As demonstrated in the module, How to Detect Cultural Differences, surface differences in cultures usually reflect differences in the deep structure of cultures. Meetings exhibit these same differences as well. In addition to the explicit differences in the surface features of meetings, you should also learn a basic negotiation process that the Harvard Negotiation Project has taught for many years and used as a model for analyzing international as well as interpersonal negotiations. It involves four basic steps that are fairly easy to grasp and that you can apply to many intercultural situations.

The Harvard Process breaks down into four steps:

There are good reasons for using this four-step process. By seeking to understand people’s motivations and working out a set of objective criteria, you have a better chance of discovering the underlying or deep cultural values may very much affect the long-term success of any agreement or discussion. Some differences in cultural values can affect the process, such as whether “truth” depends on empirical verification or on faith/desire/received belief. However, patient and calm use of this method seems to have several advantages.

Very often, our usual friends think they know what they want: to pay $5000 for a used car, to have the family at home for Christmas dinner, or to be sent on a two‑year project in Mexico. If those wishes can't be fulfilled immediately, people need to negotiate. To avoid settling, for a compromise that satisfies no one, people need to find out what motivates the other negotiator's requests. You have to “separate” people from their declared objective and find out why that objective matters to them. You have to say things like:

"How will this benefit you?"

"Why did you want to do this?"

"Have you seen this work well for some other person / organization / firm?"

"How do you believe this would work out better than what we did last time?"

"Could you let me know more about how this fits with your goals?"

Try to memorize or "burn these into your neural pathways" so that it will be easy to put forward a helpful question. All of these questions are intended to find out what needs must be satisfied for the other negotiator to reach "YES." At the same time, you want to make clear your own interests in the situation. What benefits are you seeking? What reasons do you have for negotiating? Be careful how you go about reaching, "Yes," because often the method of negotiation is s important to success.

In intercultural negotiation, some participants may not want to reveal their motives to you. Your two most valuable tools for making sure you understand them are paraphrase and indirect narratives. Paraphrase is restating your understanding in other terms. If they are reluctant to explain their reasons, just invite the other party to correct you where you’re wrong,and summarize what you think are their reasons.In general, people are quite happy to tell you where you’re wrong and will jump back into the process to correct you, although if you have a great deal more power than they do, they may follow a cultural prescription that says, “Tell the boss YES, the boss is always right.” In general, if you emphasize your desire to understand the other person’s language correctly, you may be able to overcome this rule because positioning yourself as the willing learner makes it more likely that the other person will take the position of the one “more knowledgeable about the language.”

Do not agree to anything at this first stage. If you’re asked to agree or promise, you must say, “I understand what you said. I can’t agree at this stage in the meeting. I have to understand what is important about this project/idea/object before we talk about whether it is the best possibility.”

Once you have a clear sense of the other person's or the community’s reasons for taking a position (making a request), you should begin a separate phase of the discussion. By that I mean that you should specifically say that the exploration of reasons is closed and that you aren't yet choosing a result.

You want to make clear that you want the other party to help you invent options that will benefit you both. For example, projects must satisfy community needs, but they must also be ones that the team has the knowledge and funds to carry out. Try to come up with new ways of meeting as many needs or interests as you can. Think "outside the box." For example, in everyday life in the US, changing the timing or the financing may enable the buyer to agree to a higher price if keeping the monthly payments down is a key concern. In a project, you may be able to undertake a larger project that the village wants if you can do it in stages or if they can contribute more labor or resources.

In engineering projects, there may be a very good reason to have separate meetings for understanding needs or reasons and for imagining solutions because the engineering team can reasonably say that its members need to do some preliminary work before they can discuss a range of ideas. The team needs time to analyze and be creative. It may need to learn more about local materials, supplies, or conditions before more can be negotiated.

YOU MUST NOT RESPOND NEGATIVELY TO POSSIBILITIES. Criticism of an option during this phase will bring the negotiation to a halt, fast. Nothing kills creativity faster than comments such as, “We already tried that and it didn’t work.” “Do you think we’re made of money?” or “That's not what we came here for.” Instead, try to acknowledge that you've heard each possibility by restating it, sometimes separating it from any commitment: "I can see that as an option, but I don't want to commit to it until after we’ve fully explored the possibilities."

No one wants to live with an unjust agreement. A bargain that is too harsh is one participants can't live with, and it may come unraveled. Insist on objective criteria. Such criteria might be

Engineers without Borders only works on projects that benefit the community as a whole, so that would certainly be a major criterion.

If someone insists on an unreasonable criterion, then be prepared to go with your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) instead of the agreement. Thinking about your best alternatives in advance will help you be more comfortable if the deal falls through. For example, knowing how much it will cost you to ship your equipment back to the States will help you figure out whether selling your equipment when you leave at a low price or giving it to another non-government agency is your best alternative.

Once you have chosen criteria, apply them to your options. At this point it is easier for all parties to rank the possibilities and perhaps to combine features to reach an optimal deal. At this time it is also a good idea to plan how you will deal with any problems that may come up later. Different cultures tend to have different ideas about how binding contracts are. The Japanese are reputed to believe contracts can always be renegotiated; US companies tend to believe a contract's provisions must be enforced. Deciding to go with negotiation, mediation, or binding arbitration may lower a company's legal bills later.

What if they don't “play fair” by US cultural standards?

Many popular US negotiation tactics emphasize power gains and hard bargaining. What if the other side huffs and puffs and makes demands or threats? In intercultural collaborative projects, US personnel may be seen as rich imperialists. Villagers may resent having to do what student engineers propose and may attempt to pressure teams to agree to large-scale projects that the student teams do not have funds to complete. Demands may seem only just to the villagers when the differences in wealth and educational opportunities are so great. What if they plead or play upon your status as a wealthy foreign engineer to pressure you to agree without going through the four stages of the process we’ve described?

If you know your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement), you can make more objective judgments. Don't agree to rules you can’t live with. Suppose that other side refuses to separate themselves from their position, saying, to put it in a US idiom, "Take it or leave it!" You can respond by playing out the right process verbally in their presence and inviting them to participate.

When you have the situation wrong, the other side seldom can resist telling you so, which in turn gives you a better view of their reasons and interests.

It is better to separate a negotiation into stages and hold a second or third or fourth meeting than to accept or withdraw hastily. The differences in languages can nearly always justify offering to come together later after your team has had a chance to gather more information, get clarification, contact someone for background on costs, rules, and so on, and talk together as a team. Before the next meeting, you can talk as a team to think of what deep culture values, such as having all members of the village benefit equally, may be offended if you choose to pay funds to one group or one individual. It may feel that you are working in slow motion when you intended to accomplish many things quickly, but being deliberate and warmly cordial can help you keep from making a major, poor agreement.

Several years ago a noted psychologist, Eric Berne, described games people play in a book by the same name. Two of those games, fairly harmless ones, can take a lot of time in a meeting and block productive action: “Ain’t It Awful” and “Why Don’t You, Yes But.” You can certainly indulge in these when you want to, but sometimes you’ll want to recognize them and stop them so that the group can move on to other actions.

Ain’t It Awful is played by two or more people who take turns describing offensive, unsatisfactory, or “awful” things–the weather, the lack of parking, the obtuseness of professors, the taste of the food, and so on. Each person assures the other that what he or she has described really is "awful” and then goes on to add a tale of his or her own:

To stop “Ain’t It Awful,” you have to switch to negotiation and separate Billybob from the problem: “Well, have you asked them to serve something else? What would you really enjoy?”

"Why Don’t You, Yes But” can be played by any number (two or more). One of the persons must play the role of the “refuser” who deflects all proposed solutions by saying “Yes, but . . .” and adding at least one reason that a proposed solution wouldn’t work.

Not all meetings are intended to resolve differences. You’ve probably attended some that celebrated a victory or accomplishment or one that brought people together after being away from campus all summer. Some of those meetings may have turned into a consideration of future proposals or recent problems. At that point, you can shift overtly or subtly into the four points of the negotiation strategy:

It’s really simple, once you get that framework in mind!

Problems can arise when people do not speak fluently the language in which they are communicating. They may not hear the exact meaning that another has expressed. In most languages there are multiple ways of expressing an idea. Not all statements of agreement mean the same thing. In Mexico there are at least five different ways of promising, with these different meanings:

These meanings are arranged in a hierarchy starting with the most committed intention and ending with the least committed. In Understanding Intercultural Communication, Samovar, Porter, and Jain point out that “this agreement concept ranges from a durable agreement that everyone recognizes to an agreement being unlikely. The problem, of course, is to understand the differences . . . in their cultural sense so that a correct version can be rendered in another language.” In some cultures, such as Mexico, refusing a request is judged to be extremely impolite; as a result, a person may be evasive. Since Americans believe in being direct and assertive, they may be extremely frustrated when they have been told, “Yes, I will work on the project on Saturday,” but the person does not show up. In this case the local person may have been saying “yes” in a less committed way that the US listener misunderstood. The speaker expressed a form of agreement just to preserve the friendly relationship.