WATER RIGHTS AND WHAT LEADERS CAN LEARN FROM NEGOTIATIONS

Max Bazerman who teaches Negotiations and Decison Making at Harvard Business School has written extensively on this topic - the need for modern leaders to learn how to educate our organisations and the public in the art of making "wise trades".

Wise trading is a pretty simple notion and all bargaining especially value creating negotiation is based on it. We trade something of value to us in return for something of even more value. However leaders, and particularly public leaders, have systematically educated the public that we don't need to trade and we can have everything and it won't cost us anything. How irresponsible! This is not real leadership.

I am not saying that wise trading is an easy sell - it is not - but it is necessary for our overall welfare and our futures. There are tricky complications to wise trading especially in many hot public policy issues. Sometimes the losses are now but the gains in the future. Sometimes it is easy to quantify the losses but harder to nail down the exact size of the prospective gains. Often there are winners and losers, that is,  the gains accrue to one particular group but the losses are borne by a different group. In the latter case the general rule is to attempt to find ways for the winners to compensate the losers.

It seems to me that the present dispute over water rights in the Murray Darling Basin is an excellent example of the need for leadership and the need for leaders to educate us all in the art of wise trades. Water allocation will be a hot issue in Australia and possibly the rest of the world for the forseeable future.  Tough choices will need to be made. It is critical that leadership is exercised by many people to ensure that we do make the tough choices and wise trades, and don't simply avoid them and cause even worst outcomes for ourselves and our children in the future. Already with the Murray Darling issue we can see people in leadership roles who are ducking for cover or peddling red herring solutions which are popular.

I am not sure though if the Murray Darling Basin Authority has been particularly smart in some of its approaches to the issue so far. I admire their courage for fronting up to the community consultations in the towns most likely to be asked to trade water entitlements, but I am a little dismayed at their lack of preparation. Obviously the folks from these townships need to be listened to closely and lots of compassion and generosity needs to be built into any final solution. But why isn't a more user friendly version of the Report available for consultations? Why hasn't the Report treated the socio-economic impacts on individual farmers and whole towns and regions with great sophistication and detail? A strong reaction to prospective water losses was totally predictable and understandable, but the Authority and their political masters seem to have led with the chin on some major predictable issues.

When leaders are educating others in the art of "wise trades" we need to be very courageous, very compassionate and very strategic!