Advanced negotiation: is a promised deadline a reliable forecast?
In Lausanne, negotiating a medtech delivery, a partnership with a higher education institution or a service for international sport often involves committing to a schedule. The management question is specific: on what basis should a deadline be accepted when its commercial appeal may conceal a weak estimate?
What the literature establishes
Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross (1994, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied people's tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete their own tasks. Their findings highlight reliance on the imagined scenario and insufficient attention to past experience; one of their studies shows that explicitly linking an estimate to those experiences can reduce the bias. When negotiating a deadline, describing a plausible sequence of events is therefore not enough to establish a reliable forecast.
Confidence does not reveal where the error lies
Don A. Moore and Paul J. Healy (2008, Psychological Review) distinguish three forms of overconfidence: overestimating one's performance, believing oneself better than others and placing excessive precision on one's beliefs. These forms do not necessarily move together, so confidence cannot be treated as a single indicator of accuracy. Applied to schedule negotiations, this distinction suggests examining the proposed date and the uncertainty surrounding it separately.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that a buffer should always be added to the requested deadline. Yet these studies establish neither a universal buffer nor an optimal contractual schedule. The useful distinction is between an evidence-based forecast of completion and a negotiated commitment that allocates risks and may include conditions. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot guarantee
These articles do not directly test negotiations between Lausanne businesses or schedules subject to regulatory approvals. Applying them to commercial agreements is a reasoned extension, not proof that a particular protocol improves contracts. Even historical completion times become misleading when the projects selected differ substantially in scope, dependencies or available resources.
A practical check in Lausanne
For SHR's “Advanced Negotiation” programme, an exercise applicable in Lausanne is to accompany each negotiated deadline with a record of scope, forecast date, conditions and observed durations for comparable projects. A medtech business, a higher education institution, an international sports organisation or a Lake Geneva region scale-up can then record the actual completion date and scope changes without overwriting the original forecast. The measure is verifiable: for commitments that have fallen due, calculate the difference in days between forecast and actual completion, then examine cases involving scope changes separately. This monitoring provides information about estimation quality; on its own, it does not demonstrate a training effect. 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.
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