Develop Principles and Standards.
At the heart of the Fisher-Ury model of negotiation – in addition to putting the parties into a cooperative frame of mind, focusing on the problem, identifying the issues, discovering underlying interests, and developing options to meet those interests, producing a deal that is superior to the BATNA – is the recognition that developing workable options and deals often depends upon arriving at principles which all parties can adopt. This fits into our “mundus” section, because they are an effort at transforming the subjective into the realm of objectivity. Whether it is fair, doable, wise, legal, efficient, considerate, reciprocal, due – whatever the standard, it pays consciously to work to develop standards that can be discussed with and adopted by one’s counterparty in order to address distributive issues or generally to work out a deal.