Joshua Becker

Kyoto is a play about the negotiations leading up to the Kyoto Protocol, including the UNFCCC which was the world's first international accord on climate change. It can be purchased and read in book form.

I'm about halfway through as of posting this, and it's a really interesting demonstration of negotiation. I'm reading it through the lens of standard MBA negotiation theory, and would love to discuss with others in that context. Like a one-off book club.

Non-violent communication is a book written by Marshall Rosenberg. I've never read it, but from my skimming, it is similar to the communication practice taught at Community Mediation Maryland. However, there are some key philsophical differences, and I think it's aimed at different goals. I don't know for sure because I haven't read it yet! Generally it is quite popular among mediators.

Possible method of engagement: a one-time book club meeting to discuss this book, with the expectation that everyone in attendance has read it before attending. If desired, I could bring exercises to practice the skills. Noting that I have not read it before, but I do come at it with an expert eye and some familiarity with the broad topic, this would be like a self-guided skills workshop.

Exercises would be like: simulated role play, where you're given some character background and have to act out a conflict. A chance to practice the language. I don't really know for sure yet what it would look like, having not yet read the book.

I define a decision as the process of selecting one out of two or more alternatives.

In many cases, it can be valuable to put some work into generating as many ideas as possible. This is especially important for making decisions amidst disagreement — it takes some real creative work to find an idea that everyone will agree to.

In addition to finding creative ideas to reach agreement, you also simply want ideas that are good! If you are designing a technology, or planning a campaign, you don't just want to settle on the first viable idea that comes along. You want to push yourself and your group to come up with the best possible idea.

Colloquially, the process of coming up with ideas is known as "brainstorming." For design purposes, you must address two key tensions in brainstorming.

On the one hand, you want to maintain as much diversity as possible in your process — the more diverse your ideas are, the more likely you are to find a good one. If all of your ideas are very similar, you're not really exploring the possibility space. Thus, a good design practice might be to keep all of your group members isolated, so they don't start to herd together around the same set of ideas.

On the other hand, people inspire each other — we "riff" on each others ideas — once I hear an idea from you, it sparks an idea from me that I would not have thought about on my own.   So we don't actually want to keep people separate, do we? We want to keep them together, so they can bounce ideas off each other.

This is the tension you must consider in your design process — balancing diversity and creative synergy.

Another technique for generating ideas is crowdsourcing. The idea of crowdsourcing is that we can recruit members outside of a group to contribute ideas, often through a competition where the best idea gets a prize.

The advantage of crowdsourcing is that it puts a lot more people on the problem—and more people means more chance of finding a good idea. A very popular website for crowdsourcing is Kaggle.

One interesting idea I recently read (no link available) about crowdsourcing is that the type of feedback matters — sometimes, you might want to give feedback on the quality of the solutions, and sometimes you might want to give feedback on the way that people are designing the problem.   Each approach has different advantages.

These are a few examples of design principles you might consider, and we can discuss others.

With respect to developing your facilitation practice, I teach a very specific set of techniques for managing idea generation.

Some time ago, I started building an AI negotiation coach. A negotiation coach is someone who helps a person prep for a negotiation via the sokratic method and, on a limited basis, expert advice. It follows the principle "I am an expert in negotiation, but you are an expertin YOUR negotiation."

I never finished this, as detailed below. I offer this project up to anyone who is interested in building it, or some version of it, or building a completely different thing inspired by it. I can tell you how to do negotiation coaching, and advise you on the lessons I learned so far about building with LLMs.

I abandoned this project after realizing two things:

1. Building things is not a priority for me (The hard part isn't building, it's testing and quality control!)
2. I was not entirely sure how to do negotiation coaching

Since then, two things have happened

1. I have begun doing negotiation coaching, and developed a practice
2. AI has gotten a lot better

The URL below shows the half-baked app. It shows the basic logic and flow, but it uses old models, has no quality control and I honestly don't even remember what process it's attempting to follow.

https://planning.negotiation.solutions/

You can build AI to support decision-making in a variety of ways. I have tinkered with some of these, and others are untested ideas.

For example..

• AI as negotiation or conflict management coach: one-on-one conversations to help someone plan how to navigate a situation (basically an AI version of me)
• AI as a live conversation mediator (basically an AI version of me doing a different thing)
• AI as asynchronous group decision support. This could mean a lot of things, depending on where the group communication happens and how large the group is.

I am an expert in mediation and negotiation, you are an expert in building things. I would be thrilled to guide you in building cool stuff.

I was tasked by the European Commission to develop an 8 hour skills training on collaborative policymaking. It followed on this report to which I contributed on the "12 Principles of Collaborative Policymaking."

I don't actually know much about policymaking. Really, it's a skills training on how to collaborate better, following evidence-based practice (to the extent that there is such evidence).

Most of what I made is boring stuff like lesson plans, learning objectives, learning activities, etc. Ok actually some of it is pretty cool but probably won't interest you all that much. But...

The interesting part of this project is what I called the "Action Guide" which is a literal list of things you can concretely do to improve collaboration on a team. To generate this guide, I dug into actual laboratory experiments where they did some intervention, and showed scientifically that the intervention improved some metric important to collaboration. The science is a bit sketch, but it's the best we've got.

Due to the copyright restrictions in my contract, I can't publicly share the materials I made, since they now own them. But, they told me that it's fine to share the CONTENT of the documents, as long as it's not the exact wording.

So if you want to access these materials, I can give you a project: take the document I wrote, and rephrase it so that it doesn't violate copyright. Then we can share it with anyone you want.

Frankly, it could use some revision anyway.

My other topics are fairly general and aimed at providing a broad theoretical and intellectual base for your technology design.

I also want to highlight some very specific professional skills I can teach which might be useful to you in day-to-day life.

Specifically, I have experience teaching two concrete communication skillsets, both closely related: negotiation, and conflict management.

For each of these topics, I can provide self-guided learning materials as well as taught workshops or multi-session classes, depending on demand.

Negotiation

This is exactly what it sounds like, as I would teach to MBA students. I teach negotiation the way I learned it at Kellogg School of Management. It's a fairly standard approach, taught similarly at business schools around the world. See my free online course for more information.

Negotiation includes distributive negotiation, aka price haggling. The primary goal in distributive negotiation is to claim value.

Negotiation also includes integrative negotiation, which is about making smart trade-offs that increase value for everybody at the table. This is where it gets really interesting. The standard approach is known as "interest based negotiation" because the goal is to get past people's positions (what they want) and to try to meet their underlying interest (why they want it).

Topics in negotiation include: distributive negotiation, integrative negotiation, negotiating as teams, multi-party negotiation, dispute resolution, negotiating across cultures, personality and negotiation.

Conflict Resolution

This is a skill set with two components. One component is a set of micro skills focused on how to talk to people:  active listening and open-ended questions. The other component is a process for using these skills to facilitate 2 or more people to reach agreement. Although I've picked up a few other things along the way, my practice still closely follows what I was taught by Community Mediation Maryland.  See this micro-skills resource guide and this process guide for more information.

You will not become a skilled mediator through my teaching. A full mediation training is typically a 40 hour experience, followed by hands-on practice with a mediation service provider and coached feedback.

Why do we drive on the right side of the road and not the left? Why do we call it a spork and not a foon? There was no big meeting at which these things were determined.

When engineering group decisions, you are focusing on an intentionally designed process that leads to an intentionally achieved outcome. However, many group decisions are made accidentally.

It's important to notice when decisions are being made. Sometimes you might want to try to optimize the process, sometimes you might be OK with letting it happen naturally. But what you don't want to do is stumble into some outcome that doesn't work for you.

Understanding these dynamics is also important for creating social change. For example, we can use these principles to think about how to overturn dominant conventions in a society.

Ultimately, engineering a group decision process is about being intentional. We can discuss how group decisions emerge accidentally, and how you might intervene to best accomplish your goals. Of all the topics I cover, this is the most philosophical and least defined.

One of the more popular ideas to emerge from research on group decision-making (especially under the brand "collective intelligence") is known as the "wisdom of crowds." This is a mathematical guarantee that the average belief in a group of people is more accurate than the belief of an average individual (really).

Beliefs in this context mean estimates such as "how many people currently support our campaign. and forecasts, such as "how many people will vote for us". Beliefs might also be categorical, such as "which candidate will win this campaign."

Here are some more examples of things a group might estimate or forecast:

• How many jellybeans are in this jar?
• How long will this project take to complete?
• How many units of this product will sell next year?
• How many volunteers will we be able to recruit?
• Which candidate will win the election?
• Will oil prices exceed $200/barrel before end of 2026?
• Will Andy Burnham be prime minister on Dec 31, 2027?

Honestly, you can apply this practice without any further instruction from me: simply ask a lot of people the same question, and take an average. A fair bit of evidence suggests that the average will be pretty accurate. This is known as a "prediction poll."

You can also see this principle widely applied in prediction markets, also known as betting markets. In these markets, people place bets on future outcomes and earn money if they are correct. They are called "markets" because they operate on a similar principle to the stock market.

Prediction markets and prediction polls are methods for crowdsourcing accuracy — asking people outside your group to provide input, so you can come up with accurate beliefs.

Sometimes, however, not only care about generating a specific forecast or estimate, but instead might care about supporting the formation of accurate beliefs within your own group. Indeed, if you have a group making a decision together, it is inherently desirable that their decision be based on an accurate understanding of the world!

Unfortunately, scientific research shows that lots of things happen in groups that can lead outcomes to depart from the simple average. When we talk to each other around a table, dominant voices can undermine group accuracy, leading to the "wisdom of the few" instead of the wisdom of the crowds.

By thinking about the ways in which groups can form accurate beliefs and the ways in which groups can go wrong, you can better design your facilitation practice to support the wisdom of crowds.

One of the big challenges of group decision-making is that group members typically have different needs, interests, preferences, and priorities. Even when groups have perfectly accurate information, and a full set of possible ideas, they may struggle to reach agreement because everybody in the group wants something different.

One simple way to make a decision amidst disagreement is to take a vote. The analysis of the advantage and disadvantages of different voting methods is known as social choice theory, and may be covered in other modules.

However, voting has limitations. For example, it presupposes a relatively limited set of discrete options.

Moreover, it is sometimes desirable for groups to reach consensus. Consensus can be important when it is operationally necessary to have all group members involved (i.e. one dissenter can wield an effective veto) and can also be desirable simply for generating "buy in."

The practice of making decisions amidst agreement is known as negotiation.

It's important to realize that negotiation is not always about wheeling and dealing. Imagine a family trying to agree on vacation plans, a group of freelancers trying to agree on a shared office space, or a team of political technologists trying to design a project together.

Notably, reaching agreement is not only a social problem but a computational problem. It's a matter of searching the space of all possible solutions until you find one that gets everybody to "yes."

Negotiation is a huge topic, and I have a variety of syllabuses ranging from a 2 hour workshop to a full 30 hour university course. An important part of negotiation education is hands on skills practice, i.e. completing simulated negotiation exercises to build your experience and try out different techniques.

A big part of negotiation education is theoretical learning, and you can see excerpts from my MBA lecture videos in my free online course.

Some of that theory translates into direct techniques you can apply, like a negotiator's toolbox.   For example, a common technique is "multiple equivalent simultaneous offers" aka MESOs. In this technique, someone will literally make multiple offers at the same time that are of equivalent value ("I can offer you either A, B, or C — which do you prefer?") which offers a variety of tactical and strategic benefits.

You are all here because technology has the potential to transform social decision-making.   Some technologies are better than others. Very few, of any, are derived from evidence-based practice.

This topic is a rapidly changing space, and there are a few things that we could discuss together.

1. building technology to support decision-making

2. using existing technology to support decision-making

3. designing processes to support group decision-making

Note that technology does not always mean digital technology. Facilitation techniques are a technology, and I can teach you my facilitation practice.

Ultimately, facilitation is the core practical skill that I associate with group decision-making.   Facilitation is the practice of getting groups to make good decisions.

My facilitation practice is a set of very specific micro-skills embedded within a process design strategy adapted from a well defined mediation practice taught by Community Mediation Maryland.

In the process of making a decision, a group must do the following things:

1. identify the problem (set an agenda)

2. identify possible solutions (generate ideas)

3. evaluate possible solutions (reach accurate beliefs)

4. choose a solution (reach agreement)

Any facilitation practice should include a very specific process to support each of these steps. Well, people usually skip step 3. I would be happy to teach you my facilitation practice.

Additionally, groups may sometimes pursue these goals in isolation outside of a broader decision process. For example, sometimes a group's job will simply be to generate an estimate or forecast. Sometimes, a group's job is simply to generate new ideas.

Therefore in addition to considering group decision-making as an entire process, it's important to consider each of these different components in isolation — each distinct task requires distinct design principles.

In reality, the world is not so clear cut. We can't really dissect group decision-making into neat sub-components that can be modularly repackaged into a whole, and have it work the same way every time.

What I can do is teach you how to think about group decision-making by offering you some examples of existing processes and some of the evidence base relating to specific behaviors such as belief formation.

Then, you will take these insights and creatively apply them to the problems that you encounter in your own work.