Be careful what you wish for...
Some lessons in negotiation
The Story
In 1995, the owners of the Minnesota Twins Major League Baseball team announced that the team’s home, the Metrodome, was obsolete and that they would soon begin planning for the development of a new ballpark. A new site was identified in 2000, and in 2005, the County and the Team’s Owners reached an agreement on the public-private financing package. The site was on the edge of downtown Minneapolis’s historic Warehouse District and the North Loop Neighborhood, so in the fall of 2006, the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners created the public-private volunteer-driven “Design Advocacy Group,” or “DAG 360.” Soon renamed the 2010 Partners, the group was tasked with ensuring that the project integrated urban design, sustainable design, and civic connections into an excellent public experience in the area surrounding the ballpark. Comprised of residents and business owners in the surrounding area, local elected officials, and representatives of the Twins, the 2010 Partners were specifically focused on ensuring that the money set aside by the legislature for the plazas, public art, and landscaping around the ballpark would not be diverted to the building project, diminishing the public experience of the surrounding area.
The 2010 Partners became increasingly involved in discussions with the team and their architects around the design of the public realm, including paving, trees, sustainability, public art, pedestrian access, bicycle facilities, transit links, and the location of the light rail transit station that would be built on one corner of the site. One concern was about the quality of the building’s exterior materials, but then something funny happened. The group began to insist that the new ballpark respect the architecture of the adjacent North Loop and Warehouse District neighborhoods, which were filled with old red brick warehouses and factory buildings, going so far as to insist on brick as an exterior material for the new ballpark. Apparently, they did such a good job making their argument that the Twins ultimately agreed to their demand. Victory!
Then, in April 2007, the Twins owners revealed the design for the new ballpark at the same time that they announced they had committed to spending more money on the project. A portion of this additional funding would be used to clad the building in Kasota stone, a honey-colored Minnesota limestone, which is both higher quality and more expensive than brick. This was a big and costly decision, and indeed, the ballpark—renamed Target Field in 2008—is beautiful today because of it. Local architecture critic Linda Mack approved of the design, noting how it,
“Rejects the red brick retro look of recent ballparks ... while steering away of steely modernism,” and how the designers “chose the lighter-toned Minnesota limestone,” a native material used on a number of “beloved downtown Minneapolis buildings.”1
But one façade of the ballpark that faces the neighborhood, yeah, it’s brick. And it’s new brick, brown and beige in color, so it doesn’t even look like the old red brick warehouses nearby. Indeed, it looks a little cheap next to the Kasota stone, although the designers did incorporate a horizontal ribbon of Kasota stone into the brick wall…perhaps just to rub it in. What went wrong?
The Theory
Two excellent books on the subject of negotiation offer lessons that may have been of use to the 2010 Partners. The classic text, Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton, is a product of the Harvard Negotiating Project and was first published in 1981.2 This is the more theoretical and general of the two books—well-suited to diplomats—and it outlines a four-part method: Separate the people from the problem; focus on interests, not positions; invent options for mutual gain; and insist on using objective criteria. G. Richard Shell’s Bargaining for Advantage takes a more personal approach, emphasizing the importance of knowing oneself and promoting a method based on six foundations: your bargaining style; your goals and expectations; authoritative standards and norms; relationships; the other party’s interests; and leverage.”3 Both books emphasize the importance of understanding the other party’s interests and seeking solutions that will lead to mutual gain. They both also emphasize the typical mistakes people make in negotiating, including those that were made during the 2010 Partners conversations with the team and its designers: Arguing over positions, which creates a winner/loser dynamic; inventing only narrow solutions rather than seeking solutions that benefit both parties; and a lack of flexibility and poor listening skills, which can lead to taking unnecessarily rigid positions.
First, rather than trying to determine the owners’ interests in the quality of the exterior, they took the position that a portion of the building should be brick. As this position hardened, they became more inflexible. Second, this rigid position meant that they were “inventing a narrow solution,” as in, “it must be brick because that’s as good as we can expect.” And three, they generally demonstrated a “lack of flexibility and listening,” when they could have tried harder to listen and understand the owners’ interests. And that’s how my community talked the owners of the Twins out of a Limestone façade facing our neighborhood.
One problem was that the committee assumed the owner would be cheap, even though he was the patriarch of a wealthy, multi-generational family that owns numerous successful businesses and contributes to the community through philanthropy. And rather than being absentee team owners, they are Minnesotans with local roots who have consistently demonstrated that their reputation matters to them. A more open-minded position might have considered the possibility that the owners would want to build a high-quality facility that would reflect well on them and their family’s legacy, and that if we listened to them, we could have all come to a mutual understanding of what “high-quality” meant. Last but not least, if you put yourself in the owner’s shoes, you can imagine feeling as if you were being treated as if you were untrustworthy, while being badgered about the brick. Indeed, after switching to Kasota stone, one can also imagine how you might also be inclined to feign misunderstanding—“But they demanded brick and we promised we would give it to them and so we did!”—while choosing not to finish that one section in the higher quality Kasota stone. Anyhow, they gave us the brick wall we demanded, and who could blame them? (To be fair, our well-intentioned volunteers can not only be thanked for their efforts and hard work but also forgiven for any errors. After all, they were sitting across the table from well-paid people who regularly negotiated multi-million-dollar contracts with baseball players, and they might have been a little outmatched in terms of negotiating skills.)
I’ll close this theory section with a little parable that I first read in Getting to Yes, in the chapter called “Invent Options for Mutual Gain,” that I have been sharing with students for decades:
“Yet all too often negotiators end up like the proverbial children who quarreled over an orange. After they finally agreed to divide the orange in half, the first child took one half, ate the fruit, and threw away the peel, while the other threw away the fruit and used the peel from the second half in baking a cake. All too often negotiators “leave money on the table” - they fail to reach agreement when they might have, or the agreement they do reach could have been better for each side. Too many negotiations end up with half an orange for each side instead of the whole fruit for one and the whole peel for the other. Why?”4
The Lesson
First, if you want to learn more about negotiation, I highly recommend Getting to Yes and Bargaining for Advantage. Both books are good, but I prefer the latter, which is more of a practical guide for regular people like us, who must use negotiation skills every day. Second, remember to avoid taking rigid positions: When you do, you may be foreclosing other options you don’t even know about yet. And finally, always bargain from the position of understanding the other party’s interests—and looking for ways to help you both get what you want.
The most critical thing in a negotiation is to get inside your opponent’s head and figure out what he really wants.
- Jacob Lew, Former Ambassador to Israel and Secretary of the Treasury
One of the best ways to persuade others is by listening to them.
- Dean Rusk, Former US Secretary of State
A Disclaimer and an Apology:
Memories of these events, including my own, are hazy, and some details have been lost to the sands of time. I remember this story through my role in the North Loop Neighborhood Association, twenty years ago, and I ran a draft of this essay past two friends and colleagues who served on the 2010 Partners committee. One told me he couldn’t remember the brick discussion at all, while the other said he couldn’t remember the specific details, but he did remember the outcome exactly as I wrote it. Together, we three agreed that if nothing else, the pictures confirm that there is only one blank, brown, brick façade on the whole building, and it faces the old warehouses and the neighborhood. So, with that, my apologies to all the good and hard-working volunteers who served on the 2010 Partners and did a great job ensuring that some portion of the public investment went into the public realm—I hope I have not maligned you. Finally, if any readers would like to share details or different memories, contact me at peter@reflectiveurbanist.com and tell me all about it. Who knows, depending on what I hear, this story may feature in a future mail-bag episode!
Sports Business Journal, “Approval Meets Twins’ Ballpark Design, But Where’s The Roof?”, 12 April 2007. https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Daily/Issues/2007/04/13/Facilities-Venues/Approval-Meets-Twins-Ballpark-Design-But-Wheres-The-Roof/
Fisher, Roger, William Ury, and Bruce Patton, Getting To Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, 3rd Edition, New York: Penguin Books, 2011.
Shell, G. Richard, Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiating Strategies for Reasonable People, 2nd Edition, New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
Getting to Yes, Pages 58-59.