Dancing to Yes:

Negotiating an agreement without losing the flow

Episode 1: Choreography and Negotiation of the Procedure

By Lisa Laiblin, Johannes Hofmann & Janne Sven Krippl

Associate Consultants, Rational Games, Inc,

December 2024

Lisa Laiblin & Johannes Hofmann

You are on your way to the dance venue, and your head is quickly running through the prepared list: your goals for today and how to achieve them with your partner. 

You enter the room. She is already there. The show begins – just a little differently than you expected! She’s made her own plans and starts right off with a suggestion. You´re surprised, but immediately realize that it´s a great idea.

You let her take the lead. Just when she´s about to finish, you sense it´s the right moment for one of your prepared ideas – and it perfectly matches.

At the end of the day although you both didn´t stick to all of your plans, but rather created something beautiful together, exceeding both your expectations. What a performance!

Does this sound familiar? Surely, you have experienced similar situations at the negotiation table—or was it on the dance floor? Both are not far apart...

At Rational Games Inc., we believe that dance and negotiation have a lot in common. Certainly, both depend on a structured process but require the ability to adapt the rules spontaneously.

In their seminal work on Principled Negotiation in the 1980s, Roger Fisher and William Ury made the important distinction between negotiating process and negotiating substance. 

Negotiating the substance refers to the problem-solving side of negotiation. How to mutually agree on a salary rise with your boss? In contrast, process means setting the rules of the negotiation:

• When to start?

• Who is at the table?

• Who speaks when?

Great art is to feel when to stick to the process or when to consciously break the rules. 

Let's look at it from a dancer´s perspective, we would like to suggest a third way to navigate this.  We call it Dancing the Rules of the Game.

What does this mean? In dance, especially competitive Latin dance, you have a partner and a fixed choreography – the rules of your game. But before you decide to break the rules, it´s useful to understand why you have them. 

Instead of constantly having to decide what steps to dance, a choreography allows us to focus on how to dance together: Light or heavy? Strong or delicate? 

Sometimes you might be in the mood to play with the rules while your partner has a need for safety. Good dancers need to be able to feel these needs – sometimes it´s not advisable to change. Sticking to the choreography for a bit longer can give your partner a feeling of reliability and safety. This may allow for a playful approach later instead of producing a conflict of interest. 

Choreography keeps your partnership safe. It prescribes elements and moves that make sense to both of you. It allows you to cling to the structure, feel safe and get into the flow.

Those of us who are frequently involved in negotiation or mediation know all about the importance of negotiation choreography: Process and rules are there to build minimal common ground among the parties before exploring joint solutions for possibly highly conflictual disagreements. They ensure that everyone feels equally treated, create a safe space and contain heated emotions. In this way, relationships are strengthened. Similarly in dance, choreographies are safe grounds to explore the interests that literally move both partners to dance. 

But in competitive dancing - just like in any negotiation - it is not possible to stick to a predefined choreography through to the end. High-pressure performance situations create uncertainties, and one has to be able to adapt spontaneously. As a dancer, if you just cling to your choreography like a crutch, if you forget about your partner and just think of your steps, the dance feels mechanical and loses expressiveness. You stop sensing yourself as well as the person in front of you.

Just as it is important to listen to your partner in a dance partnership, so it is in negotiation. There is no sense in strictly following a predefined process. Instead, you have to constantly ask questions, read the room, and listen actively. Even beyond listening, the great challenge of any negotiator is to learn “active sensing”, which means paying attention to all verbal and non-verbal cues of the other side, movement, posture, and bodily reactions. The goal is to constantly gather complementary information, test your own hypothesis of where the other side is going, and detect reactive emotions early enough. 

The same holds for dancing. When dancers don’t listen to their partners and lose their sense of what we call togetherness, the process gets in the way of exploring interests, creates mistrust and impairs self-expression.

In the end, no audience cheers to dancers who just follow their choreography. They respond far more to those couples who are connected wholeheartedly and show virtuous improvisation within their choreography.

Our professional dancers at RGI have shown us how to create a sense of togetherness, how to sense your partner actively and dance the rules of the negotiation game. Please join us on this unfolding journey, Dancing to Yes.

To Be Continued. I Comments welcome.