Thread. I have never negotiated an international agreement. However, I dedicated a decade of my life to watching at close quarters some of the world’s smartest and most effective trade negotiators in action. Here are some lessons I learned.
1. Master every aspect of your brief and ensure you understand fully what you are dealing with down to the finest technical detail.
2. Spend a long time developing your negotiating objectives and strategy. Define your offensive and defensive goals and decide where you are prepared to compromise. Never set out rigid red lines in advance.
3. Spend a lot of time also studying your opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, where they have room for manoeuvre and where they have constraints.
4. Understand that the real test of a negotiator’s skill is in dealing with those on his/her own side, not with opponents in the negotiating chamber. “Your adversaries are in front of you, your enemies behind you” is an iron principle of negotiation.
5. Work out well in advance which interests on your own side you are ready to throw to the wolves - because you’ll need to - and which you will advocate. Carefully cultivate the latter and get them to work with you.
6. Don’t over-estimate your own strength. When you hold weak cards, don’t pretend they are strong ones. You won’t fool your adversaries, only yourself, and end up looking foolish.
7. Don’t threaten to walk out when your adversaries know that doing so would hurt you more than it would them. They will simply treat your threats as empty bluster and wait until you crawl back to the negotiating table.
8. Show that you are sincerely committed to negotiating seriously and constructively, not simply posturing for a domestic audience (though negotiators find it nevessary to do some of that, too).
9. Seek out and listen to experienced people who know the ropes and have conducted important international negotiations. Ignore Saturday afternoon quarterbacking by bystanders who have no such experience.
Finally, how many of these lessons has the UK government followed in the Brexit negotiations to date?
