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Introduction:
Are there special tools an
intervenor should use when people with a great deal of technical knowledge are
ensconced in conflict? Frank Blechman talks about the methods he used to help a
group of technicians to negotiate regulations for monitoring chemical weapons stock
piles. These methods helped to generate more productive
discussions, yielding results that would be understandable to the general public
despite their highly technical nature.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Technical Negotiating
Frank Blechman
Private Consultant. Formerly at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University
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About 6 years ago I was asked to facilitate a
federal working group on the monitoring of chemical weapons stock piles. This is
a group that had been meeting for about 6 months and getting absolutely nowhere.
It was made up of chemical weapons experts from the stockpile depots that had
been established under the chemical weapon demobilization treaty, and state and
local health officials from areas around those depots. The question was how
should they interact? What are the guidelines? How should the depots be
monitored? What role would the state and local officials play? Particularly what
role would monitoring play in case of an accidental release? There was, as you
would expect, lots of hostility between the sides. There was lots of technical
language thrown around. Some of which was only partially understood by some of
the players.
Even though all of the people who were participating were technically trained
were actively hostile to any notion that they were going to do anything
touchy feely because they were all technicians. At the beginning of that, I was
able to get them to step back and say what are the criteria for success in this
process? Is it that you win or that somebody else wins? They were able to say
that they had to produce something that was technically feasible. We are all
technicians, we all believe in that. But it also has to be politically feasible
and financially feasible. It had to be something that makes sense, so that they
could explain it to the public.
So they sort of rhetorically said that but
didn't have much of a sense of what it meant. As we went along, I would try each
session to get somebody, even though they were all technicians, to be the political monitor, even though they were all technicians. The person who was monitoring was in charge of figuring out if
there was something they could explain that they could explain to their
grandmother. At this point the person got a hat that said, "I'm on the
Granny watch." When we were in the third or forth session, the people who
had these roles that were not natural for them, began to get enthusiastic about
it, partly in parody. They would parody a politician's response to some proposal
that we made, or an accountant's response, or their own grandmother's response,
which were the funniest, of course. When they were able to do that and other
people were able to receive it good naturedly, it was a moment when I said I
think this is going to work. They were stepping out of their pre-described roles.
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