Negotiation is never about winning

Not long ago I was sitting in the car with Professor Tim Cullen, Professor negotiations at University of Oxford, talking about negotiations, geopolitics and why so many difficult conversations across the world seem to keep ending in deeper division.

And one thought... something which seems so logic and so simple: "Negotiation is never about winning".

Because when one side wins completely, somebody else walks away feeling they lost. And people rarely stay content with outcomes that only work for one side .

Good negotiation usually asks something more difficult from both sides. It's about a willingness to move, a willingness to listen, a willingness to give up part of what you initially wanted in order to create something both sides can genuinely live with.

OK... maybe not perfect. Maybe not everything you aimed for, but fair enough to shake hands and move forward.

It sounds all simple and perhaps it is. Yet looking around the world today, so much seems built around winning versus losing. Us versus them.

Maybe lasting progress starts when we spend less energy trying to defeat each other and more energy trying to understand what a workable path forward actually looks like.