The use of full-length films to teach negotiation.

Olivier Fournout

This is the text of a lecture given at the conference “New Trends in Negotiation Teaching”, presented by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) and the Institute for Research and Education on Negotiation in Europe at ESSEC Business School (IRENE), Nov. 14-15, 2005.

Key words: negotiation, leadership, film, fiction, phenomenology, negotiation of meaning, teaching of negociation, pedagogy, imagination, interaction.

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It is a year since I started courses on negotiation and leadership in which I use full-length films as the main pedagogical tool. It is this experience that I would like to talk about here. I will organize my lecture around three points:

first, I will describe the course itself and its background;

then, I will try to clarify my pedagogical principles;

and finally, I will give you a very quick sample of this pedagogy by showing you some extracts from Lost in La Mancha, and I will make a few comments.

1- The course and its background.

This course is given at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (the National Graduate School of Telecommunications in Paris). The three sessions on negotiation are fairly modest in size : 12 hours. I built them around three films. The first one is Le souper (The Supper) where we get an idea of the negotiation between Talleyrand and Fouché a few weeks after Waterloo, when France’s whole future is at stake. The meeting as imagined by the author takes place within the context of a typical French high society dinner at the time. It gives me the opportunity to give an introductory course on negotiation. The second film is Lost in La Mancha, the making-of of Terry Gilliam’s film Don Quichotte. The purpose here is to see how the negotiating spirit and methods can apply to leadership and