Negotiation and Dispute Management

Conflicts are part of our daily life. Whether it is that your parents do not approve of your boyfriend or girlfriend and try to prevent you to spend time with him or her; whether a classmate submitted a paper, which you worked on together, just under his name; or whether your neighbour got angry when you cut off a branch from his tree since it made your terrace too shady and he now dumps his garbage onto your land, the conflicts are all around us and threaten to force us into long and exhausting disputes with bitter ends. In some cases, if a dispute gets out of hand, the parties may end up in court or even in jail. This is unless you are capable of skillful negotiation and dispute management. This module will introduce you to the basics of how disputes appear, develop and how they could be managed. We will work with multiple real life scenarios which will allow us to try out our negotiation skills and improve them by understanding what the dynamic between the parties is like and what strategies and steps can be employed to turn the dispute away from escalation towards a search for a solution. The teaching method will place students into various roles in several role plays and require their full and active participation. Indeed, two larger negotiation scenarios will be negotiated by everyone in a class and reviewed and critiqued on individual basis as well as with the whole group.