In the public sector, Mr. Tull has consulted to the governments of Bolivia, Guyana, Venezuela, and Colombia on their national conflicts. He has advised and trained such diverse groups as OXFAM, Indonesia's Ministry of Trade, El Salvador's Ministry of Education, and many of Canada's First Nations Communities including the Mi'Kmaq, Samson Cree, and Ermineskin Cree Nations. He has worked extensively with the WHO, WFP, FAO, UNDP, OCHA, and UNICEF branches of the United Nations.

In the private sector, Mr. Tull has designed and delivered training workshops throughout the world for companies such as IBM, General Mills, Major League Baseball, Haagen Dazs, Saudi Aramco and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Mr. Tull's extensive teaching experience includes the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Education and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Mr. Tull spent eight years working with Roger Fisher, co-author of the groundbreaking negotiation book Getting to Yes, as part of the Conflict Management Group. Prior to joining CMG, Mr. Tull spent several years working as an International Partner for Habitat for Humanity in Central and South America. His interest in negotiation theory was made very personal in Nicaragua when he was held hostage by Recompa guerrillas and negotiated his own release, as well as that of his colleagues.

Mr. Tull is also a Consultant with Mercy Corps International, an Associate with the ARIA Group, and an Advisor to the Ethnic Relations Commission of Guyana. Mr. Tull received his Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and his BA, with honors, from Kenyon College.

In the mid 1990s the Canadian Wheat Board, the various wheat pools (Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan), the railroads, private grain companies, and growers all sought agreement on how to revamp the logistics system for moving grain from the prairies to market. At a basic level the system points in the wrong direction, i.e., grain flow easily from West to East for export to Europe, but the largest growing market is in Asia which requires Canadian grain to flow from East to West. How do more than a dozen parties organize themselves to conduct efficiently a complex, multi-party negotiation?

CMI Concord Group facilitated such discussions using the one-text (or "single negotiating text") process invented by Roger Fisher at the Harvard Negotiation Project. Led by Paul Cramer, the CMI Concord team crafted a one-text that contained five major issues (i.e., the role of the Canadian Wheat Board, Rail Transportation, Elevator facilities, Terminal Facilities, and Farmer Delivery Rights), some 21 sub-issues, and multiples of options per sub-issue. The process allowed all the parties to speak to their key short-term concerns in the context of the longer-term vision for the industry. By the conclusion of an industry conference facilitated by CMI, the parties had a clear choice between the options in the one-text and their BATNAs and were able to reach an unprecedented agreement.

President Mandela and Vice Presidents de Klerk and Mbeki After Negotiating the First National Unity Government of South Africa.

In the early 1990s, South Africa as a nation faced a tremendous challenge. They sought to negotiate a peaceful transition from the apartheid regime to a democracy that would be acceptable to blacks and whites alike. Many thought the task was hopeless.

The road to reconciliation had been preceded by decades of violence. In the 1950s, the ruling National Party, dominated by the Afrikaners, South Africa's Dutch settlers, formally established the apartheid system. Blacks could live only in certain designated areas and were denied the right to vote. Opposition political parties were outlawed and black politicians were exiled, imprisoned, and sometimes murdered. Racism and violence were the order of the day. Years of protest and international sanctions finally lead to historic talks that began in secret between the government and African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, a political prisoner for twenty-seven years. The newly elected president, F.W. DeKlerk, surprised the world in February 1990 by dismantling segregation laws and legalizing the ANC. Mandela was free, and serious negotiations began. Unfortunately, the decades of violence and armed resistance left both sides traumatized and deeply suspicious of each other's motives. Many viewed negotiation only as the process for making concessions and thus tantamount to treason, for which alleged traitors were "necklaced."

Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing into the mid 1990s, as representatives of Conflict Management Group, Roger Fisher, CMI Concord partner Charles Barker and other CMG colleagues made numerous trips to South Africa. They worked through the Wilgispruit Fellowship Center at the direction of then Archbishop Desmond Tutu and present Bishop Joseph Seoka, the African National Congress, the National Party, the Dutch Reformed Church, AZAPO, and the Inkatha Freedom Party to teach cooperative interest-based negotiation process to leaders among all factions and to advise key leaders and their negotiators. Of course, the work of Fisher, Barker and their colleagues was only one small part of a massive nation wide effort attracting international support that continues to this day. Nonetheless, as the lead constitutional negotiators, Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer explained to Roger Fisher in a late 1990s interview, the cooperative interest-based negotiation process was the approach that they, their principals, and their constituencies used to create solution after solution leading finally to a new constitution and democratic elections.

An important product provided by Janssen Cilag to health care providers throughout Europe is a medicine used in the treatment of certain chronic and life threatening diseases. Starting in 2O02, sales of this medicine to physicians and hospitals world wide for millions of patients were significantly reduced after publication of a study indicating that a few hundred patients in recent years might have experienced serious reactions from use of the medicine. Janssen Cilag notified physicians of the concern and, following the Credo of its parent company, Johnson & Johnson, took strong measures against its financial interest to investigate and eliminate any possible problem with this medicine. Nonetheless, the reputation of the medicine had been damaged and many health care providers switched to alternate forms of treatment.

CMI Concord Group had been teaching negotiation within Johnson & Johnson and advising their negotiators for several years leading up to 2002. When this problem arose, it became one of the focal points of instruction about negotiating good working relationships and trustworthy, interest-based agreements with health care providers and authorities. Janssen Cilag negotiators began applying CMI Concord training and advice and soon got results.

For example, in one European country, as a direct result of using the seven element tools, a negotiation team successfully gained the commitment of a highly esteemed hospital to switch their patients from an alternate medicine back to that of Janssen Cilag. Since the problem became a concern, this was the first health care provider in the country ever to switch back to Janssen Cilag's medicine and the first health care provider to select this medicine from among all other choices available. Key to this result were the Janssen Cilag negotiators' ability to build good working relationships, promote clear understanding of interests, demonstrate flexibility by proposing many good options, and defend the resulting proposed agreement internally with well-developed standards of fairness. This first of many such successful negotiations was alone worth over €1 million annually.

The Newton Public School System educates more than 11,000 students with almost 1,000 teachers. Although one of the best systems in the state, labor relations in the late 1980s and early 1990s were plagued by a poor relationship between the School Committee and Administration and the Newton Teachers Association. The interactions got so bad that the teachers "worked to rule" as part of their bargaining strategy, something that all parties acknowledged was not good for the teachers, the administration, the parents, or the children.

CMI Concord Group was asked to help rebuild the working relationship between and among the parties. Starting with an initial three-day joint training workshop co-facilitated by Paul Cramer, we taught the parties how to use an "interest-based" or "principled negotiation" process for resolving their issues. As a result, the parties created a "procedural contract" for how negotiations would be conducted and memorialized that in negotiation "ground rules." The parties then used these ground rules to change the process from acrimonious positional bargaining to a more interest-focused dialogue. Joint data gathering teams produced information on legitimacy; small brainstorming groups inventing options for discussion in the larger group; and the "Newton Five" became a sub-group to maintain communication and the working relationship whenever issues arose between contract talks.

Since the beginning of the interest-based process the parties have successfully concluded three additional contracts. They have managed through difficult issues regarding health care costs, and recently agreed to try jointly to reduce costs by sourcing pharmaceuticals from Canada.

(Written by Landrum Bolling, board member of Mercy Corps, about the recent training work of Paul Cramer and colleagues. See the Mercy Corps website for more detail.)

Iraqi government officials analyzing current negotiations at Mercy Corps' conflict management workshop. Image © Paul Cramer 2006

Amman, Jordan - Recently, a diverse group of government officials from Shiite provinces in south-central Iraq came together here for an intensive weeklong workshop in conflict negotiation and problem-solving.

There were no live reports on CNN. No banner headlines or congratulatory editorials. No discussion of the implications for President Bush's poll numbers. The quiet, down-to-earth deliberations we saw in conference rooms here could never compete with suicide bombings for public attention and media coverage. But they may just be a signal of better times to come in that tortured land.

None of the participants had to attend, and no U.S. military or government officers were present. The words "nation building" or "spreading democracy" were never spoken, and there was no discussion of American policies and activities in the Middle East, for or against.

For the 25 Iraqis and four American trainers who participated in this Mercy Corps training, it was a businesslike exploration of a broad range of practical management issues: how to negotiate oil-pricing contracts, how to cope with disputes between neighboring villages over access to scarce water supplies, how to calm angry enemies fighting over supposedly "non-negotiable" demands.

The overarching theme of the workshop was learning how to analyze administrative difficulties; how to understand the nature of disputes; how to contain, manage and resolve conflicts.

The trainers — two lawyers, a Christian minister and a former college president — had all worked closely with Roger Fisher, the Harvard professor and negotiation guru who is author of the best-selling guide to productive negotiations "Getting to Yes."

There was a minimum of lecturing or moralizing or political speculation. Actual and theoretical cases of conflict were put on the table for dissection and "negotiation." Simulated games were played out, often with emotional intensity. Discussions were lively and free-wheeling.

While the American facilitators tried deliberately to avoid discussion of the immediate conflicts within Iraq, the Iraqi participants inevitably kept coming up with references to their own difficulties — and the relevance of the procedures under discussion.

In the end, there was a unanimous request from the group for a longer follow-up workshop with explicit application of Fisher's methodology to real Iraqi problems.

Just the other day, word came to me from two of the participants that some of the workshop techniques they had learned were tried out, with the agreement of a higher level government official who had asked for help in dealing with an inter-clan conflict that had already produced bloodshed.

Representatives of the two sides were persuaded to sit down together and talk. Methodically, they went through the joint exercise of analyzing the problem, each side listening to the other, both seeking to understand the other's underlying interests, and searching for a mutually satisfactory deal both sides could live with. It worked.

Not a massive breakthrough for peace, but surely an important lesson, a reason to have hope.

The real question in Iraq today is whether the many unheralded efforts to build honest, capable administrative structures and authentic citizen participation can eventually replace violence and mayhem. There is still time — but not much.

image: Sabine Reichel Berlin Germany © sxc.hu 2004

In 1987 the Dominican Republic's nickel mining contract with Falconbridge, Ltd. was in trouble. The 1970 contract that was supposed to yield over US$200 million in revenue had produced only US$5 million on nickel sales of over US$1 billion. The unexpectedly rapid rise in oil costs for the nickel refining process explained the shortfall, but didn't solve the problem. The Dominican economy was failing, mining revenues had dwindled to nothing, the country's nonrenewable ore – its patrimony - continued to leave its ports in foreign investors' freighters, and the government felt it was the laughing stock of the developing world. The President, Joaquín Balaguer, imposed a 20% tax on exports and, when Falconbridge refused to pay, mining ground to a halt.  Neither party could afford to abandon the relationship; neither one could afford to give in to the other.

The Dominican Republic called on the United Nations for help. CMI Concord Partner Charles Barker served as negotiation advisor on the UN Mission led by CMI Concord Senior Professional Ricardo Gomez, an engineer with over 40 years of experience in the mining industry. Within the government negotiating team of cabinet ministers and expert advisors on economics, trade, finance, labor, tourism and mining, preparation for negotiation had become snared in legitimate but vastly differing points of view about their goals and strategies. Over a long critical weekend in December 1987, CMI Concord led the government team through a Seven Elements preparation session examining the interests and communication patterns of all stakeholders, options for high value resolution, externally derived standards of fairness, approaches for developing a good working relationship and clear communication, the requirements for a sufficient agreement, and a plan of action if agreement was not possible.

image: © Charles L. Barker 2004

Emerging from that weekend, the government team was aligned and ready to complete final preparations for negotiation. By May 1988, the government and Falconbridge had reached a new agreement. The over all result was that the government received US$123 million in additional taxes in that year and Falcondo, the operating company, made a record profit of US$88 million. The UN sponsor of the mission estimated that CMI Concord's work enabled the government team to save at least US$1 billion over the life of the renegotiated contract.

For further information, see CEPMLP website (Center for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy) www.cepmlp.org; Volume 5-3a, Renegotiation and Contract Adaption in the International Investment Projects: Applicable Legal Principles & Industry Practices" by Thomas Waelde and Abba Kolo.

In 1999, he became a Special Assistant to the President of the United States working in the Office of the Special Envoy for the Americas. In the White House he worked with the National Security Council, the State Department and the U.S. Trade Representative on Western Hemisphere economic integration and the promotion of democracy. President Clinton later appointed Mr. Sanchez U.S. Assistant Secretary of Transportation where he developed aviation policy and oversaw international negotiations. Prior to his work in the federal government, he practiced corporate and administrative law with the law firm of Steel, Hector and Davis in Miami, Florida.

Before entering law, he served in the administration of former Florida Governor (now U.S. Senator) Bob Graham, as the first director of the state's Caribbean Basin Initiative Program. He is a contributing author to Negociacion 2000, a collection of essays on negotiation published by McGraw-Hill.

Mr. Sanchez received his undergraduate and law degrees from Florida State University and received a Master's in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In addition to serving as a Senior Professional with CMI Concord Group, Mr. Sanchez is a Senior Consultant with CMPartners, LLC and Managing Partner of Cambridge Negotiation Strategies Group.

In the spring and summer of 2004, Dr. Palmer served as a special consultant to the Ministry of Justice of Jordan on the establishment and implementation of a court-annexed mediation program. He also traveled to Karelia Russia as a consultant on alternative dispute resolution programs.

A former chair of the Vermont Bar Association ADR Committee, Dr. Palmer is a leader in the Association for Conflict Resolution as well as the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section.

Mike has written extensively in the conflict management field. His articles include "To Cybersettle or Not To Cybersettle," "Problem-Solving Negotiation: What's In it for You . . . and Your Clients?" "Negotiating With School Professionals" (Chapter in Handbook on Special Education), "Bullyproofing Your School," "When Playful Teasing Turns Mean," and "The Magic of Mediation." He is currently at work on a book to assist others in teaching negotiation and conflict management in colleges and graduate schools.