Negotiating the brief - Meeting 1

Me and my group members, Jurgen and Jennifer, attended a meeting with James Chatton. Our class was split into 3 groups and the other 2 groups also attended. A guest visitor, Mr Bowles, was also invited.

My Performance


In my group I was chosen as the negotiator. This meant that I had to discuss the possible amendment to the brief that our group had come up with with James Chatton. As this was my first time negotiating a brief I struggled with being persuasive enough to persuade Mr Chatton to agree to my amendment. As a result of this we failed to have our amendment agreed to, although I can take valuable skills and experience for negotiating in the future. I now know that I need to centralise my argument more when trying to negotiate. My argument wasn't focused enough and the points I made were not strong enough to accept. James Chatton did give me feedback saying that in future I need to centralise my points and try to be more persuasive in the way I approach the discussion. He also said that I need to try and make my negotiation more of a win-win situation and that I may have to compromise something in order to get what I want. I also know that I shouldn't give up when my amendments aren't agreed to and to carry on trying to negotiate throughout the discussion. A positive point to my performance was that I did actually participate in the negotiation process, even though my amendment may not have been agreed to.


Group Performance

I think that overall our group wasn't very productive. Although we came up with a possible amendment to the brief, we didn't discuss it in much depth, meaning that when it came to talking about the amendment we proposed it was a big struggle. This created an obvious problem when trying to persuade Mr Chatton to agree to our amendments, leading to him dismissing our idea. I also think that our group could have organised ourselves much quicker. It took us a few minutes to start thinking of ammendments we could choose from, meaning that we didn't have much time to discuss the ammendment. Our group didn't discuss an angle of approach, meaning that when I started negotiating with Mr Chatton I didn't know where to start. When I negotiate in the future I will definately choose my angle of approach before the negotiation process begins. Mr Chatton agreed that as a group we didn't have a good approach to the negotiation, meaning our argument was weak and went off in different directions. This is something I will have to change when negotiating in the future.

Feedback for another group

Group 3, which contained Dale, James D, Andrew and Carl had clearly prepared well for their negotiation. They were the only group which secured a negotiation to the brief there and then and presented a well centred argument.
When Mr Chatton said no to their first request of 3 pages for the sales list they were quick to compromise a little and ask for 2 pages. I think that this helped secure their negotiation as they agreed to a loose leaf paging strategy which Mr Chatton seemed to like.
I could take alot from the way this group worked as they presented their negotiation in a very good way and were clear with what they were going to say before the negotiation begun.