Works
- Breaking the Impasse: Consensual Approaches to Resolving Public Disputes (with Jeffrey Cruikshank), 1987
- The Consensus Building Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement, 1999
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Joint fact-finding. In joint fact-finding, as Ehrmann and Stinson's chapter describes it, stakeholders with differing viewpoints and interests work together to develop data, analyze facts and forecasts, and build common assumptions, then use that shared information to reach decisions. The parties agree on the experts and the questions, which keeps the analysis from becoming a contest between each side's own science.
What it explains
Susskind's work explains why disputes that hinge on facts are settled more easily when the parties build the facts together. Agreeing first on the questions and the experts removes the main ground on which each side would otherwise reject the other's evidence.
Tactics that draw on Lawrence Susskind (1)
In Thinking Tools
Known for
An MIT professor of urban and environmental planning and founder of the Consensus Building Institute (1993) who developed the mutual gains approach to negotiation and consensus building in public disputes.