Simulation Overview
Negotiation is taught through practice: you learn by doing. While the principles of negotiation are fairly straightforward, the hardest part of learning to be a great negotiator is putting those principles into practice.
There is one type of negotiation where it is especially difficult to get practice: dealing with difficult negotiators. Often learners in courses are reluctant to “go negative” while negotiating with their peers. These realities leave negotiators unprepared to respond to the various power plays and tricky tactics that negotiators engage in real-world settings.
University of Michigan Ross School of Business Professor Susan Asford and Forio designed this simulation to address this issue. As learners go through the simulation, they observe negotiators working on various aspects of a deal. Each scene will end with an issue known to cause negotiators difficulty. We call these difficult issues “power plays” or “tricky tactics”.
Learners get to provide an actual negotiation response on video. After learners post their videos, the negotiation responses are evaluated. The simulation contains nine different events. Learners are usually assigned a subset of those events to consider and respond to.
