I loved it partly because I played on a basketball team that won that way (but not enough of the teams I played on did). Also because Lawrence of Arabia was the big movie my sophomore year (I even read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's book).

But you MIGHT like it because it's a well-written piece that makes you think about uncommon strategies and what can make them successful.

The technology community -- especially when we seek to foster serious change in organizational structure and strategy, meaning when we seek to bring truly serious new value to the world -- is often fighting an underdog battle. We lose many of them. The technical odds are tricky, and the political odds often overwhelming.

But Saul Alinsky often took apparently weak communities and won battles with unconventional strategies. Unconventional, to say the least. His Reveille for Radicals was required reading in a seminar I had with Paul Ylvisaker my first year in graduate school; Ylvisaker brought Alinsky to an evening class and he stayed talking with us students until past midnight.

Anyway, here it is. Are there ideas here about how we could win bureaucratic battles when the existing structures don't see the need to move?

All the best,

Jerry

What we've often missed in this early self-awareness is that many of the world's problems aren't puzzles with right and wrong answers. They're people problems. The challenge is getting a group to agree on how to work together. There are many good enough answers, some better than others. But all the good answers are negotiated agreements where enough of the group is motivated to work together successfully.

Engineers -- and economists -- often recognize the importance of negotiation problems intellectually, but many don't like to work on them. They don't like "politics." They don't like emotion-driven negotiations and compromise.

This orientation hurts results when technology needs to be used as a catalyst for institutional strategy and change -- i.e., when the essence of the problem is negotiation and politics.

In this context I recently -- and finally -- got around to reading the popular Getting to Yes book of Roger Fisher and William Ury. (Roger's brother Frank has been a friend of mine for many years, so I felt a little guilty about not having read the book earlier.)

In my view, the core Getting to Yes idea is a warning that we tend to handle negotiations as a one-dimensional tug of war, a zero-sum conflict between our position and that of whomever we are negotiating with. The book argues against negotiating "positions," urging instead an exploration of the multi-dimensional "interests" that have generated those positions. In this larger framework, shared interests and win-win opportunities can often be found, with good answers identified by relatively objective principles to meet the needs of both parties.

Among many high profile examples offered by the book, consider the Egypt v. Israel negotiation over the Sinai. Both wanted all of it, considering a 50-50 split unacceptable.

In that case, the interests were broader and bigger than land per se. What Egypt was interested in fundamentally was sovereignty over territory which historically had been theirs "forever." What Israel was interested in was defense from another attack by an all-too-close Egyptian army.

With the underlying interests understood, Egypt was given sovereignty over the lands and people, with Israel getting an agreement that Egypt would bring no military capacity into the territory.

The "mantra" of Getting to Yes is:

1. Separate the people from the problem. Show you understand "their" problem and seek to turn the process away from conflict and towards the potential for collective problem-solving.
2. Focus on interests, not positions.
3. Invent options for mutual gain (i.e., not just one possible solution, but many; and not just gain for you, but gain for them as well)
4. Insist on using objective criteria to legitimize a solution; strength of will alone should not define the answer.

In my view there are better and much deeper books on negotiation (Howard Raiffa's Negotiation Analysis: The Science and Art of Collaborative Decision Making, for example). But Getting to Yes is a good quick read. The main ideas in the context of other writing on negotiation can be usefully explored in this Wikipedia article.

We should care about negotiation skills if we want to improve the impact of CIOs and other technology leaders in government, especially in making them more effective members of the senior team. Negotiation skills are essential.

Given the criticality of negotiation, what examples do we have, if any, of where and how negotiation skills have led to better CIO+CEO relations and IT strategies? What's out there?

And finally, can we use what's been learned via theory and/or practice to handle people problems better than we did in the 4th grade? How can the CIO community better learn and utilize negotiation skills?

All the best,

Jerry

Summer's now over (well, not legally, but school has started and that's good enough for me). We're still in tough times.

Some argue that the truly nasty economy will lead to major new moves. That history shows most truly big shifts took place during tough times. That "Necessity is the Mother of invention."

Others don't see it that way. There's no money for new things. Everyone is hunkering down, protecting what they've got.

My take is that the 2009-2012 stretch will soon be looked back on as a key inflection point in the history of tech-enabled change in government. Some of the moves will be obvious extensions of what's already seen as working: more online services, especially broadband and wireless, and some serious focus -- finally -- on consolidation and shared services.

And some of what's coming will be truly new and different. Such as...?

But what's your take?

1. Will 2009-12 bring new "major moves" to IT-enabled innovation?
2. If so, what will they be?
3. What are you working on?

Please follow the link below back to the blog to offer your comments. We're caught in a bit of an ivory tower here and need to know what's going on "out there."

All the best,

Jerry

jerry_mechling@harvard.edu

http://www.lnwprogram.org/blog/