The first public event of this initiative occurred in Rome, Italy in May 2008. We organized and offered an "executive" two-day training course in basic negotiation, with primarily Italian students. The course was typical of such two-day courses in one respect, and untypical in two others. We (and our distinguished steering commitee) agreed that the subject matter chosen was mainstream, if not universal, for such short courses. Less typical was the use of six different teachers, each given about two hours of class time. This was done so that each module of the class would be presented by an instructor regarded by peers as particularly adept at that subject. Our intent was to present the course at an unexceptionable "benchmark" standard, so that anything new would be weighed against the best of current practice.
An even more untypical element was that the instructors were observed not just by the 30 students, but by 50 of the instructors' peers. (This was so untypical that it surprised even us; we had anticipated that most of these extremely experienced negotiation teachers, invited to a four-day meeting in May in Rome, would choose to spend the two days of the executive course mostly touring the city, rather than sitting in a cramped room watching material that they had seen or presented themselves many times before. Their dedication created a space crunch.) Following the observed teaching, the students were presented with the customary certificates, and then excused, while the scholars convened for two days of analysis and rethinking. The scholars formed teams, often interdisciplinary and transnational, to write articles on the experience and lessons learned from the Rome training and discussions. The results of these discussions include Rethinking Negotiation Teaching: Innovations for Context and Culture (DRI Press 2009) and a special section of the Negotiation Journal, Volume 25, Issue 2 (April 2009).
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