One-day workshop
Most approaches to negotiation begin with an existing situation: parties have interests, positions, alternatives, relationships, and a range of possible agreements. The negotiator’s task is to work effectively within that space.
Formative bargaining begins one step earlier. It asks: how is the negotiating field itself formed, and how can interaction change it?
This one-day workshop introduces Professor Alisher Faizullaev’s original approach to negotiation as a formative process. Negotiators do not merely exchange offers or search for agreements within fixed parameters through their actions and interactions, they can change perceptions, relationships, preferences, expectations, possibilities, and ultimately the field from which an agreement may emerge.
The approach shifts attention from simply finding value or claiming value to understanding how negotiating possibilities themselves are formed: learning not merely to operate within the negotiating field, but to sense and shape it.
Participants work with four practical orientations:
Be Still – regulate tempo, resist premature reaction, and create space for perception and judgement.
Be Rooted – maintain structural and psychological grounding under pressure.
Be Attuned – sense the wider negotiating field: people, relationships, signals, interests, emotions, constraints and emerging possibilities.
Be Flowing – respond flexibly, redirect pressure, and move with changing circumstances rather than becoming trapped by fixed positions or behavioural patterns.
These are not sequential stages or negotiating techniques. They form a repertoire of states and capacities from which appropriate action can emerge.
The workshop also connects formative bargaining with the practical realities of bargaining: offers and concessions, power and leverage, distributive and integrative dynamics, reciprocity, tactics and counter-tactics, and the need to read a bargaining process as it unfolds. Special attention is given to difficult negotiations, asymmetric situations, pressure, uncertainty, and interaction with challenging counterparts.
Participants explore:
- the negotiating field and how it forms
- bargaining space and the emergence of possible agreements
- sensing changes in relationships, perceptions and possibilities
- distributive and integrative bargaining
- power, leverage, reciprocity and concession dynamics
- responding to pressure without becoming reactive
- behavioural flexibility and strategic movement
- difficult counterparts and asymmetric situations
- shaping the conditions for agreement, not merely searching for one
The workshop draws conceptually on negotiation theory, field thinking, Taoist philosophy, and the embodied intelligence associated with Tai Chi push-hands practice, an approach developed by Professor Faizullaev alongside his work on diplomatic and international negotiation, while remaining focused on practical professional application.
Learning is experiential: participants encounter negotiation problems through exercises, interaction, bargaining situations, reflection and structured discussion. The aim is not to acquire additional negotiating techniques, but to develop a greater sensitivity to what is happening in a negotiation, and a greater capacity to influence what becomes possible.
The workshop is designed for executives, managers, entrepreneurs, negotiators, diplomats, lawyers, public officials, and others who face complex, high-stakes or difficult negotiations.
Format: One-day workshop, approximately 7 hours, including lunch and two short breaks.
Optimal group size: 16–30 participants.
Interested in organising a workshop for your team or organisation? Contact NegoLead to discuss your needs and explore tailored delivery options.
