When Andrónico Luksic writes a letter to the shareholders of the CCU it is because, in a narrative universe of García Márquez, the aspiring colonel has no one to write to him. The entrepreneur and VIP booking officer of the Army reflects the feeling of uneasiness before waiting for the future and the results that emanate from the Constitutional Convention. Luksic and the veterans who triumphed in the “War of the Thousand Days”, which culminated in the coup d’état, are despaired by the complexity and uncertainty of the moment and the process. In those thousand Creole days of hopes and pains, civic dialogue and political negotiation suffered the highest contempt.
The recent story begins on an October morning in 2019 that, in the course of the 18th of that month, was accumulating an irrepressible, verbalized energy. ipso facto like the social explosion. This telluric force gave way to an unprecedented and unprecedented political negotiation, opening a constituent process in Chile, in the midst of a context of crisis, complexity and uncertainty. We are in that transformative dynamic now. Political negotiation and civic dialogue are valued and appreciated in the search for adaptive solutions, for the deployment of new institutional designs based on flexible, sensitive and sustainable agreements.
To paraphrase Mrs Castagna, we could take Luksic’s letter and say: “You, Mr. Luksic, at your age! Aren’t you embarrassed by their behavior and speech? Really? It is important that you do not confuse “the tone of the debate” with “the polychromatic dialogue” that is taking place within the Constitutional Convention. At your age and place of privilege to express yourself, you should know that “negotiation” is not the same as “dialogue” and that dialogue is not debate. Dialogue and negotiation are technologies that complement each other, but with different toolboxes and methodological designs. Also at this point in your life, you, Mr Luksic, should understand that a crisis is not the same as a conflict. They are different social phenomena, but intertwined in their cyclicality, dynamics, nature, data and typology”.
While some, from the constituted power, argue about the advisability of investing their savings in the purchase of corn for the maintenance of their fighting cocks, Don Sebas he sets out to offer for the colonel’s rooster a speculative and deceptive purchase of the future. However, we already know in García Márquez’s fiction that when the wife asks the colonel about what would happen if the rooster loses and what they would eat, the colonel replies: “Shit”, which in Chilean reality would be nothing more than eating a new defeat of the “Rejection” in the exit plebiscite.
The perplexity of a businessman, a politician or a social leader, accustomed to a way of exercising power, in the face of a decentralized scene, feel the axes and dynamics of power stagger. Decisional verticalism begins to migrate towards greater horizontality and participation, producing a transformative energy between the construction of consensus and the valuation of dissent and installs the greater challenge of ADAPTABILITY. In other words, there is a world to explore, beyond the relationship with the shareholders of a company or the bases of a union, where the Organizational self it puts play, tension and virtuous distension with the This is interinstitutionalthe They systemic and the About us ecosystem.
Negotiating in this twenty-first century requires changing the conception of power as a management of the supremacy of the interests and needs of some over others. The ecological crisis and its impacts warn us of scenarios of greater complexity and uncertainty for human existence. Negotiation is science, technology, art and crafts when people are at the center of collaborative innovation processes, promoting adaptive, appreciative and polychromatic design solutions from the home, workplace, neighborhood, city, region or country.
The negotiations that will come will be nourished by the sciences and technologies of the society of affection, staging the art and craftsmanship of multidimensional negotiators. oriented to growing processes of adaptability, inviting to participate in co-laboratories, so that people and institutions can co-create adaptive “design solutions” (which is not the same as “the diseño of a solution”, as tradition dictates). The participation of people puts into play their experiences, knowledge, learning, practices and values, to jointly experience the resolution of dilemmatic situations and the energetic transformation of interwoven relationships, open to learning and dialogic creativity.
Multidimensional negotiation is an exercise of inclusive power over the possession of hierarchical power. Taken to the football field, millions of people play football in their courtyards, neighborhood courts or sports centers, but few or few become Pelé, Endler, Messi or Vieira. In the case of the 4D negotiation approach, it is not necessary to become a star negotiator or negotiator from the highest spheres of power, but what is required is to be available to learn to live together and innovate as people in their own communities of belonging.
Generate collaborative innovation between people and institutions, based on a platform that explores the spatiotemporal dimensions of negotiation, enhances the flows of appreciative and polychromatic conversational intelligence and facilitates progress in adaptability processes, orienting the process and its objectives to the achievement of agreements in a collaborative energy field that transcends the classic negotiation table, producer of confrontational negotiations in black and white.
Traditional negotiation (2D and 3D) presents negotiators as narrators of their stories, conflicts, ruptures, consensuses and divergences (all legitimate) in a shared space to translate positions into interests and agree on a guaranteed limited future among their negotiators, with respect to a specific height, width and depth at the time of signing that negotiated agreement and, therefore, this type of negotiation does not ensure a sense of spatiotemporal inheritance. In turn, multidimensional negotiators promote the search for sustainable balances and adaptability exercises, where the habitat, product of the negotiating action, becomes intelligent and generative for subscribers, inhabitants, visitors and heirs of those negotiated spatiotemporal dimensions, something like a flexible and resistant negotiated mesh or texture that adapts to the updating processes.
4D negotiation invites us to be part of the energy field that occurs in a co-laboratory, arising from the strengths of its actors and not from their weaknesses. It sets us to observe the negotiating energy that emanates from its participants, along with analyzing the fluidity of their strengths, as well as designing and planning their aspirations and opportunities, managing and evaluating their results. Observing the overlooked, the detail, cultivating a panoptic look at the process, installs us in the rotation and translation movements promoted by the co-laboratories in their 4 workstations, to negotiate in the fourth dimension.
In times of the empire of the “I”, with an exacerbated individualism and decisional primacy of a few over the will of others, learning communities and new dialogic citizenships with territorial and intergenerational impact emerge, capable of influencing organizational and inter-institutional horizontality. 4D negotiation connects with epochal change and the opening of a new cultural cycle, where people are shaping the circulatory and respiratory system of negotiation, as well as the heart and brain of collaborative innovation processes and dialogic creativity, building resilient communities attentive to the generative value of diversity and divergence.
Adaptability to crises, complexity and uncertainty has a lot to do with the need for survival that we have as a human species in contexts of generalized crises and, therefore, the exploratory interest of a know how to be in this world and the shared and extensible benefits of a know how to inhabit with respect and humility before the nature that houses us on this planet or in any other habitat in the future.
The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
