Monday, June 15, 2015

The Story of the Orange (negotiating)

The Orange
 

Even though I have 39,000 views of my blog, I have only one follower, so I guess I need to step things up a bit here. I'm going to try to post every Monday.

This is a story I heard in a negotiation class:

The Orange

There were two children (a boy and a girl) who were fighting over the last orange when their mom walked into the kitchen.
The mom took the orange, cut it in half and gave each child half.
This seemed to be a good compromise to make them each somewhat happy.
Neither of them were very satisfied with the result.
After more questioning, the mom found out that the son wanted to eat the fruit and the daughter wanted the peel to make orange zest for a recipe she was working on.

So, the point of the story is that sometimes we quickly think of a compromise (we're jumping to the "solution") when if we spend time to listen to the "need" we may find a better solution that meets the goal best (a better "negotiation").

So, when negotiating (and we use negotiations all the time in life and at work), try to find out the needs and goals of each party before we jump to solutions.