Healthcare Negotiations Training

Advanced Negotiations

Most experienced professionals have negotiated many times in their lives and have often taken a negotiations course at some point in their career. The current course is intended to sharpen and advance those skills by offering experienced negotiators organizing frameworks and sophisticated strategies to deal with a variety of negotiation scenarios. The course will build participants’ understanding, skill, and confidence to achieve better outcomes in all their negotiations—large and small. Participants will learn how to increase the quality of the agreements they negotiate to maximize potential value, and how to claim as much of that value for themselves, even in complex, ambiguous, or conflict-ridden contexts. A basic premise of the course is that becoming a great negotiator is an ongoing learning journey, where increasing competence is attained through thoughtful, evidence-based skill building.

The course is structured around three types of activities:

•       Applying analytical skills to gain a strategic understanding of negotiation contexts

•       Learning empirically validated techniques for advancing interests

•       Practice, practice, and more practice

Advanced Negotiations

Week 1 Negotiating in organizations

·      Engaging in value creation across multiple issues with quantitative and qualitative outcomes

·      Navigating dynamics of power, status, and group identities

·      Using negotiations to strengthen long-term working relationships

Week 2 Advanced integrative strategies

·      Identifying counterparts’ values and preferences

·      Leveraging uncertainty and varied risk preferences for value creation

·      Engaging in ongoing deal improvement

Week 3 Game theory and coalition building

·      Gaining a basic understanding of mixed motive nature of negotiations

·      Identifying factors that lead to trust violations and trust building

·      Considering the effect of multi-party dynamics on communication

Week 4 Psychological drivers of conflict escalation

·      Gaining an awareness of the key psychological drivers of conflict

·     Learning to recognize and mitigate cognitive biases that prevent conflict resolution

·      Recognizing when and how to involve third parties

Week 5 Communicating across ideological disagreement

·      Leveraging questions to identify needs and values in disagreement

·      Learning about and practicing techniques for demonstrating engagement with opposing perspectives 

·      Using story-telling to build trust and authenticity

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Sacha Adele Field (Soja), PMP, CPP, CSSGB, LEED Green Assoc.

Sacha has developed her skills as a project leader, mentor, and negotiations concierge with over 30 years of experience in cross-functional project management. She worked with change management and agile methodologies before those terms were coined and, whatever you do, don’t tell her that “we have always done it that way.”

Sacha started her career at Morgan Stanley in NYC, relocated to Los Angeles where she ran projects in both tv and film production (Agile anyone?). She then went on to manage themed entertainment engineering and fabrication projects (think exploding barrels and Tinkerbell) where she honed her skills in international negotiations and leading cross-functional teams. As Director of Project Management at the California Science Center, Sacha successfully negotiated everything from exhibit design and fabrication to construction and building air rights among the Science Center, Foundation, and State of California representatives. No small task. In 2010 Sacha’s passion for teaching and work as a practitioner collided. She met the Total Systems Education, Ltd. (TSE) team during this time, and also became the Lead Instructor for PMI Metrolina’s PMP prep course. Sacha was hand-picked to join the launch team at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. in the role of Director of Operations for the Museum. After opening the museum in a mere 18 months, Sacha accepted a role as Director of Property Management at the Catalina Island Conservancy, overseeing 42,000 acres of protected and privately owned land. 

In 2022, Sacha reignited her passion for helping women learn how to negotiate transitions in their lives. In 2023, she eagerly joined the team at TSE as Director of Innovation. Sacha’s goal is to combine her own unique skillset with TSE’s extensive project management expertise to positively impact as many lives as possible.

Julia Minson

Julia Minson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the founder of Disagreeing Better, LLC. She is a decision scientist with research interests in conflict, negotiations and judgment and decision making. Her primary line of research addresses the “psychology of disagreement” – How do people engage with opinions, judgments and decisions that are different from their own?
She explores this theme in the context of disagreement around hot-button, identity relevant topics, such as conflicts around politics, professional decision-making, and lifestyle choices. She is particularly interested in simple, scalable interventions to help people be more receptive to views and opinions they strongly oppose.

Minson also studies group decision making to uncover the psychological biases that prevent managers, consumers, and policy-makers from maximizing the benefits of collaboration. This includes research on under-weighting of advice, “wisdom of crowds,” and over-confidence.

Much of Julia’s research is conducted in collaboration with the graduate and post-doctoral members of MC² – the Minson Conflict and Collaboration Lab.

At the Kennedy School Julia is affiliated with the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, the Center for Public Leadership, and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. Julia teaches courses on negotiations and decision-making as part of the Management, Leadership and Decision Science area, as well as through HKS Executive Education.

Julia is the organizer of the HKS Conflict Management and Depolarization speaker series, sponsored by the Center for Public Leadership and the Management Leadership and Decision Sciences Area.

Prior to coming to the Kennedy School, Julia served as an Adjunct Lecturer at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where she taught Negotiations at both the MBA and the undergraduate levels. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford University and her BA in Psychology from Harvard University.