Canon of negotiation

 

The Canon of Negotiation initiative, led by Chris Honeyman and Andrea Schneider and with more than a hundred contributing experts, is the leading international effort to define what negotiation is.

This project, which began in the second phase of the Broad Field project, became a major undertaking of its own, which as of 2024 has been under way for more than twenty years. In published results, the Canon initiative first produced a full special 2004 issue of the Marquette Law Review, and in 2006, the most comprehensive reference book available on negotiation, The Negotiator’s Fieldbook. In 2017 that was replaced by an even more ambitious work, The Negotiator’s Desk Reference. And in 2019, the American Bar Association published a shorter “spinoff” book, Negotiation Essentials for Lawyers—designed primarily for lawyers, but potentially valuable also for time-pressed business executives, government officials and others. More recently, the Canon initiative is one of two predecessors which led to Project Seshat, along with the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching project.

The Canon project has also inspired numerous discussions at conferences, etc. Among recent ones, one notable occasion was a 2017 symposium organized by the University of Missouri Law School and resulting in a special issue of the Journal of Dispute Resolution. Honeyman and Schneider were among the co-authors of two of the articles (“…Grand Unified Negotiation Theory…” and “Should They Listen?…”, available below.)

Published 2019 by the American Bar Association: Negotiation Essentials for Lawyers, from the same editors as the Negotiator’s Desk Reference (NDR). Essentials contains 53 chapters, each one extensively adapted from the NDR by its original authors for the needs of time-pressed lawyers and other busy practitioners. ABA flyer

The Negotiator’s Desk Reference was published in 2017. Edited by Chris Honeyman and Andrea Kupfer Schneider, and with 106 other contributors, the NDR supersedes the same editors’ Negotiator’s Fieldbook (ABA 2006) as the most comprehensive book available about negotiation.

Published in 2006 by the American Bar Association, the Fieldbook promptly became an ABA bestseller. It was widely recognized for more than a decade as the most thorough reference and teaching text available about negotiation. But in that time a great deal more has been learned, particularly in the course of the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Project (with its four-volume book series.)

Work began in late 2013 on the Fieldbook’s successor. Replacing a work of the Fieldbook’s scope was not a simple process; for example, paying more attention to worldwide sources of wisdom on negotiation involved conducting symposia in Hong Kong and Leiden as well as Milwaukee. So it took four years, and a team of more than a hundred contributors. 

Three articles from CPR’s widely-followed newsletter Alternatives are linked in PDF below, describing different ways of looking at the huge Negotiator’s Desk Reference. The fourth article listed is on how the content and contributors for the NDR were established. It is reprinted here from PinPoints, the newsletter of the Processes of International Negotiation Working Group. Other related publications are also listed here.

Key Publications: