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 Learning to Teach Negotiation
Michael Wheeler

Fall semester 1971 found me in the right place at the right time. I was a
graduate student just as Jim White happened to be visiting from the Uni-
versity of Michigan Law School. On a whim I enrolled in his negotiation
seminar.
In the first session we did a simulation, with half the class representing
a furniture manufacturer. The rest took the role of prospective buyers from
a retail store. Each side received confidential instructions. Then we paired
up to settle on a price for a mattress order. Negotiation teachers will
recognize the drill, but may be surprised that it was in use more than a
decade before Getting to Yes (Fisher and Ury 1981), The Art and Science of
Negotiation (Raiffa 1985), and You Can Negotiate Anything (Cohen 1982)
appeared on the scene.
Although everyone in class had been dealt the same cards, some
buyers got a bargain while others paid through the nose. In the debriefing,
we discussed what approaches might have driven success and which
others might explain failure. In simulations that followed, we students
tested our skill at settling lawsuits, handling family disputes, and resolving a
police strike. That I remember these details so many years later tells you
that I was hooked from the start. I had found my calling.
Our syllabus also included various readings, all but one of which
slipped my memory long ago. The sole exception is Richard Walton and
Robert McKersie's A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations: An

Michael Wheeler is a professor of management practice emeritus at the Harvard Business School
in Boston and the editor of NegotiationJournal. His e-mail address is mwheeler@hbs.edu.

10.111 1/nejo.12131
© 2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College Negotiation Journal October 2015 477
Analysis of a Social Interaction System, then a mere six years old. I clearly
recall the authors' illumination of distributive and integrative bargaining,
and puzzling how the two might be reconciled.
My perspective on negotiation was shaped by a second stroke of good
luck. That same semester marked the launch of an interdisciplinary course
on law and public policy taught by an all-star team of faculty. From the
Harvard Law School, there was Philip Heymann, who later became U.S.
deputy attorney general; Laurence Tribe, the eminent constitutional scholar;
and Stephen Breyer, who now sits on the U.S. Supreme Court. From Har-
vard's Kennedy School of Government, we had economists Richard
Zeckhauser and Edith Stokey; Howard Raiffa, a towering figure in decision
science; and Thomas Schelling, who later became a Nobel laureate in
economics.
For a full year we students sat back and enjoyed the ride as our
teachers debated how to divide scarce resources, allocate risk, and promote
efficiency. It was in that class that I first learned about game theory, decision
trees, and linear programming. It didn't take a genius to connect the con-
ceptual dots, as many of those analytic tools mapped well to the cases and
exercises in Jim White's negotiation seminar. (Just think of a personal injury
claimant weighing the "bird in the hand" of a settlement offer versus taking
the risk of going to court and either winning more or losing everything.)
My heavily underlined copy of Schelling's Strategy of Conflict (1960) still
sits on my shelf.
And so my career took shape. The following year, I taught negotia-
tion at New England Law in Boston. At the time it was one of only a
handful of schools offering such a course. Now negotiation is a staple in
graduate programs in business, government, law, and planning - in the
United States and many other countries. Over the decades I've taught
several thousand people - undergraduates, students in various profes-
sional programs, and plenty of executives, as well. At this late hour, only
a handful of colleagues in our field have the double-edged honor of
seniority over me. When I departed the MBA classroom for the last time
this spring, every professor junior to me moved one step up the ladder.
What follows is a highly personal account of how my view of nego-
tiation has changed over my career, and with that, the way that I teach it. I'll
describe that evolution here, not to suggest that others should follow my
path, but rather to point out pedagogical challenges I have encountered as
well as various solutions that I've concocted to address them. I will be
pleased, indeed, when others develop better ones.
This is a reflective piece, so the first person pronoun appears often.
I'm reviewing my experience, after all. But more than that, I want to make
clear that I am not attempting a broad overview of pedagogical trends in
our field. Leonard Greenhalgh and Roy Lewicki have done that splendidly in
the preceding piece. Perhaps my musings will prompt fellow teachers of

478 Michael Wheeler Learning to Teach Negotiation

my vintage to reflect the various paths that they have followed, while
colleagues a generation younger might ponder what sort of reminiscences
they might write some time ages and ages hence.

Negotiation 1.0
Given my training, I gravitated toward a structural approach to teaching
negotiation. My fledgling course began with simple two-party, single-issue,
one-shot situations. From there, I elaborated, first with a multi-issue example
(to illustrate value creation) and then next, a multi-party situation to raise
coalitional issues. Somewhere along the way, I had students do a multi-
round prisoners' dilemma exercise to get at issues of trust, communication,
and reputation in longer-term relationships. Something must have been in
the air, as other teachers similarly found their way to that sequence

-
understandably so because its logic is easy to convey. That framework also
encompasses the core elements of negotiation analysis (parties, interests,
options, and the like). The micro-economic heritage of some of those
categories adds a patina of rigor.
What I didn't realize, though, is how this framework reinforces a
narrow, utilitarian view of the negotiation process. Yes, results certainly
matter. In practice, people negotiate in hopes of producing a better
outcome than whatever they might achieve unilaterally. In our classes,
students are eager to find out how they've done compared to their
peers. And for teachers, quantitative outcomes are easy to tally and
analyze. In contrast, that's decidedly not the case for soft variables such as
the negotiators' assumptions, attitudes, statements, and actions, which can
profoundly shape ultimate outcomes. In class, the drama of seeing
"who did best" (or worst) tends to overshadow other important
aspects of negotiation, including identity, emotions, values, and relation-
ships. To paraphrase Einstein, not everything that counts can be easily
counted.
Len Greenhalgh and Roy Lewicki strike a similar chord in their lead
article. They speak, for example, of over-reliance on stylized exercises that
mimic lab studies involving strangers that "were not designed to replicate
what real people encounter in real dispute situations - complex decisions
that must be made by complex people within an ongoing relationship"
(2015: 468-69, emphasis added).
What and how I taught did evolve incrementally over the years. As
negotiation research bloomed, the readings I assigned were enriched. Later,
after I joined the MIT faculty, I relied more heavily on dense real-world case
studies. I worked with colleagues Lawrence Bacow and Lawrence Susskind
to develop a series of cases documenting emotionally charged, highly politi-
cized, and technically challenging environmental disputes. In class we had
stimulating discussions about regulatory innovation, efficiency, and social
justice. Most of the time, however, I fell back on the standard analytic

Negotiation Journal October 2015 479

framework of interests, for example, ZOPAs (zones of possible agreement)
and BATNAs (best alternatives to a negotiated agreement).
When I arrived at the Harvard Business School to join James Sebenius's
negotiation teaching team, I wrote similar cases, including a lengthy
account of the $200 billion settlement between forty-six states and the four
major American tobacco companies. While such cases involved compli-
cated issues and scores of parties, I wasn't getting at complexity in the
fuller sense that Len and Roy mean it.

Negotiation 2.0
My courses were successful nevertheless, at least as measured by student
ratings. Even so, I had growing doubts about whether I was delivering on
the implicit promise to enhance my students' capacity to negotiate effec-
tively. In 2005, I pulled those concerns together at a conference in France
on "New Trends in Negotiation Teaching" in a keynote talk called "Is
Teaching Negotiation Too Easy, Too Hard, or Both?" (A version of the talk
appeared later in these pages; see Wheeler 2006).
For the "too easy" aspect, I noted the popularity of negotiation and the
luxury of having eager students who come into class already sold on the
relevance of the subject. They know they will negotiate professionally, both
with outside parties and with their own colleagues, and personally when
renting an apartment, buying a car, or dealing with irksome neighbors. As a
bonus, our classes are a lively change of pace. Instead of suffering through
dreary lectures, students get to play games and critique videos. What's fun
for them is fun for us, as well. (Does selling a ten dollar bill for more than
twice its face value ever get old?) The enthusiasm is both gratifying and
seductive. Why mess with an approach that seems to work so well?
Alas, I said in my talk, popularity does not equal value. Teaching people
about negotiation is one thing. Teaching them how to negotiate is quite
another. That's the "too hard" part. In a series of provocative experiments
twelve years ago, Janice Nadler, Leigh Thompson, and Leaf Van Boven
(2003) showed that students often fail to apply what we hope we have
taught them. Take, for example, the use of a contingency clause to create
value - for example, how including a bonus or a penalty, depending on
future performance, can enable an optimistic seller to make a deal with a
more skeptical buyer. The researchers asked subjects to do an exercise that
included that element, and then they debriefed their experience. But when
given a second simulation, with the same latent potential, they were no
more likely to recognize that opportunity than did a control group that had
no training whatsoever.
Concepts that come easily to seasoned negotiators apparently are hard
for newcomers to grasp, especially when it involves borrowing an idea from
one context and applying it to another. But the researchers reported some
consoling finfings. Two other pedagogical methods were more successful.

480 Michael Wheeler Learning to Teach Negotiation

Specifically, students who were prompted to engage in analogic reasoning
- explicitly comparing and contrasting two different situations, each of
which had the value-creating element - were more likely to exploit the
idea in a subsequent simulation. And a different group that simply watched
a video of other negotiators using the contingency device was even more
likely to put it to use.1
The not-so-good news, however, is that the improvement in the ana-
logic and observational groups wasn't universal. A significant number of
students still failed to learn. Given that it's difficult to teach students to
apply seemingly simple analytic tools, what can we expect with regard to
far more nuanced but equally important aspects of the negotiation process?
Take for example, Len and Roy's observation about the complexity of what
it really means to agree, especially in negotiations with colleagues and
teammates.

[T]here are often multiple, more subtle degrees of "yes" that

students need to understand. "Yes" can span the range from "Yes,
I've heard what you have to say and I'm done talking about it" to
"Yes, that's the best thing we can do under the circumstances and
I pledge to do all I can make it happen." The range is from zero
commitment - and possibly a passive-aggressive response - to
maximum commitment. Achieving this understanding requires
shifting their emphasis from how much utility do I gain from
this agreement to how strong is the agreement. The higher a
negotiating manager (stakeholder) stands on the organizational
ladder, the more important it will be that she or he skillfully
negotiates strong agreements within management (Greenhalgh
and Lewicki 2015: 471, emphasis in original).

But do we have a reliable test for distinguishing a tepid yes from a one
that's whole-hearted? Can we speak with conviction about what actionable
steps are more likely to elicit real commitment? I confess that in my many
years of years of using simulations involving long-term relationships, such as
"Discount & Hawkins" (Wheeler 2011a) or "Riggs-Vericomp" (Wheeler
2008). I've never thought of introducing a measure of the durability of
agreement. I'm not sure that a plausible one can be devised for role-playing
exercises in which the fictional promises that students make never actually
have to be fulfilled. Hats off to anybody who can solve this problem, but
for now we are stuck talking about different kinds of yesses rather
than showing students how to identify them in the wilds of a real-life
negotiation.
As Len and Roy's example implies, the heart of the "too hard" challenge
is that so much of negotiation involves fundamental relational skills. Long
before our students enter a classroom, they have been shaped by years of
social experience, positive and otherwise. Their attitudes about themselves
- and about others - strongly influence their behavior. It is folly to ignore

Negotiation Journal October 2015 481

this reality, and perhaps vain to imagine that we can do much in the face of
it. As Len Greenhalgh noted at the events commemorating the fiftieth
anniversary of A BehavioralTheory of Negotiation:

We should not underestimate the difficulty of teaching lambs to

be assertive or lions to be empathetic. Old habits die hard, even
when we want to kick them. Legions of therapists can testify that
understanding an idea on a conceptual level is one thing, but
putting it into practice is quite another (Greenhalgh 2015).

The authors note that relational behavior is often established in early

childhood. The seeds of conflict aversion can be planted early, for example.
People change, of course, and patterns can be broken or tempered, but
behavior change requires much more than classroom training. Len and Roy
caution that "helping students learn their predispositions in depth requires
clinical training" and great sensitivity. They acknowledge that most of us
who teach negotiation have neither the schooling nor class time to do
comprehensive relational work. We are on firmer footing, they suggest, if we
focus on trust - which behaviors promote it and which other ones hinder
it.
The element of trust in negotiation is important in its own right. It may
also provide a window on relational dynamics more broadly. I believe that
is a promising approach, although in recent years I have taken a different
path. Specifically, I have situated relational interplay more broadly within a
dynamic model of negotiation that is markedly different from the one I was
schooled in and that I long taught. As a consequence, I have changed what
I teach, how I teach it, and how I test what my students have learned.
My current courses are premised on the reality that circumstances
change in the course of negotiation, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. By
extension this also incorporates a fundamentally relational view. After all,
we can't script negotiation. Our counterparts are likely to be as smart,
determined, and fallible as we are. They will be no more willing to bend to
our will than we would let them dictate what we do and say. The negotia-
tion process and its outcome are thus co-constructed by the attitudes and
actions of the parties. Each must adapt to the other. Consequently, agility is
essential both strategically and moment to moment.2
The unit of analysis in my teaching (and writing) is the interaction
between the parties, the dance of negotiation, if you will, rather than the
moves made by an individual negotiator. Obviously I have wandered far
from the formal decision analytic models I began with. A friend has called
my outlook "post-structural," although I'm not sure that quite captures it.
Improvisation is both an art and a discipline. Improvising effectively
requires a nimble mindset, as well.
I give my students fair warning that if they sign up for my course, they
will venture far outside mainstream negotiation thinking. An H. L. Mencken

482 Michael Wheeler Learning to Teach Negotiation

epigram appears at the top of my syllabus:"For every complex problem, there
is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." When it comes to standard
negotiation analysis, I'd scratch Mencken's "wrong" in favor of a somewhat
more polite "insufficient." I do cover basic concepts in the first module of the
course, although even here I subvert such familiar notions as the identification
of"interests," as they are often fluid, even in simple transactions. The second
module puts strategic agility front and center. It draws heavily on military
doctrine. Most important are the parallels between coping with the "fog of
war" and managing the uncertainties inherent in negotiation" (Wheeler
2013b). The third introduces some practices of jazz musicians and improv
comics. In the concluding module, we consider the challenge of negotiating
support for new ideas and visions (by studying the artists Christo and
Jeanne-Claude).And a case from the American Civil War illuminates the nexus
between negotiation, leadership, and character.
I push students to draw analogies across these domains, often going
back to the material we covered weeks before. Drawing insight from fields
like medicine and psychotherapy, which demand agility, underscores the
importance of unlearning, letting go of preconceptions (an important idea
that Len and Roy also touch upon in their article). Recalling the research of
Nagel, Thompson, and Van Boven, I also show a lot of videos that illustrate
the importance of interpersonal behavior in negotiation, in the hope that
students will absorb how each person's attitudes influence how others
respond.
I cover a lot of territory, much of it novel. If I left it at that, students
would know a fair amount about negotiation - as refracted through my
particular lens. Helping them to internalize these ideas and put them to
work, however, requires much more. I do three things in hopes of making
my course more transformative.
* I'm explicit about students' responsibility for their own learning.
* I require a massive amount of self-reflection.
* My final examination is itself a culminating and personalized learning
experience.
The students' responsibilities are laid down before the course begins.
My syllabus (longer than most others I've seen) spells out in detail the
course objectives and my expectations. Students also must respond to an
online survey that asks about their experience, career plans, and goals for
taking the course. Most important, they must read an extensive article that
lays out the challenges in learning to negotiate more effectively (Wheeler
201 1b).
Negotiation is a "wicked learning environment," I tell them, because
outcomes provide ambiguous feedback. 5 Reviewing the inputs - how you
prepare for and conduct the negotiation process - builds a sturdier base

Negotiation Journal October 2015 483

for useful learning. The more experience you review, the more likely you
are to recognize assumptions and tendencies that you may have over-
looked. You may have strengths you can build upon, I tell them. In other
areas, you may see behavioral patterns that may hamper your efficacy.
Comprehensive reflection requires that students have a way to orga-
nize and understand their experience. I ask them to build an electronic
workbook that captures much of their experience in the course - think of
it as a turbo-charged version of the journal writing that is an important
component of many negotiation courses. Because it's web-based, it's pos-
sible to assemble, edit, and analyze a much richer data set. Almost all my
sessions require students to make pre- and post-class entries. These range
from text entries and survey responses, short module papers, and, for an
emotion exercise, I even ask students to submit drawings.
I regularly push students to critique their earlier work. For example,
they must prepare strategy statements for upcoming simulations. Following
the simulation, they review those entries to see how they might have
planned more effectively. The Workbook also captures personal "take-
aways" from cases, videos, and class discussions. This past semester it
included seventy-five separate items. In its entirety, the document is a
head-to-toe workup of how each student thinks about, prepares for, con-
ducts, and learns from negotiations.
Building a platform this elaborate required substantial technical help,
which I have been grateful to receive. I like the "bells and whistles," but
generic course support software is available that has most of the important
functionality mine does.
As a matter of policy, my school does not provide teaching assistants;
faculty are expected to take full responsibility for all that takes place in
their courses. Giving personalized feedback to sixty students for all of their
submissions just isn't feasible, although I do sample individual work and
compile class-wide information. Ultimately, it is largely up to each student to
make sense of his or her Workbook.
Rather than hoping this will happen magically, I design my final exami-
nation in such a way that students are asked to analyze their personal
experience over the semester. (If this also fosters the habit of ongoing
learning through self-reflection, so much the better, although I make no
guarantees on that score.) The exam has no surprises or trick questions.
Long in advance, I tell students what it covers. I want them to think about
it while they are taking the course. I'll describe the exam here in detail and
quote portions of it. What I ask students to address closely matches what I
hope they learn.
The exam starts by asking each student to describe an important
professional negotiation he or she expects to undertake in the next few
years. I ask them to describe the key issues, the stakes, and, most important,
whatever would be most challenging for them in this situation. I don't want

484 Michael Wheeler Learning to Teach Negotiation

generalities. Students must ground their reflections in a context that matters
to them. Then I present a series of questions that draw on their analysis of
the particular material each one has collected in his or her personal Work-
book. Specifically I ask:

Now, in the situation you just described, imagine you will be

negotiating across the table with an ultra-competent, fully pre-
pared counterpart. You have never met this person before, but for
our purposes you should understand that he or she is:
* solely and steadfastly intent on maximizing his or her own well-being;
and
* utterly unconcerned about how you do in this negotiation, other than
to whatever extent (if any) your performance affects the outcome for
them.
Moreover, this person somehow came across a copy of your
Workbook materials. He or she fully understands what its various
elements reveal and, further, is able to piece them together into a
valuable picture of how you negotiate.
* How would such a person describe you as a negotiator?
* What specific data in your Workbook would support that assessment?
* What particular items would be most useful to him or her in the
upcoming negotiation? (Wheeler 2015).

I pose the question this way in hopes of priming a more detached

assessment. Instead of asking students to describe themselves, I want them
to step into the shoes of a smart and unsympathetic counterpart who is
intent on exploiting the material in the Workbook for his or her own
benefit, as the next section of the exam details.

Given their assessment of you (as presented in the prior subsec-

tion) and their single-minded self-interest, what strategy and
tactics will they employ in dealing with you to maximize their
own well-being? Explain why. (Note: to use a chess analogy, this
sub-question asks you to imagine the best possible game the
other party can play againstyou. Furthermore, the "you" that
they are playing is completely ignorant about them, including the
fact that they have a copy of your Workbook.)

Breaking the larger question into smaller parts provides students a

structure so they don't meander or overlook key issues. When I grade, I use
a template that covers specifics in their answers to the subquestions (such
as how well they support their observations with references to their Work-
book entries). These preliminary subsections set up the next two parts,
which seek to uncover how the students, recognizing their own capabili-
ties, intend to negotiate.

Negotiation Journal October 2015 485

 Now return to your side of the table. Given the fact that your
counterpart is playing the best conceivable game against you
(since they secretly obtained your Workbook profile), what can
you do in response to make the best of the situation?
* For starters, what actions or behavior on their part will signal to you
that you are up against an especially formidable counterpart? What will
be the biggest challenges for you, and how will you deal with them?
* What techniques and practices have you learned in the course that
might help you make the best of this situation? What will make imple-
menting them difficult?
* What mistakes did you see others make in our various exercises (or did
you make yourself) that you believe you could avoid here?

The language above about mistakes and implementation is meant to elicit

realistic assessments, rather than a list of bromides. Finally, I relax the initial
constraints, so that students consider how they would negotiate in a situation
in which neither party knows anything of the other's attitude or approach.

Finally, stay with the same scenario that you sketched in Part 1,
but change two key assumptions. This time you know nothing
about the nature, skills, or intentions of the person with whom
you're about to negotiate; likewise, they know absolutely nothing
about you. In short, each of you is working from an entirely blank
slate. (Naturally, you still know yourself well, given your experi-
ence in this course and the material in your Workbook.) Consider
the following questions:
* What sort of impression will you want to convey to your counterpart?
Refer specifically to your self-assessment diagram (that tracks assertive-
ness and empathy on the horizontal/relational axis with creating and
claiming on the vertical/substantive axis).'
* Ideally, what sort of diagram would you like them to draw of you: would
it be tilted in one or more particular direction(s)? Why (or why not)?
How would such an impression be favorable to you?
* Finally, what specifically will you do during the negotiation to encour-
age your counterpart to develop the impression of you that you
prefer?

I have used versions of this exam for the past half dozen years. Letting
students know long in advance what they will be asked on the final offers
only benefits, with no downside. The sooner they consider my questions,
the more they will learn from the course. In the end, they will analyze their
own experiences and do so in a context that is personally relevant to them.
(A side benefit for me is that when it's time to read a tall stack of exams,
each one is different and most are interesting.)
Recent student papers are the best I've seen in my career. By far.
That's my subjective judgment, of course. Still, I have reason to believe

486 Michael Wheeler Learning to Teach Negotiation

that my students have become better able to put what they've learned to
work:
* First is their candor. They note their own shortcomings and accept the
challenge of modifying long-standing habits of thinking and acting, their
impatience, for example, or their cynicism about other people's inten-
tions. That humility, I hope, will help them be more alert and self-aware
as they negotiate.
* Second, they interpret their experience holistically and grapple with
contradictions in their data, noting, for example, how an approach that
seemingly worked well in one case proved problematic in another.
* Third, the students draw on examples to make their arguments. In
telling stories about themselves, they draw on what they have seen,
heard, or done throughout the course. They develop a rich library of
analogies that they can draw on when they find themselves in novel
situations.
Have I crossed the bridge from teaching an informational course, one
that is merely about negotiation, to a fully transformational one that enables
behavioral change? I doubt that I'm half-way across. But I have come some
distance from where I started. Whatever progress I've made arises from my
willingness to experiment. As a contrarian, my mantra in teaching has been,
"If it's not broken, break it." Fortunately I've had support from my school
and from my students to innovate. Some of my teaching experiments have
succeeded. More than a few have not.
I understand that younger faculty often aren't in a position to take big
risks in the classroom, but one can innovate without wandering as far off
the traditional path as I have. Teaching a transformational course certainly
doesn't require buying into my improvisational view of negotiation. A
course built around Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton's (1981,
1991) seven elements or David Lax and Jim Sebenius's 3-D framework
(2006) can give students just as powerful a sense of agency, a feeling that
negotiation - rather than being something that happens to them - is a
process that they can positively influence, even if not fully control.
If a prime objective is enhancing students' practical skills, however,
then the relational nature of negotiation must be placed front and center,
no matter what the conceptual framework of a course is. Negotiation's
economic and structural aspects are doubtless important. But our greatest
opportunity as teachers lies on the behavioral front, helping our students
become leaders who work constructively with others to resolve disputes
and forge agreements that advance the greater good.
Dick Walton and Bob McKersie recognized this half a century ago with
the attention that they gave to attitudinal structuring. As other authors have
pointed out in this issue, that is not the most elegant term, but it surely

Negotiation Journal October 2015 487

encompasses the idea that negotiators have beliefs about themselves, their
counterparts, and the problems they jointly face. Those attitudes drive, in
turn, what people do and say at the bargaining table - and not always in
ways that serve their own professed interests.

Negotiation 3.0
My days of teaching a full-semester negotiation course are over. I can't
imagine having had a more fulfilling and stimulating career. I've learned at
least as much from my students as they have from me. Although I've carried
my classroom teaching as far as I can, the fact that I'm moving on does not
mean that I'm moving out. Quite the opposite.
I'm fascinated by the potential of the new instructional media. Earlier
this year, for example, the Teaching Negotiation Research Center at the
Program on Negotiation sponsored a symposium that highlighted new
products from academic institutions and private companies, including
computer-based simulations, tutorials, and course platforms.' I've jumped
on this bandwagon, too. My negotiation blog on the LinkedIn professional
networking site has somehow attracted a large following. I'm producing
short videos on a variety of negotiation topics, which are available free of
charge.' Together with colleagues at the Baker Library at HBS, I'm devel-
oping a multimedia resource that originally was to be based solely on my
book The Art of Negotiation, but has morphed into something bigger and
better that will include the work of others in the school's Negotiation,
Organizations, and Markets unit. What else? I also recently created an app
for mobile phones and tablets that enables users to build a tool kit of best
practices by rating their negotiation experiences.9 A web-based version for
classroom use will be available early in 2016.
I am most excited about the prospect of collaborating with colleagues
to develop an online negotiation course. Not that long ago I was skeptical
about distance learning, especially in our field. How, I wondered, could
high-energy, often intensely personal courses like ours be flattened on a
computer screen seen by solitary students in far-off outposts? Such doubts
seemed to be confirmed by the under-performance of many massive open
online courses (MOOCs) in the last five years. But other educators have
pointed out that merely building pale versions of what we do in the
classroom is the wrong approach. What if instead we took the emergence
of this new technology as an opportunity to start fresh?
One way to begin would be to identify whom we want to teach and
what they need to learn, with both choices subject to revision. Discovering
what we might do better in this environment than in traditional settings
would be an adventure. Maybe some innovative material would migrate
back and invigorate our standard courses. Starting from scratch might even
teach us to look at negotiation in new ways. There is still stimulating work
to do.

488 Michael Wheeler Learning to Teach Negotiation

 I see wonderful symmetry in writing about my negotiation career in
the issue of Negotiationjournal that celebrates the anniversary of Walton
and McKersie's A BehavioralTheory of Labor Negotiations,which I read
as a student so long ago. Dick and Bob pioneered theory-building in our
field and have had enduring influence on what many of us teach. More
profoundly, as so many of us can testify, they have each set a lofty example
of what it is to be a warm, wise, and generous colleague.
I began this piece by noting my good fortune of being introduced to
negotiation back in the early 1970s by stellar teachers. When I arrived at
HBS twenty years later, one of those teachers, Howard Raiffa, became my
colleague. A few years after that, Guhan Subramanian was among my stu-
dents. Now Guhan is a colleague who is both a gifted teacher and ground-
breaking scholar. Among his many lucky students, several already have
become teachers who are advancins our work. It has been - and will
continue to be - a privilege to be part of this parade.

NOTES

1. The authors wrote, "Interestingly, negotiators in the observation group showed the largest
increase in performance, but the least ability to articulate the learning principles that helped them
improve, suggesting that they had acquired tacit knowledge that they were unable to articulate"
(Nadler, Thompson, and Van Boven 2003: 529).
2. For a full elaboration of this point of view, see Wheeler (2013a).
3. For example, the particular car we thought we wanted to buy turns out to handle badly. A
potential business partner whose initial reserve made us wary later opens up and becomes
engaging. As we learn in such cases, we adjust accordingly.
4. A copy of the 2015 syllabus is posted at http://www.michaelwheeler.com.
5. For example, what if you leave the bargaining table empty handed? Have you failed?
Not necessarily. The best you could offer might not have matched what your counterpart
could get elsewhere. Then again, perhaps one or both of you overplayed your hand. Maybe you
weren't creative enough or your personalities got in the way. By the same token, if you got a
great deal, were you smart or simply lucky? Your counterpart could have blundered or been
desperate.
6. The self-assessment diagram referred to connects individuals' perceptions of their own
relational and interpersonal skills. It introduces two classic negotiation tensions and creates a
provisional profile of people's particular tendencies. For more details, go to http://negotiation3-
O.com/best-practices/.
7. A sample of providers of different products and services include: Expert Negotiator
(http://www.expertnegotiator.com/); ForClass (http://www.forclass.com/); iDecisionGames
(http://idecisiongames.com/); interactive Game Based Learning (http://www.igbl.co.uk);
Instructure (http://www.instructure.com/); Dispute Resolution Research Center, Kellogg School of
Management (http://www.negotiationexercises.com); Rational Games (http://www.rationalgames
.org/); and zopaf (http://www.zopaf.com/).
8. See the Best Practices section of http://www.michaelwheeler.com.
9. See the Negotiation 360 section of http://www.michaelwheeler.com.

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490 Michael Wheeler Learning to Teach Negotiation