Format

I typically teach this course once a week for fifteen weeks, with each class session lasting two hours and forty minutes. Although I have taught it in a longer format (once a week for ten weeks; four hours per class session), my sense is that it would be difficult to divide it into shorter class periods, such as three fifty minute courses per week. Some of the exercises might fit into fifty minutes, but most would not, especially with the debriefings, which can easily run thirty minutes. For most of the class plans, you will see approximate times for each activity, though I emphasize that these are approximate. Debriefings can run longer than expected, especially when the students have interesting experiences to discuss.

Class Size

As I mention in the notes for Figure 5 of the article, my classes have ranged from 13 to 33 students with an average of about 24. Thirteen is really too few and 33 is too large. Too few students means the large group exercises are too easy while too many students makes them unmanageable. Twenty-four is ideal: it keeps teams at about 6 students; it renders Innovation Maze difficult without making it insurmountable; and it provides many potential student pairings to keep the negotiation games fresh.

Videos

I use several videos for this course and it may be helpful to say a word about each, since they may not be available to you and because frankly some are not as good as I would like, at least in part because I am making due with what we have in our library.

Week 1: I introduce the course with the opening scene from Patton, with George C. Scott in the title role. As the class plan indicates, I then ask whether and why students would follow him (a military leader about to take them into battle), then expand the question to why they would follow anyone (say, a boss in an office setting or a city manager), and then hit them with the key question: why would someone follow them? That is the purpose of the course, I emphasize. Other videos might be used for this purpose, but this one makes a big impression and provides a good place to start.

Week 1: I have used a rather old video on the concept of Groupthink (1973) as a way to introduce the idea of decision-making errors or “red flags.” Students complain about its age (they seem to have a hard time looking past hair styles and neckties from the 1970s), but I believe it still has value for getting them to think about why decision processes go wrong. If anyone has suggestions for videos about decision-making errors, I would welcome them.

Week 1: I also have used another video on decision-making, entitled Problem Solving and Decision-making, by the New England Hospital Assembly (1987), but have found it a bit slow and, increasingly, unnecessary to achieve one of the key objectives of this first class meeting: to give the students a basic decision-making model.

Week 8: I use two videos to introduce the essential concepts of negotiation. The first, Roger Dawson’s Guide to Everyday Negotiating (1987), presents several “gambits,” the primary purpose of which is to fool, pressure, or out-fox your opponent. I use a couple of these as illustrations of “claiming” behavior and distributive bargaining techniques that students might encounter. The second, The Stanford Video Guide to Negotiating (1997), is meant for business school classes but works very well with MPA students. It presents a far more constructive and ethical approach to bargaining, reinforcing many of the concepts from Getting to Yes. It lasts about an hour and provides a good point of reference during debriefings in subsequent negotiation exercises. For example, during Salary Negotiation #3 (Week 9), students should invent a contingent agreement just like the one they see in The Stanford Video Guide to Negotiating and once I demonstrate that parallel during the debriefing they seem to understand the concept much more clearly. I have also shown a few segments from Getting to Yes: Video Workshop, to illustrate concepts like preliminarity and “interests vs. positions,” though I have found the entire video too long to fit conveniently within this 15 week format.

Role-playing Exercises

Note that there are two big role-playing exercises mentioned in this syllabus: St. Joseph Shopping Mall Exercise (Weeks 12 and 13) and Operation Wilderness (Weeks 14 and 15), both from the Electronic Hallway. St. Joseph is more difficult and less illuminating to students than Operation Wilderness. A couple of times, I have used Operation Wilderness before St. Joseph, but the difficulties of the latter game meant that the students did not leave class on a high note. I have therefore made it a practice to end with Operation Wilderness, which is difficult but manageable.

It is usually the case that there is one additional holiday during the term, leaving only thirteen weeks of actual class meetings (15 weeks total minus 2 holidays). Under these circumstances, I substitute Connecticut Valley School Budget Negotiation (from Lewicki) for St. Joseph. This multi-party, multi-issue negotiation is a good prelude to Operation Wilderness and can easily be done in one class session, rather than the two required for St. Joseph.

Note that for both St. Joseph and Operation Wilderness I schedule two class meetings for the students to complete the exercises, with “if needed” in parentheses after the second meeting. Sometimes, they complete the exercise in one class meeting. In the case of Operation Wilderness, completing the exercise in one class means they end the term a week early. I am happy to allow this because there have been many instances when the students truly did need an extra week to complete the exercise – either because they got a slow start or because they botched the first rounds of negotiation and needed time to clean up the mess they made. I have had several very bad experiences limiting the exercise to one week without the safety valve of the second week. Ending the course in failure significantly erodes the value of the experience.

In the JPAE essay, I note that “exceptional creativity” is required for students to arrive at an “expand the pie” solution for Operation Wilderness. In recent classes, several groups of students have done just: by using the single unit of timber on plot D4 (where the town is located). The rules of the game clearly state that D4 cannot be included in the park; but students have suggested that the timber unit there might be included in the holdings of the Timber Company or the Forest Service even though the plot of land would still be owned by the Town. This solution arises only when a student or group of students finally understands enough about everyone’s interests to formulate their collective problem appropriately: the problem is that there are not enough timber units, so where could we get another unit of timber? When this solution emerges as a result of this sort of clear-headed analysis of the problem, I have permitted the students to use it, though in the nearly thirty times I have run this exercise only five classes have ever considered the idea.

Syllabus

Class Plans

Please feel free to email with comments, questions, or suggestions: revellk@fiu.edu