of the Web to accommodate diverse learning styles, languages and cultures in multiple time zones.⁴⁰ It is refreshing to engage another student or client on Web technology without necessarily knowing the gender, accent, clothing or ethnicity of that person.

Whether in groups or alone, augmented with technology or not, reality is often the best teacher. I don’t see the need to fabricate events in a simulation.⁴¹ The famous Sally Soprano negotiation is a case-in-point. One student plays the role of an aging opera singer hoping for one last hurrah. Another plays an opera-house manager and is told to get Sally to work for a certain fee or less. If that is accomplished, s/he has completed the task, and Sally gets her hurrah. The learning lies in the discovery that Sally would have sung for much less. Students, not being opera singers or opera house managers, nonetheless learn something of the subterfuge of negotiation and how knowing more about the other side can help. But in this and most case studies, complex details may be distractions.⁴² While it is true that real-life cases feature countless details, emotions and diversions, a teacher must consider which of these matters are salient and which are tangential points.⁴³ The teacher also needs to consider whether unpredictable lessons, or incidental learning (always occurring, one assumes) is central or whether a more structured, predictable curriculum is required.⁴⁴

More learning may occur if students play themselves in new situations, as opposed to fictitious people in new and unfamiliar situations. What it is like to be another person in another occupation may be interesting but is often a diversion from the learning goal. At best it involves speculation about that person, business dilemma or life situation. The teacher can assign students a realistic role—confidante, coach or counsel to the opera singer or opera-house manager. Students (or counsel in real life) would not know all the background to the client’s situation. There are roles in this negotiation for students with skill in tax, publicity, media, building management, security, intellectual property and more. Harnessing this real-life experience might more closely approximate the intent of andragogy, from which other students and the teacher can learn.⁴⁵

There are other ways to achieve realism and harness expertise in classrooms.⁴⁶ The teacher or student can present a real case that s/he was involved in or has thoroughly researched. The case can be presented in sequence, real time and accelerated time or with timeouts for debriefing.⁴⁷ Students can work in small groups to discuss how the players would advise the characters in the event. The fact that the event is real, and the teacher can debrief and be debriefed on how it actually played out, adds learning value.

Technical and accurate details are needed. Many educated and/or experienced people will balk if they cannot get background facts or if those offered are not technically accurate. Research enhances simulations.⁴⁸

Rules enhance learning as well. The opera manager has limited incentive to bargain with Sally for a lower fee because just one dollar under the target is a victory. Perhaps a bonus, or the incentive of being able to pay reduced property taxes (from the proceeds of advanced sales) by a certain deadline, would provide better motivation.

Time compression is usually an enhancement as well. In reality, if one needs to prepare for a full opera house six months hence, there is no need to order programs for a few weeks to come. But if urgency is built into the simulation, participants need to exercise quick judgment in real time and live with the consequences. Imperatives created by time zones, legislative hearings and media inquiries can both speed things up and intensify the learning experience.⁴⁹ In the Sally Soprano case, it might be the need to hold a mock news conference at the end of class or write advertising copy for next week’s newspaper.

Finally, the need to engage participants fully is a challenge. Ultimately, simulations are fake and you didn’t actually blow any money at all. So how does one get the heart racing with a zeal for the deal or generate tension if agreement is slipping away? Mock legislative or regulatory hearings at which participants must explain themselves, fake media interviews, formal briefings of the boss and other such imperatives can put students on the spot so they get the most out of the event. A less structured approach, where students privately debrief each other and quickly move on to the next exercise, is less valuable.⁵⁰

CASES, CASE STUDIES, CASE-IN-POINT AND JUST-IN-CASE LEARNING

Recounting cases and case studies is a kind of simulation too. Some cases have to do with executives of well-known companies. Others are hypothetical but well-researched. Still others mask the names of actual executives and companies. Some are précis of actual court proceedings. Many have a degree of authenticity to them because of their authorship or the well-known issue they address.⁵¹ All can be used to examine what students would do in a similar situation.

At the John F. Kennedy School of Government, some case studies are used but so is the case-in-point method. This supposes that the interaction between individuals can also be a metaphor for their abilities to interact on other levels. Two executives who cannot decide on a restaurant for a lunch meeting may also have trouble making business decisions together. The executive who takes an inordinate time to procure goods or services during normal business times may pose a problem in a crisis.

The notion of case-in-point learning evokes the concepts of just-in-time versus just-in-case learning.⁵² For me, just-in-time learning involves procuring knowledge just before it’s needed. This includes cramming for an exam, a quick bit of research before a dinner party or throwing together a series of slides the night before a business presentation. Just-in-case learning is the procurement of knowledge for unknown purposes at an unspecified time in the future. Just-in-time learning is more disposable, while just-in-case learning is deeper and more permanent.

ETHNOGRAPHY – CAPTURING THE CASE

Academics and practitioners are not the only ones who care about capturing lessons from past cases. Disputants, too, need to know why their case evolved the way it did, or why a similar past case evolved in a certain way. This can help with tactics, but many data