The Centre for Strategic Negotiations is a consulting, training and policy practice

  We specialise in maximising the value of high stakes negotiations

Approach

How often are negotiations prepared with a deep assessment of power and interests? Rarely. Yet this preparation and analysis is key to transforming negotiation value.

The heart of CSN’s approach is a forensic focus on power and interest. Together with a simple ambition: negotiation strategy should be that, not tactics. It shouldn’t get a little more, it should transform value.

CSN was founded on the principle that power isn’t just a function of size. Power is created through careful analysis and artful preparation. Interest can be similarly created to enrich negotiations.

The approach was born following a Google negotiation that had stalled for five years. At stake was an infrastructure partnership model that could transform their service platform.

Google had miscalculated its power and not built interest with the other side. Power, and interest, need to be created to sustain the deal. The approach closed it, saving them $400mn globally and the industry a further $1bn.

“The deal was dead really, but somehow pulled back. A masterpiece of negotiation. Superb performance, approaching astounding”

Valey Kamalov, Senior Staff Engineer
Google

Method

“Strategy is the art of creating power” Sir Lawrence Freedman

CSN’s unique, cutting-edge method:

 ·       Combines strategy, negotiation and team performance principles

 ·       Offers highly practical tools immediately applicable to negotiations

 ·       Designed to work highly effectively across sectors and industries

 ·       Transforms how you prepare, conduct and close negotiations

 A process for consistently delivering exceptional results

“In this most challenging of negotiation settings, the approach was both highly practical and highly impactful”

Anaide Nahikian, Programme Lead
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative

“The deal tripled in value. Over a year on, the approach continues to be pivotal to our partnership success”

Sophie Langman,
Partnerships Director
Cancer Research UK

Partnerships & Deals

What Is It For?

 ·       Creating richer and deeper partnerships

 ·       Turning around stuck and failing deals

 ·       Multiplying the value of deal propositions

 ·       Leveraging power to lower supplier costs

 ·       Building common ground and alignmentApproach

Who Is It For?

  • SMEs creating power to close richer partnerships to scale more quickly

  • Business units seeking to raise profit, deepen alignment and execution

  • Public agencies will achieve policy goals and value for money 

  • Charities building partnerships to maximize their social impact

  • NGOs building dialogue to resolve conflict and deliver resources

“Paul leveraged technology advances to create a new kind of deal structure. It scaled globally, becoming among our most complex and high value partnerships.”

Dr. Vijay Vusirikala, Director,
Network Architecture and Engineering,
Google

Case Studies

  • Challenge: A global technology company’s power counted for little when trying to build a ground-breaking partnership with a much smaller firm. Five years passed without progress. At stake was the ability to scale their service in days instead of months and vast savings.

    Approach: They wrongly thought they had the power. Value had to be created. A new deal structure was created, exploiting advances in technology, to triple its value to the partner.

    Result: The partnership closed. The model scaled the tech company’s service by 25 times. Its global rollout saved them $400mn, and became an open standard saving the industry $1bn.

  • Challenge: A start-up received partnership interest from their sector’s global leader. A quick, high value deal would forge their future, but a slow and low-value one could end it. Initial terms confirmed their worst fears.

    Approach: They changed the global leader’s mindset from tactical deal to partnership by understanding their real interests, and creating a vision to match it. A high-value proposition followed with pressure moved to the global leader to close.

    Result: Power had shifted, and they negotiated as partners. A 3-page draft became a 40-page deal but still closed in 8 weeks. It brought credibility and several million to self-fund growth.

“New possibilities for the deal, unrealistic, even outrageous, were achieved by creating more value for both sides. The deal set the company alive."

Chris Moore, Managing Director,
SLC

Turnarounds

Turning around and closing failing and stalling negotiations

Approach

Getting to the heart of the real problem

Retaking control of process in four steps

Beyond resetting to deeper relationship

Impact

Breathe new life and momentum to close

Create environment for higher value deal

“We were devastated. We assumed we had no power. The turnaround was miraculous, the best experience of my career”

Joanna Merton,
Senior Partnerships Manager,
Cancer Research UK

Case Studies

  • Challenge: A large charity’s partnership with a global conglomerate, approaching signature after 12 months, was cancelled for no reason. 18% of the charity’s divisional income would be lost; they were devastated.

    Approach: The charity team first needed to drain their emotion. Then an analysis of the deal to identify and create power to revive it. Several areas of power were found, and a strategy quickly built to leverage them, delivered largely through two carefully drafted messages.

    Result: Within two weeks the FTSE company completely reversed their decision. The deal was revived. The charity recaptured several million pounds and reset the partnership.

  • Challenge: A Silicon Valley giant sought a new shared-ownership infrastructure model saving them $55mn. Their largest supplier was the obvious choice, but it kept stalling due to the supplier fearing its complexity and the giant entering their market.

    Approach: Complex issues were broken down into separate negotiation problems and solved jointly. These ‘mini-wins’ built momentum, but not trust, halting the deal. Turning the problem into an opportunity for transparency, control and revenue saved it.

    Result: The relationship had moved from a supplier to partner. The new infrastructure model brought the giant $55mn in savings and a far more robust platform.

“He transformed our toughest challenge into an elegant framework deepening collaboration and trust. The resulting deal was ground-breaking for the company and industry”

Mike Galvin, Vice President
Tata Communications

Training

Combining bespoke negotiation models and tools with existing ones

Approach

Practical course material building to a curriculum

Modified for experience and negotiation context

Case studies deepening assimilation of concepts

Impact

Applied to participants’ past and present deals

Learning and skills with bottom-line results

“It brought a deep understanding of our power and how to convert it into leverage. We have become more focused, strategic and bold with our partnerships”

Sophie Langman,
Partnerships Director
Cancer Research UK

Case Studies

  • Challenge: A mid-sized health organization was concluding a key deal with a multinational. It opened up 80 new countries, but significantly undervalued them. After nine months they were resigned to accepting it to extend reach.

    Approach: Our ‘ideal proposition’ programme analysed the history of the negotiation, and other related ones. We took the learning and selected one additional elements to add substantial new value. This was delivered in a hastily arranged additional meeting.

    Result: An hour after the meeting the multinational called. They wanted to triple the deal value with the new elements. The partnership brought all the revenue and 80 territories.

  • Challenge: A gaming industry start-up was struggling with its first major negotiation. Its preferred platform provider wouldn’t move from standard terms. After three months without progress, they had an expensive and rigid deal.

    Approach: Our workshop analysed both the start-up’s power and the platform provider’s interest. We then looked at how the start-up could build both narratives to position themselves differently, and a new negotiation process of several stages.

    Result: Within 2 weeks the platform provider offered a new deal with 45% lower costs. The start-up also got additional terms providing commercial protection from their competition.

“We got all the terms we wanted, and it added tremendous value to the company. The negotiation approach has been successfully applied to other larger deals”

Christian Facey, CEO
Audiomob

Security

Political and humanitarian negotiations to find common ground

Approach

Designing tailored support and interventions

Creating leverage to negotiate more equally

Strategies and narratives to align interests

Impact

Finding pathways to constructive dialogue

Moving parties toward joint problem solving

“The participants, all Ukranian, gave the humanitarian frontline negotiation course 90% approval. An unbelievable scoring. It was knocked out of the park”

Rodger le Grand,
Instructional Designer,
Harvard

Case Studies

  • Challenge: America’s top university runs an initiative to support humanitarian negotiations. They sought a new, practical approach for frontline aid workers negotiating with non-state armed actors. In the Donbas, Ukraine.

    Approach: Humanitarian workers often negotiate with counterparties that don’t value the lives of vulnerable elderly and children. How can you find a common interest? By getting truly into the mind of the other side. Alongside this, novel use of their mandate as narrative power, and building a sequenced negotiation strategy, created new power and interest.

    Result: Participants assessed the approach 90% effective supporting their negotiations on the ground, far above typical ratings. The college said it exceeded all expectations.

  • Challenge: A political mediation and peace organisation, working from grass roots to political executive in the Middle East, faced a new challenge. An initiative facilitating foreign ministers, across the region, all in the same room.

    Approach: Framing facilitation as negotiation opened up new ways to manage the conversation. Which 3 fundamental interests do all the foreign ministers share? How can those interests be ordered, and shaped, to build some consensus? Can their agendas align into shared, problem-solving projects?

    Result: New tools, including the ‘blank canvas’ approach, supported the team to consistently facilitate with negotiation goals in mind. The project developed into a successful, many stage, process.

“A powerful combination of strategic thinking, and skilled negotiation, which cuts straight to the heart of a problem. We immediately applied innovative tools to our mediation work on the ground.”

Oliver Mcternan, Director
Forward Thinking