Sunny Wed
Finally some sunshine today. Monday and Tuesday were pretty ho-hum — standard classes, with nothing much that stood out. Today was significantly more interesting.
6.803 - Winston talked about writing a book; a point he hit was no re-work. If you do a task, complete it all at once. Modularize tasks that take more than one sitting into smaller parts that are complete and self-sufficient and that can be done at once. E.g. if writing a chapter, do the illustrations and write the problems and solutions all together — don’t write the chapter and leave the illustrations for two weeks later, you won’t remember what were intending and you will have to re-work some of your writing, or at least re-read it to refamiliarize yourself.
6.033 - A lecture on fault-tolerance. Featured a graph from mortality.org, a site with some pretty nifty data about human mortality.
6.UAT - A guest lecture on Negotiation. Pretty cool stuff, here’s the outline:
Prepare
- Clarify your mandate and define your team
- Estimate your Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) and theirs
- Improve your BATNA (if possible)
- Know your interests
- Think about their interests
- Prepare to suggest mutually beneficial options
Create value
- Explore interests on both sides
- Suspend criticism
- Invent with committing
- Generate options and packages that “make the pie larger”
- Use neutrals to improve communication
Distribute value
- Behave in ways that build trust
- Discuss standards or criteria for “dividing” the pie
- Use neutrals to suggest possible distributions
- Design nearly self-enforcing agreements
Follow through
- Agree on monitoring arrangements
- Make it easy to live up to commitments
- Align organizational incentives and controls
- Keep working to improve relationships
- Agree to use neutrals to resolve disagreements
– From a 6.UAT Handout, “Mutual Gains Approach to Negotiation” published by the Consensus Building Institute
–
The week is halfway over and March draws to a close… time is going faster, but all’s going well :)