The U.S. federal government’s debt-ceiling negotiation has been at the forefront of the news for quite some time and generated a tremendous amount of interest and emotion across the entire political spectrum.
From a negotiation perspective, what lessons did you learn from it?
Here are two (please add more):
- Negotiators faced with a firm deadline typically feel an increasing sense of urgency (and anxiety) to close the deal as they approach the deadline. Here, the process concluded on the day the U.S. Treasury said it would face default. Clearly, this deadline had a huge impact.
- The parties had an offer-concession pattern of negotiating all the way up to deadlines (remember the tax cut negotiations last December), and they did it again. It was predictable this time – and will be again in the future.
What did you learn from it?