[K-Women Talk] The Art of Negotiation: Choosing a Meal Over a Fight

[Asia Economy] Over the past 20 years working at the Environmental Foundation, I have attended various types of meetings?discussion panels, councils, advisory meetings, seminars, conferences, forums, government committees, and more. Every time I left these meetings feeling regretful, I wanted to talk about the play Oslo.

This play stages the true story of how Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), met in 1993 and signed the Oslo Peace Accords.

Written by American playwright J.T. Rogers, it premiered in 2016 at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York. I later learned that it swept awards including the 2017 Tony Award for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play.

I saw the play around late October 2018, and its scenes still come to life in many real-world moments. I had wondered why the peace agreement was named after Oslo, Norway, but the play reveals the reason.

Trygve Rød Larsen, who ran the Norwegian Institute of Applied Social Science called FAFO, wanted to put his theory into practice. He believed the reason why U.S.-led negotiations kept failing was that both sides met with “official purposes” and tried to “put all issues on the table at once.” In such settings, each side fights only for its own goals. Negotiations cannot succeed.

Larsen viewed the negotiation parties not as organizations or groups, but as individuals. If individuals belonging to organizations meet and build trust, and then other individuals meet and continue these trust relationships, opposing organizations or groups could eventually reach a consensus.

Those working in sales or project bidding know how important this is. However, government policies, meetings, and common practices lack a human element. For example, nameplates for external participants show their names and affiliations, but government participants only display their department names.

Returning to Oslo, Dr. Larsen and his wife Mona Juul rented a quiet forest villa near Oslo and invited two mid-level managers from the Israeli and Palestinian governments, along with an elderly couple who were good cooks.

The two officials, initially angry and holding firmly to their countries’ positions, began to think, “Ah, this person is also a father of two children and a salaried worker worried about electricity bills,” as they sat at the dinner table prepared by the Larsens.

These two then invited their superiors to the villa, who in turn brought their own superiors, culminating in the 1993 meeting between Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat to sign the peace agreement. This is why Larsen’s theory is called Gradualism.

We are now struggling amid a triple wave of high exchange rates, high inflation, and high oil prices. Climate disasters we have never experienced before continue around the globe. Meanwhile, President Yoon Suk-yeol’s approval ratings are stuck in decline, and the two major parties are locked in endless fights. When problem-solving is difficult, fighting often becomes a seemingly attractive escape, but fighting is not the ultimate goal.

The current president, during his candidacy, taught us that even the order of adding ingredients to kimchi stew matters. He made Israel and Palestine shake hands?what can we not do? Instead of fighting, if we meet at the president’s table, I expect we might find an unexpected breakthrough. Dare I say!

Imi Kyung, CEO of the Environmental Foundation

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.