PSA-Harvard Complete the 2015/2016 Program

Partnership for a Secure America (PSA) and Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation (PON) completed the second negotiation training series for foreign policy and national security staff on Capitol Hill. Through lectures and workshops, instructors from PON and PSA worked to train more effective negotiators on Capitol Hill.

The program was launched in 2014 with the first series focusing on classroom instruction. Learning negotiation vocabulary and the fundamental principles of negotiation were the focus of the classroom instruction. The 2015/2016 series built upon those skills and shifted the emphasis to individual student development. Through bipartisan small group negotiations, students applied lessons from classroom instruction to substantive policy issues. The small groups tacked issues including combating ISIS, addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, developing a U.S. cyber security policy, and deterring Russian involvement in Syria. This approach allowed students to gain greater facility with the tools and concepts of negotiation.

The program allowed students to learn from, as well as instruct, each other with the goal of making negotiation skills more natural and automatic when opportunities for deal making arise,