Creativity in negotiation is like a great song. What do the best negotiators and jazz musicians have in common? A CNN Opinion article argues that business leaders succeed more when they have the freedom to improvise. Good negotiators know how critical this insight is to what they do.
We teach and write about the importance of creativity in negotiations, and the need for improvisation at the bargaining table. But here are three deeper parallels between great jazz and great negotiation:
Exchange
In jazz, particularly in rehearsal, the musicians exchange musical ideas and take cues from each other. The more experienced they are and the better they know their instruments and their partners, the greater the possibilities. In collaborative negotiation, bargaining is a genuine exchange, where the unexpected can happen and new ideas develop. Active listening, probing, and identifying the other party’s interests lead to creative concessions and offers that uncover new value. In negotiation, as in jazz, “Improvisation grows out of a receptivity to what the situation offers.”
Learning and finding new value
In jazz, musicians learn more about the melody, their instruments, and their partners. Similarly, in a good collaborative negotiation both parties learn more about their own and each other’s businesses. A creatively handled conflict between a buyer’s terms and a seller’s bottom line can bring in new elements of value. A seller might offer a new packaging or delivery method, innovative payment terms, a valuable training program. Buyers might offer sources of new business or coveted tickets to a game. A good negotiator, like a jazz musician, finishes an exchange with an expanded understanding of value.
The relationship
Another facet of the parallel between jazz musicians and great negotiators is that both understand the core value of the relationship. Jazz musicians achieve music fully only through collaboration with other musicians — they understand, as Barrett says, that “creativity is a collaborative achievement.” Similarly, good negotiators know that one of the most valuable products of a collaborative negotiation is often the collaborative relationship itself.
In jazz musicians, as in great negotiators, creativity and improvisation are not just skills or tactics, but they represent a whole mindset, or philosophy of negotiating: a collaborative negotiation itself finds or creates new value, just as an interactive, collaborative jazz performance creates new music.