Q & A Table of Contents
Please Explain BATNA To Me
From: Albert, Kosovo
Question: Can You please provide me with sufficient information on BATNA?
Response: BATNA is actually a fairly complex concept in negotiation.
On its face it refers to one’s Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. The simplest example is if you want to buy a television; if there is only one shop within a radius of 100 km, you haven’t got much of an alternative. However, if there are many shops nearby, you can compare which offers the best price, the best choice of models, best service, delivery, etc.
BATNA is a measure of balance of power among the negotiating parties. The critical thing to keep in mind that the party with the strongest BATNA does not necessarily win. Sometimes emotional commitment, for example, ‘trumps’ a stronger BATNA.
There are two kinds of BATNA: Walking-in and Dynamic:
Walking-in BATNA consists of the resources a party controls or influences that can be used to solve the problem at hand. If you can reach resolution using resources within your organization, you have less need of resources available to other negotiating parties.
Once negotiation begins, BATNA becomes a Dynamic element as each party learn more about the relative utility of his/her resources for reaching resolution. Thus the negotiation process is really an exchange of information about each party’s BATNA.
One can analyze BATNA using the card game of poker in a couple of ways:
First, there’s the old song that includes the lyrics: “You have to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em. Know when to walk away, and know when to run.” If you understand your BATNA you have a better capacity to say to another negotiator: “This proposition does not sound promising. I am leaving.”
The second way BATNA may be compared with poker is that poker is played in two fundamental ways: If all the cards to each player are dealt face down, only he or she knows what resources he has — and which cards other players don’t have. When some cards are dealt face down and some are dealt face up, each player knows all of his/her assets — and a little bit about the visible cards held by other players. And they know your open cards as well. So there is more general knowledge about BATNA — but it is only during the process of playing the hand that one discovers whether one’s assumptions about power/BATNA are accurate.
There is considerably more information available on our website’s Advice section; use the internal search engine to find articles where the word BATNA is used. In addition my book, ‘Negotiating Skills for Managers’ (McGraw-Hill) pays a lot of attention to BATNA. I am not sure how easy it is to find the book in Kosovo, but perhaps you can get it through the OSCE.
If you have specific negotiation challenges you are facing, please feel free to ask more questions.
Good luck,
Steve
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