Practice and Exercises for Negotiators and Mediators

After the articulated treatment of the theoretical and historical issues presented so far, concerning both international negotiation and psychology and psychotherapy applications, especially cognitive ones, we now introduce a possible scheme of intervention for the training of future negotiators which considers what has been described above, and has been mentioned in the sections titled “Practical Guide.” Summarizing what we have developed in the first part of the volume, the first possible conclusion is that it would be important to teach the negotiators (both actual and future) the principles and utilizations of psychology and of psychotherapy applied to negotiation with the purpose of increasing their abilities; and all this in the shortest possible time, and with the maximum operational effectiveness we can obtain. In this session, therefore, we proceed to delineate a training program, which concerns the first level of training for negotiators, and is composed of 15 meetings of eight hours every day (four hours of frontal lesson and four hours of practical exercise), so that it could be possible to complete the job in three intensive weeks, from Monday to Friday. The dimension of the group to which we refer varies from 6 to 20 subjects, with a preference for the smallest group, with a staff composed of a director of training (psychotherapist or political scientist), three cognitive psychotherapists, a sociologist-anthropologist, and a political scientist. So we sum up the functions that the program aims to teach, and the motives for the utility of such learning with respect to negotiation.