Negotiation Techniques and Getting to YES

Rating: 9/10 (22 March 2019)

Everyone has to negotiate at some point in their life. Yet, it is not always easy to convince others of your position. In the film, 12 Angry Men, we get to witness a heated scene that takes place mainly in a courtroom with a jury of 12 men. Throughout the movie, these 12 jurors deliberate and negotiate the acquittal of a defendant, an 18-year-old male who allegedly stabbed his father to death. In this negotiation, each juror has to make a choice between two options of accepting the current outcome of being "guilty" or join the opposing group of being "not guilty". In this case, some of the jurors made use of positional and principled negotiation, as discuss in the book Getting to YES by Roger Fisher, effectively to persuade the other parties. In the book, Fisher raised several problems that most negotiations face and then goes on to suggests effective solutions to overcome them. In this movie review, there are parallel between the observed negotiations made in the movie and concepts of principled negotiations discussed in the book. To sum up, 12 Angry Men is a brilliant movie that showcases a common negotiation situation that takes place in a courtroom. Particularly, I will like to applaud Juror 8, played by Henry Fonda, for being a skilled negotiator where he made use of skilful negotiation techniques mentioned in Getting to YES to change the outcome of the case.