Step 1: Don’t View the Other Party as a Demon

The dysfunction on Capitol Hill has come to this: Forty senior Republican and Democratic staff members have just completed a crash course on how to talk to each other.

“I actually went back and talked to the staff about what I learned in class every week,” said Sophia Lafargue, chief of staff for Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Democrat of New York.

A seven-week pilot program by the Partnership for a Secure America, a nonprofit group working on national security issues, brought in Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation to lead the training. Showing that “the other side doesn’t have horns and webbed feet” is an important first step, said Andrew Semmel, executive director of the partnership.

Over dinners in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill and sessions held at George Washington University, students handled negotiations in simulations of past events — the reunification of Germany, among others – and then compared their answers to what actually happened.

Another time students were given different information about how to climb Mount Everest but were told they had to scale it as a group, forcing them to communicate to get to the top.

Over all, the classes urged staff members to be more analytical and strategic in dealing with the opposing side. “I used to think negotiation outcomes were mostly by chance,” said one of the students, Bill Tighe, chief of staff to Representative Tom Marino, Republican of Pennsylvania.

People on Capitol Hill still start negotiations from the wrong place, said David Lax, a Harvard visiting professor who helped lead the classes. They are “tempted to see negotiations as zero sum, what I get you lose,” he said. “We tried to shift their vision to where the negotiation is a variable sum and it can make the pie bigger for everyone.”

Some political experts remain skeptical.

“Anything that gets people talking and listening to one another can be useful, but I would seriously doubt that it will make a difference in passing legislation,” said Matt Grossman, associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. “Their inability to reach agreement isn’t a sign of poor negotiation, but of irreconcilable differences.”