The Negotiation Game

The data of the market needs to be identified to deliver the product or service to the proper client.
For this, the characteristics for the market are listed below:

• High level executives

• Will travel to Asia Pacific to drive negotiations
• They will face very aggressive negotiations
• They will have to deal with high susceptibility and intolerance of ideas
• Conversational English is provided, however technical English is limited
• No time pressure to reach an agreement

With this information a game to train the market to develop soft skills of negotiation in an
international environment is developed. The game is going to be called the tower game. The
purpose of the game is to build the highest tower as possible. The detailed steps of the game are
listed below:

1. For this game, you’ll need to negotiate for a set of 100 toothpicks, 10 pieces of paper and
one Play-Doh.
2. All the players (high-level executives) are divided in three teams: toothpick holders, Play-
Doh holders and the builders.
3. As the names suggest, the toothpick holders will have all the toothpicks, the Play-Doh
holders will have the Play-Doh and the builders will have the pieces of paper.
4. The objective of the games is to have (as a team) the highest tower built. The tower
should be able to stand by itself.
5. The tower can only be done by connecting the toothpicks with little balls of Play-Doh. This
process can only be done by the builders and they have to use a piece of paper as a tag of
licensing, so all of them will need to negotiate with the other 2 teams to construct.
6. In each round, teams will have 10 minutes to decide which strategy to follow, during this
time teams can talk among each other, no technical language will be allowed so everyone
is able to understand.
7. After this time teams must select one person to gather in the center and negotiate for 5
minutes.
8. This process is repeated though three to five times and then the winner is defined.

The objective of this game is to work on soft skills such as teamwork and eventually also hard
skills, communication, negotiation and the implementation. The expected behavior from the
audience is to understand other teams’ interests in order to negotiate with them. If they don’t do
this, agreements will be hard to reach. Also, the audience will have to face aggressive negotiations,
since the nature of the game demands for teams to be co-depending on each other, given them
high importance in the game.

The path in which each player must go is variant but different things must be realized for the
player. First of all, naturally, every team will try to get the most and will look for strategies to win,
hardly a team will try to cooperate with another team. At this stage, teamwork within teams is
being worked on. After this, and especially after the first negotiation rounds, teams will realize
that the path in which each player must go is variant but different things must be realized for the
player. First of all, naturally, every team will try to get the most and will look for strategies to win,
hardly a team will try to cooperate with another team. At this stage, teamwork within teams is
being worked on. After this, and especially after the first negotiation rounds, teams will realize
that they need from each other, and if no one cooperates, nobody will win. This is when teams
start to talk among each other during negotiations to reach an agreement. In the end, the players
must understand that a win-win mindset is fundamental to reach agreements with all the parts
involved satisfied. Therefore, is intended to cultivate a cooperation mindset for strategy.