Tl-ling! The gentle ring of a brass bell,
announcing the end of meditation, guides you out of the depths
of stillness where you had lost yourself. The silence had been
so profound that you'd forgotten that you were not alone. As
your eyes begin to focus, you look around—you are
surrounded by hundreds of others. And then, with a start, you
remember: you are at Harvard Law School attending a workshop on
negotiation and conflict resolution.
How did meditation get to Harvard Law School? Harvard Law has
long been the training ground for Supreme Court justices,
secretaries of state, senators, and statesmen and -women of all
political persuasions. Its graduates become the elite corps who
handle the most difficult disputes on the planet. Since 1983,
Harvard Law School has housed the Program on Negotiation, the
world's leading think tank on negotiation and conflict
resolution (an interuniversity consortium comprising Harvard,
MIT, and Tufts). And in the last two years, a fledgling project
of the Program on Negotiation is bringing something new to
seeking peace—inner tranquillity. The Harvard Negotiation
Insight Initiative, founded by Erica Ariel Fox, teaches
mindfulness practices as essential to the art of conflict
resolution. The Insight Initiative's mission is “to
broaden and deepen the way we understand, teach, and practice
negotiation and dispute resolution by integrating insights from
the world's ethical, philosophical, and spiritual
traditions.” And meditation, Fox asserts, not only is
central to achieving that mission but is also enabling
negotiators to be more successful in getting to yes.
Getting to Yes, in fact, is the title of the
blockbuster bestseller written by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury,
and Bruce Patton, who are among the founders of the Program on
Negotiation. They revolutionized the practice of negotiation by
arguing that the best and most effective way to settle disputes
is to break out of aggressively adversarial zero-sum (I win, you
lose) dynamics and adopt a win-win—or
non-zero-sum—approach. Now, in a rough-and-ready,
litigious capitalist society, I-win, you-lose has been the way
the game of life is played. We live in a culture where
“the Donald” has become an icon of success for
ruling over a dog-eat-dog “reality” TV show that
salaciously celebrates competition and betrayal and in a world
where armed conflict, simmering violence, and relentless
lawsuits are just part of the landscape. But in the midst of all
of this, for the past twenty-some years, Getting to Yes
has sold over one million copies and been translated into
eighteen languages—to this day, it sells three thousand
copies per week in North America alone. This ever-escalating
demand for a positive, win-win approach to settling our
differences marks a significant transformation and maturation in
humanity's historical struggle to get along. “Win-win
appeals to people's higher and better nature,” Fox
comments. “Fundamentally, people actually do want to
operate at a higher level of functioning, and our culture
doesn't give people training in what that looks like. They
literally don't know what it would mean to come into what feels
like an adversarial situation and do it differently.”
In fact, in the heat of an emotionally charged conflict, even
negotiators who have learned the win-win strategy often lose the
plot and become competitive. “People understand the idea
behind these basic practices of collaboration,” she
states. “But it's not integrated into their being, into
who they are. They are just taught a set of skills. So when the
pressure is on and the stakes are high, they fail to respond
appropriately and return to their old competitive habits.”
Through the Insight Initiative, Fox is teaching negotiators to
reach for a deeper reality beneath the surface level of
separation. “Win-win is far more than the recognition that
'if we're both nice to each other, we're going to get a better
deal,'” she observes. “There's a spiritual principle
underneath win-win that I would call interconnectivity,
meaning that we're really truly in this together.
We are in a shared field of interconnection. If you deeply
recognize this, then when you have a conflict with someone, you
find yourself in a radically different state of consciousness
that could lead to a very different outcome.”
Fox, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, pioneer in the
mediation movement, and faculty member of Elat Chayyim, a
spiritual retreat center, has struck a nerve with the Insight
Initiative. The public forums sponsored by the
program—such as a dialogue between Peter Senge and Jon
Kabat-Zinn—have packed the halls of Harvard Law. And their
summer trainings have brought together negotiators from all over
the world, many of whom have reached a point of crisis in their
profession: “Many people are deeply burnt out by overwork
and by realizing the futility of conflict practices like
litigation, for example, which is emotionally and financially
draining—not to mention often futile,” says Fox.
“They don't feel that the work of their hands is actually
serving the world in a positive way. More people than we realize
have an interest in something that they might call spiritual,
but they're isolated from each other.” Creating networks
to connect these practitioners so they have greater influence is
also one of the Initiative's goals. Fox recognizes “the
potential for having global public cultural impact because it's
housed at Harvard, one of the most powerful institutions for
shaping society in the world.”
This potential for impact may be what is most significant
about the Insight Initiative, because the enormous popularity of
the win-win strategy has evolutionary implications. As Robert
Wright argues in his influential book Nonzero, and as
more and more evolutionary theorists are beginning to recognize,
win-win tends to be the way evolution happens—through
cooperation that benefits all parties. By deepening our
understanding of win-win to encompass the fundamental spiritual
principle of interconnectivity or Oneness, the Insight
Initiative is helping to create a new worldview that may be able
to lead us beyond all division. Fox notes that “bringing
master spiritual teachers to teach with us here at Harvard is a
way to support this evolution. My quest is to tap into the wells
of wisdom from the spiritual traditions without all the
religious trappings that are not appropriate in this kind of
context. And my vision is that in the next five to ten years,
there will be an integration of these ideas and of awareness
practices in business, in law, in education, in social
services—that these deeper dimensions of how to address
conflict will become mainstream.” And that would be a
win-win for all of us.