Shift the axis of dispute

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If, as we contrarians like to, we see a negotiation as not a straight, two-dog tussle between buyer and seller, but a multi-dimensional game of passive-aggressive rent-seeking that is merely staged within the intellectual construct of a bilateral negotiation — think of the negotiation as a kind of papier-mâché ecosystem on which a totally different struggle for memetic survival is waged — then possibilities open up for those who genuinely seek to move the negotiation on.

Remember the array of interests here. There are many competing agendas — as many as there are players in this drama; more in fact, since any agent has his own interest and his principal’s to juggle — and the interested you would think should predominate, being those of the notional “buyer” and “seller” — should we call them “hosts”? — are in practice the most weakly held.

Imagine the battlefield is populated not by loyal soldiers with an unwavering unitary commitment to the defence of the realm, but hastily-roused rabble of rowdy, but confused, mercenaries, not really sure what’s going on, whose side they’re on, where they are meant to be standing or how they even came to be in the middle of this fight in the first place — but grateful for the livelihood it affords them, all the same. Each of these agents — the negotiators, salespeople, professional advisers, credit committees — each one has her own private agenda, and that is to make themselves look like what they are doing is necessary — to vouchsafe, as far as possible, that livelihood. What they do doesn’t have to be necessary; just to seem that way to whomsoever should be paying their bill. That bill should be as large as it can be without seeming out of proportion to the value of the negotiation.

Thus, buyer and seller are hosts, to a rich ecosystem of rent-seeking agents.

Now, a negotiation between buyer and seller where all concur, at once, that “we are agreed, then” will not put many coppers in a rent-seeker’s tin. There need to be points of detail, bafflingly articulated, that must be hammered out just in case. The rent-seekers busy themselves usually, with hypothetical contingencies of the sort that could happen, should the sky fall in on our heads, but if dealt with may permit the “client” to sleep at night.

Negotiators