Managing the Value and Danger

of Dualities
Bruce Patton

In A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, Richard Walton and Robert

McKersie presented several “conceptual dualities” that have shaped much
thinking about negotiation, including integrative versus distributive bargain-
ing; attitudinal structuring (versus substantive deal structuring); and intra-
versus inter-organizational bargaining.
I want here to illustrate how such conceptual dualities have been (and
continue to be) extremely useful in thinking about negotiation, while also
underscoring how they can be and often are dangerous when they are
understood and applied inappropriately as discrete entities instead of as
linked aspects of a single tension.

The Legacy of Walton and McKersie

What is especially useful about Walton and McKersie’s approach is the
close connection they make to practice and their focus on helping nego-
tiators think through their various, often dualistic interests and how best to
pursue them. That is the same focus that led Roger Fisher, William Ury, and
me to the framework in our book, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement
without Giving In (1981, 1991, 2010). The substance of our advice also
owes an important debt to Walton and McKersie’s work.
Contrary to some critics who have mischaracterized Getting to Yes as
a “win–win” primer, the advice to negotiators offered there is clearly aimed
at managing the dualistic tensions identified in Walton and McKersie,
especially the tension between those interests of the parties that conflict
and those that are shared, complementary, or different (distributive versus
integrative).

Bruce Patton is co-founder and distinguished fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project and a
partner at Vantage Partners, LLC in Boston. His e-mail address is [email protected].

10.1111/nejo.12104
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 First and foremost, Getting to Yes advises negotiators to avoid those
cognitive and practical errors likely to lead unnecessarily to suboptimal
deals with significant unrealized potential value (economic, relational,
reputational, precedential, or otherwise). So, for example, we admonished
negotiators to focus on interests rather than positions as the real drivers of
value with the greater potential for creative optimization. Likewise, we
advised negotiators to know and develop their best alternative to a nego-
tiated agreement (BATNA) to minimize the chance of an outcome (whether
a deal or no deal) that they would come to regret.
The fact that Getting to Yes starts from the proposition that a good
outcome for you in negotiation may be no agreement, if there is none to be
found with this party that is better for you than your BATNA, makes clear
that while finding a deal where both parties “win” may be a fine “integra-
tive” aspiration, it is not the goal on which we were focused.
Instead, we saw a negotiator as trying to maximize the satisfaction of
his or her own interests. As a practical matter, that is unlikely to happen
through a deal unless that deal also meets some of the other party’s
important interests (better than the other party’s BATNA). So we advised a
negotiator to think about what others’ interests are and how they might be
met at low cost to the negotiator.
However, unlike some theorists, we also acknowledged the reality
embedded in Walton and McKersie’s second process, attitudinal structuring
— namely that parties may have important potential interests in their
relationship itself, including noninstrumental ones. Further, we noted that
the importance and salience of these relational interests may vary depend-
ing on how the relationship develops, which is likely to be affected by how
the parties interact in the negotiation as they deal with their nonrelational
interests. So again, the focus is on how to manage the linkage and potential
tension among different interests, which are all simultaneously in play as
the negotiators interact.
Our advice to make the most of the variable of perceived legitimacy
(“Insist on Using Objective Standards”) is both hard-headed and effective
practical advice for a negotiator because it helps meet the universal interest
to not feel unfairly treated and also offers a process for doing so that helps
avoid relationship damage (to the extent that matters to the negotiator).
While Getting to Yes is addressed to negotiators generally, rather than
to academics and labor negotiators, I offer these examples to demonstrate
the close parallels in its conceptual underpinnings and focus with those of
Walton and McKersie.

The Danger of Treating Dualistic Tensions as

Discrete Categories
As helpful as dualities can be in illuminating tensions to be managed in
negotiation, however, they can also mislead those who seek to separate

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 them into discrete categories. James Sebenius explores some of these mis-
conceptions in depth in his contribution to this issue. These misconcep-
tions may explain why some analysts have persistently charged Getting to
Yes with ignoring the “hard” distributive realities of the world, when our
purpose was to advise negotiators how to manage exactly those concerns
in a world where they are virtually never a wise or well-prepared negotia-
tor’s only concerns.
Conceptually the problem is that the individual poles of difference in
a duality may not exist independently, so assuming otherwise and focusing
on one at a time — as opposed to the dynamic tension created by the
relationship between the poles — may tempt people to distort reality to fit
their theoretical expectations.
By analogy, ski instructors advise those skiing through trees to keep
their eyes on the space between the trees: if you look at the individual trees,
you tend to hit them. (Similarly on the highway, motorists who look toward
the car next to them tend to drift closer to it.)
In focusing on the space between the trees, negotiation no longer
becomes a choice between one tree or the other. It is not about whether an
issue or the overall negotiation is integrative or distributive, but how to
simultaneously manage both aspects. More subtly, it is about how to ensure
that distributive dynamics don’t crowd out integrative potential, or a focus
on integrative processes doesn’t result in addressing more distributive
aspects superficially.
Human brains have an affinity for either/or thinking, and both the
integrative and the distributive “tree” have their own attractions, which can
lead one to focus only in that direction, but at great risk. We have heard
myriad stories of negotiators who turn scenarios ripe with integrative
possibilities into pitched battles and creative dead zones as a result of
beliefs that negotiation (or a negotiation) is “distributive.” We also know of
other negotiators who have been hurt in one way or another by inappro-
priately assuming a certain kind of collaborative response or value-creating
possibility in profoundly conflictual situations. We have even heard of
teachers saying plainly counterfactual things like, “First you have an inte-
grative phase of inventing creative options, and then you go to the hard
distributive stuff of divvying up the results.” These all seem to me a lot like
skiers looking at the trees.
In negotiation, I have argued that in the real world there are no
zero-sum games, no purely distributive or integrative negotiations (Patton
2005). It is always possible to behave in ways that shrink the pie and, in
practice, almost always possible to expand it. Thus the advice to focus on
interests, not positions, is ultimately all about focusing on the space
between the trees.
In fact, real negotiators always have a portfolio of interests, some
shared, like not shrinking the pie, some simply and perhaps usefully

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 different, and some in conflict. In this way I believe the challenges of
negotiation are similar to the challenges and complexity of optimizing the
value of any investment portfolio. The hard part is in deciding how best to
balance and manage the competing interests and issues — the space
between the trees, if you will.
I think this has important implications for those of us seeking to advise
negotiators. For that purpose, the question is not so much what are the
opposing trees, nor even how to negotiate with any given tree. If there are
no purely distributive or integrative negotiations, then it is not all that
helpful to consider how best to conduct a distributive negotiation as
opposed to an integrative negotiation.
Rather, the question should always be how best do we navigate
around and between the trees? How do we best manage the tensions
between shared, differing, and conflicting interests to optimize value?
Between interests in substance and in relationship, or between short-term
and long-term interests? Between getting better terms in the agreement
versus more value created in the implementation of the agreement?
Between getting agreement and setting a precedent? And so on.
That focus on how best to manage competing interests is at the heart
of Walton and McKersie’s masterpiece, the reason they sought to name
dualities of tension, and something else we should continue to learn from
their work.

REFERENCES
Fisher, R., and W. Ury with B. Patton (eds). 1981. Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without
giving in. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
———, and ——— with ———. 1991. Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in.
New York: Penguin.
———, and ——— with ———. 2010, Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in.
New York: Penguin.
Patton, B. 2005. Negotiation. In The handbook of dispute resolution, edited by M. Moffitt and R.
Bordone. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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