Process Management

This book is about change. Change in complex issues. Change in complex issues always has the following three characteristics. Firstly, there are always multiple actors involved in this type of change. Put differently, the changes occur in a network of actors. These actors are, in a sense, dependent on each other. They need each other’s support in effectuating the change, or, at the very least, they should be prepared not to frustrate or obstruct the change. The second characteristic is that these actors negotiate with each other. One needs the other, and vice versa. This is why the actors negotiate. The negotiations are complex in themselves. It is very unlikely that one negotiation session is sufficient to shape the change in a detailed and definitive way. More likely, this will require a series of meetings. And thirdly, the negotiation is a process, a series of meetings that can stretch across a longer period of time, sometimes even years.

How do these processes originate? How can we explain that issues that seem to be perfectly reconcilable with straightforward negotiation resulting in a clear deal, still develop into an unpredictable, seemingly never-ending process? The first reason is that in truly controversial cases it is impossible to start negotiating immediately. These issues have a past of negotiations and events that is so heavy with issues and failures that parties cannot simply rejoin the negotiation table. There is no longer any mutual trust, and trust cannot simply be restored by decree. Such negotiations therefore always have to be preceded by a process of ‘pre-negotiations’. If these proceed well, they result in agreements about the ‘real’ negotiations. Pre-negotiations are highly contentious and are characterized by their own specific arrangements. They are usually carried out by ‘unofficial representatives’, they proceed via ‘secret diplomacy’, and may result in ‘staged agreements’ [33].

On 13 September, 1993, Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo peace accords. Formal negotiations had commenced in Norway on 11 June 1993. But the move ‘to go to the table’ was preceded by months of unofficial dialogue between the two sides. And even these unofficial dialogues could not simply be initiated. They were preceded by years of careful overtures. The problem in such processes is that groups that do not trust each other and sometimes do not even recognize each other need to talk to each other, and require mutual affirmation of the fact that the negotiations matter and that the negotiation partners have a certain degree of authority. But their official position is that the other party does not even exist—and as a result, affirmation of authority is a contradiction in terms that undermines one’s own position. For how can any authority be assigned by a body that is not recognized and therefore has no authority itself?

For many years, so-called ‘unofficial representatives’ and ‘entrepreneurial co-mediators’ have made overtures towards each other. Unofficial representatives embody a critical combination of connections to important officials and unofficial status. They may for instance be authoritative academics who, under the veil of a scientific seminar, assess each others standpoints and test how far the other party is willing to go. Formally, these unofficial representatives have no governmental relationships. Both governments can easily dismiss any statements and concessions that the unofficial representatives make—although of course the governments can also take all the credit when it comes to potential successes.

Entrepreneurial co-mediators are ‘moderate partisans’ who reach out to moderate partisans on the other side. Often implicitly, they can build upon the work of the unofficial representatives. These overtures are highly contentious. If they became public, major unrest would immediately arise, and the negotiations would have to be stopped and even denied. At key moments in these negotiations, ‘guardians’ have to take control of the results. Guardians are top leaders who have established their credibility as protectors of their respective groups during crucial periods of danger and struggle. They possess the authority needed to gain widespread, grassroots support for the agreement. Rabin played this role on the Israeli side, and Arafat on the Palestinian side [33].

This chapter addresses the requirements of a good process. Some of these requirements can be met through the right process design. This is where we enter the domain of negotiation architecture [22, 29]. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 3.2 will introduce the four main requirements of a process, or process agreements (we will refer to these as the core elements of a process design). A good process is:

The design principles outlined in the previous chapter may be helpful when making process agreements, but of course the main question remains how such agreements are made. In this chapter we will answer this question as follows. (Both the current chapter and Chap.​ 5 are partly based on actual process designs and draft process designs that we made in the past See [2–13].).

This chapter examines ways for the process manager to ensure that the decision making is an open process: the relevant parties have to be involved in the decision making and they must be certain that their interests will be addressed where possible, in accordance with the process agreements. This implies that the initiator as well as these parties should be involved in drawing up the agenda of the process.

Chapter 5 addressed the open nature of decision making. Open decision making has major advantages, but it may also be quite threatening to the parties involved. They have particular interests and are not always sure whether their participation in an open decision-making process will actually serve their interests. They might get ‘trapped’, or perhaps open decision making will produce a result that they are not satisfied with.

So far, we have argued that process management is characterized by openness. The main stakeholders are invited to participate in a process and are involved in drawing up the agenda. Openness, however, is not without risk for these stakeholders. They can perceive the process as a funnel trap: once they have joined, they may feel that they are forced in a certain direction without being able to leave the process. It is therefore important that parties’ core values are protected. For the sake of these core values, parties are offered room at crucial moments. For instance, they are not required to commit to the result of the process beforehand, and they are offered an exit option.

The fourth core element of the process approach is substance: the process that is developed under the guidance of the process manager must be sufficiently substantive. After all, a process without substance is empty.

The preceding chapters have already pointed out repeatedly that a decision-making process may degenerate into a process for the sake of the process. This may affect its speed (core element 3), but also its substance. When a process drifts too far away from the substance, it is vulnerable and fails to meet its original objective: a process is designed to produce substantive problem definitions and problem solutions.

Over the past years, we have had many discussions about process management—with initiators of large-scale projects, with governments that were facing resistance, with organisations that had doubts about participating in a particular process, with project managers who noticed that their project was stagnating. Many of the notions in the preceding chapters surfaced during those discussions.