When it comes to procurement, and disputes in general, dispute resolution is a subject of considerable study at post-secondary institutes around the world.
One mid-sized Canadian university, for instance, offers no less than 16 separate units through its departments of history, business, political science and philosophy on this subject. This list does not include the other units required by procurement people dealing with things related to labour and the business negotiation process.
The goals of these various programs are to teach students to avoid dispute before it arises and how to deal more effectively with the disputes that do arise.
I have always found it interesting that in much of the thinking related to conflict management there is an apparent assumption that the causes of conflict are hidden and difficult to understand.
The following university course descriptions illustrate my point.
- Conflict Transformation: An examination of ways of presenting, resolving and transforming conflicts in everyday life, in our culture and others, and in the areas of family, business, the law, schools and large-scale political conflicts.
- Peace Studies: An introduction to the discipline of peace research, focusing on the concepts of peace, war, security, conflict, violence and non-violence and examining the roles of values and ideologies in the attainment of peace.
- Theory of Values: A study of human practices of evaluation in morality, politics, art, religion and economics.
Undoubtedly, this type of study serves an important role. However, it overstates the complexity of the situation.
Although difficult cases are not rare, for the most part the cases of real-world procurement disputes and conflict are rarely complex.
In procurement, most disputes arise simply from either arguments over money (or money’s worth) or due to one person or organization treating others badly.
Until that happy and unlikely day on which all people are as wealthy as they would like to be, little can be done concerning disputes over money, but it is possible to avoid the many disputes that arise from human conduct.
The type of behaviour that leads to conflict at the international level will often be exactly the same type of behaviour that will lead to conflict at the national level.
I would say from experience that most people who deal at the international level are sufficiently sophisticated and tolerant enough to understand that values, beliefs and customers are likely to vary from one part of the world to another.
What they will not put up with is behaviour that would almost certainly be inappropriate in any part of the world.
Supply chain is no stranger to disputes. The most effective way of avoiding disputes is simply not to do the type of thing that is likely to lead to a dispute. Moreover, the easiest way to resolve a dispute once it has begun is to discontinue the behaviour that led to the dispute in the first place.
There are always risks to consider in dealing with the problem of the unco-operative negotiator in relation to resolving procurement issues. Since the state of negotiation often builds unrealistic expectations, apparent problems with negotiation may cause those expectations to crash within one’s own organization.
For this reason, the key members of the leader’s constituency need to be briefed as to the process (or lack of it) that is being made and also concerning its causes. Second, hostile outsiders to both organizations may seek to exploit any apparent breakdown.
There is thus a need to manage appearances, to send a message, but keep the door open. One approach is to “suspend” negotiations to allow both sides to consider each other’s apparent position or priorities and to devise an appropriate response.
This approach has the advantage of indicating a continued desire to proceed if attitudes change.
Stephen Bauld is a government procurement expert and can be reached at swbauld@purchasingci.com.
Some of his columns may contain excerpts from The Municipal Procurement Handbook published by Butterworths.
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