Advanced negotiation: what would make you revise your assessment?
Attributing a refusal to price, timing or a regulatory constraint immediately shapes the next stage of a negotiation. The managerial question is precise: before making a concession, how can you check whether your explanation stands up to anything beyond the evidence that supports it?
What the literature establishes
Peter Cathcart Wason (1960, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology) studied how participants try to discover a rule using sequences of numbers. His experiment reveals a difficulty in choosing tests that could disprove a hypothesis, rather than examples consistent with it. For negotiation, the methodological warning is that obtaining an answer consistent with your assessment does not establish that the assessment is correct.
Considering the opposite explanation
Charles G. Lord, Mark R. Lepper and Elizabeth Preston (1984, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) showed, in their social judgement tasks, that instructions to consider the opposite could reduce the biases under investigation more effectively than a simple instruction to be impartial. The mechanism involves making alternative interpretations accessible when the initial judgement has pushed them aside. In negotiation, this suggests preparing a competing explanation for an obstacle, then looking for an observation that would distinguish between the two.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that negotiators should systematically challenge their own analysis or extend their enquiries before every concession. These studies justify neither permanent doubt nor treating all explanations as equally plausible. The point is narrower: identify what would lead you to revise an important hypothesis before making a costly decision based on it. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings do not demonstrate
These studies do not examine commercial negotiations in Lausanne and do not establish that this kind of preparation increases the value of agreements. An answer obtained during negotiation may also reflect strategic presentation rather than information that settles the issue. The proposed practice should therefore be evaluated as a discipline of verification, without promising a demonstrated financial benefit.
A practical check in Lausanne
Within SHR’s « Advanced Negotiation » programme, an exercise applicable in Lausanne would examine an obstacle in a medtech partnership, a contract with a higher education institution, a relationship with an international sports organisation or an agreement involving a Lake Geneva region scale-up. Before any major concession, record the preferred explanation, a competing explanation and the expected observation that would distinguish between them. During the debrief, locate that observation in meeting notes, an email or a contractual document, then record whether the assessment was maintained, revised or left unresolved. The measure would be the proportion of major concessions preceded by such a documented test; it would indicate verification discipline, not, on its own, the quality of the agreement. To go further: explore the Advanced Negotiation training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Advanced Negotiation in Lausanne
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