OK. What I want to do now is talk about communication a little bit. Now maybe
you've had some of this before or maybe not. So let's go a little bit into this
idea of the communication model, how does communication work. At its most basic of
course, communication is related to... the questions are based on communication.
That's the way I want to say it. Questions are a form of communication,
right? So if we understand the communication model a little bit better,
we can have an idea of what to be careful of, what to avoid, what to look at
carefully. So let's look at this example here of the communication model. When two
people communicate, of course, what you have is there are many, many chances for
miscommunication. Now how does miscommunication happen miscommunication
happen? Because from the person speaking to the person listening, you go through a
few number of layers. For example, you go through an encoding process. That means
you take your idea in your brain, and you encode it into ... language symbols, may
be written, maybe spoken, right? In this case, we're going to speak, and there are
many influences that can influence that message encoding, such as culture, such as
knowledge, such as experience, feelings attitudes, emotion. So if you are feeling
happy, you may say the sentence in one way. If you're feeling sad, you may say it
in another way. This encoding then becomes words that you here or words that you
read or some other body language maybe for example. Can be many things, but the
point is that's what gets sent out. So if the person says something like: "My son
likes cars." Then you can imagine this is not so hard to understand. It looks
pretty basic, doesn't it? I mean what do we have here? We have my son likes cars.
It comes over to the listener. The listener also decodes exactly the way that
the speaker encoded. Only in this case, what do we have? We
have that message may be spoken in this case or written or body language comes
through the layers here of culture, knowledge, emotions, feelings, attitudes
and it gets decoded. So it comes through my area here, and I personally can change
that message to be something different. Why? Because it's come through this layer
here of my decoding, influenced by things like my feelings, and influenced by
things like my my culture. So this seems very simple, doesn't it? This should not
be a problem: "My son likes cars." But in this case, we can see that my son likes
cars presents quite different images than what we assume they were. When we
first heard this person say "my son likes cars", what he was trying to say was my
son likes cars, meaning "my grown-up son who is 30 years old works on cars." But
the person who heard the message, maybe he was thinking about a child who likes
to play with toy cars. So in this way we clearly can have completely different
meanings in the brain between these people, even though the word seems very
simple and easy to understand. So this miscommunication is caused from the
encoding and the decoding between the two participants in the conversation, and
it's very, very easy to happen. There's not a whole lot that you can do to make
sure it doesn't happen. It's very difficult to prevent. So how can we
overcome this kind of situation where we have such a seems... like so basic a thing?
If we can't even get basic ideas right, how in the world can we actually do
things like complex negotiation. Well, one of the things we
can do is learn to ask questions. Because the more questions we ask, the more we
can clarify. In that example we just had, we could say something like: "Oh, well, how
old is your son? Oh what does your son do for a job, for a career?" And then we would
get the answer. We get the picture more clearly. We wouldn't be so open to
miscommunication. So let's look at these questions, and begin to get an idea of
how these questions work. There are basically two kinds of approaches to
questions: positive and negative. Positive questions help make the negotiation
clear, more clear. They overcome problems. They help to solve the problems we saw
in the communication model between those two people. These questions can be
answered, and that helps lead to a building up of a good relationship, a
trust between the two communicators, especially in integrative. So these kinds
of questions are real questions. They're very helpful in understanding more, and
you need to learn as a negotiator to ask those questions so that you don't have
communication problems, miscommunication. And you need to learn also to supply
questions, even when you don't think you have a question. You think this is
very clear to me. But maybe it's not clear, so you ask questions to try to get
more information. Now inside of our textbook, we have quite a number of
examples. I'm going to just go over some of these very quickly. Some of the
examples of positive questions or questions related to who, what, where, why
when. These kinds of questions, I think you heard this in class before, right?
asking these who, what, whe,n why, these kinds of questions. So anything that
helps to understand things about this. What happened? when did it happen? who was
involved? why did it happen? who are you selling to? what's the product you're
trying to sell? where are you selling it at? when will you begin? These all help
make the situation clear. Open-ended questions are questions like:
How do you like our new office? What are your thoughts on this offer? Can you tell
us what you are looking for? These are very open questions, meaning I just in
general I'm asking you something: What do you think? What do you feel? What are you
looking for? What kind of products are you interested in? What markets are you
targeting in the future? Very big questions, and it leaves it for the
respondent to answer any way they want. "Leading questions" are questions that
already have the answer in them: "Don't you think this offer includes everything
you asked for?" You see that's a good leading question. That means that's not
really a question. That's me telling you you already got what you wanted. I gave
you what you wanted. How about this next one? It's a good one. "Wouldn't you agree this
price reduction is very generous? Wouldn't you agree that this price reduction is
very generous?" That means I don't want your answer. I'm just telling you I've
given you a lot. It's very generous. "It looks like this is the best offer you
can get, isn't that true?" but this is the best offer you can get. I'm telling you.
I'm not really asking you, even though it sounds like a question. OK, so along
these lines, the idea is you need to think about what is your ...
overall direction. Are you looking for integrative or are you looking for
distributive? And then use your questions in a way that helps support that
approach. We have planning questions, complementing questions, some focused
questions, and there are many different other kinds of questions you can check
out in your book. Please, use them in your RPG. This is going to be very useful for
you to execute your role playing game. Let's do a little follow-up here, and
talk about negative questions. Now negative questions are different than
positive questions because negative questions really do not have an answer,
and sometimes they can be very aggressive. These questions are not
really questions, but they're really aimed at giving the other side some kind
of feeling of pressure. We're sending them a very negative message. Let's look
at a few examples here. For example, if you look at the first one, this is a
prospective question: "Can you see that this price puts us in a very bad market
situation?" Can you see or something that can't you see, can't you see this price
really hurts our company? Can't you see your price is too high? Can't you see
you're making us lose money? So those are negative questions, and they're
not really questions at all.
OK. There's other examples in your book you can follow up on. So what happens
when you're in a negotiation and these questions are coming up? Now, how can you
deal with that? Well, here in this part of our book, we cover specific examples of
how to respond to those tough questions, to those negative questions. For example,
"take it or leave" is one kind of tactic you can use. If someone says take
it or leave it, that is "Take my offer or give up, just go away. We won't give you
anything." You can respond by saying: "If we were able to find a more attractive
alternative, would you still want me to take it or leave it?" That means: "If I
found somebody else, is that really what you want? If I found another company is
that really what you want?" Or you could say the next one: "Does the decision have
to be made now or can we take some time?" So you told me take it or leave it,
and I say hmm do we have to do this right now? Can't we wait a little bit? And
this by by postponing the time, I'm asking a question can't we take
more time? And actually my question is trying to respond to your very tough
approach, and my question is helping us to put it off. Maybe we explore a little
bit of another issue, and come back to this later. So these are good examples of
how you can use questions to respond to a very tough situation, a very hard
situation to make your negotiation not fail.
OK. I think that's a pretty straightforward chapter, talking about
the communications. I think, for my students, the biggest problem they have in doing
the role playing game is that when they go out to the groups, the
companies, and they begin to ask about prices and quality and shipping times, I
think that they don't really use this strategy of asking questions, in a way
that either helps integrative or distributor bargaining. They just, you
know kind of think, I'll just ask what's your price? What's your delivery? What's
your quality? And that's all I ask. But there are many of the things you can ask
about, in order to help the other side understand your situation, or to convey
some ideas that help them think they know your secret information, which may
not be the true secret information. So you really need to use this
communication skill to execute either integrative or distributive. It's a bit
of a hard one to explain. This is why we play the RPG. You really need experience
to get the idea of this. Questions are key in either case. Either you're using
win-win or win-lose, you still need to use questions because it really helps to
move the negotiation forward, and or to help the other side feel comfortable
with you, even if you're not executing an integrated strategy. OK. So next time
we're going to go looking at the RPG in detail. It's a little bit complex, a
little bit complicated. So I hope that you can get some rest before you watch
the next video, and put on your thinking caps and a little bit of patience.
Download the PDFs and the file. I think it's an excel sheet we use now this
semester. Download that, get your hands on it. And let's see if we can really focus
here on in. Because very soon begins your RPG game, your role playing game of
negotiation. And remember your grade is going to be directly
affected by how well you do, and it could be win-win you get what you want.
Everybody gets what they want. It could be win lose. You win, they lose. But you
don't want to be the one on the losing side. You wanT do everything you can to
get on the winning side, whether that's win-win or win-lose. So please focus
yourself, and remember if you're on the losing side, you may not even realize it
until the scores all added up a week later, and then you could lose badly. You
want to win. OK? Keep that hunger. Keep that target. Keep that objective. As
business students, you need to really have that objective to win. Doesn't mean
the other side always loses if you're using a win-win. But don't be afraid to
Don't be afraid to. Don't be oh the one who says "I'm not worried to lose. Its ok
if I lose." That is not a successful business approach. Companies that are ok
to lose, at the price of ever winning, even if it's win-win, well they don't
stay around too long. So I don't want you to be that way. I want you to be
aggressive in winning, even if it's win-win, but don't be afraid to face
win-lose distributive bargaining situations because they're so common.
All right, good luck with that. I'll see you next time when we talk about our RPG game.