Negotiation exercise design is a skill that, such as negotiation itself, is rooted in certain core principles and can be refined with practice. How writers approach the design process is the key to producing effective exercises and powerful learning experiences. This article addresses five core principles that can be used to curate both simple and moderately complex negotiation exercises, including games, role plays, and simulations. These core principles are (1) define the purpose, (2) determine the format, (3) maintain focus, (4) test the function, and (5) plan for a debrief. These principles can be used as a general framework to help writers overcome the challenges inherent in exercise design and empower them to create and deliver their own tailored negotiation exercises. The principles are a tried‐and‐true method developed from the authors' own experience designing the material for university curricula, executive education, and workshops for government, military, and private clients.

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Negotiation practitioners today struggle to manage complex political, economic, and cultural disputes that often involve an array of intertwined issues, parties, process choices, and consequences -both intended and unintended. To prepare next-generation negotiators for these multifaceted challenges, negotiation instructors must keep pace with the rapidly evolving complexity of today's world. In this article, we introduce systemic multiconstituency exercises (SMCEs), a new educational tool for capturing this emerging reality and helping to close the experiential learning gap between the simulated and the nonsimulated environment.We discuss our pedagogical rationale for developing The Transition, a seventy-two-party SMCE inspired by the complex conflicts in Afghanistan and Central Asia and then describe our experiences conducting multiple iterations of this simulation at Harvard University. We argue that SMCEs, Negotiation Journal January 2018 37 in which stakeholders are embedded in clusters of overlapping networks, differ from conventional multiparty exercises because of their immersive character, emergent properties, and dynamic architecture. This design allows for the creation of crucial negotiation complexity challenges within a simulated exercise context, most importantly what we call "cognitive maelstroms," nested negotiation networks, and cascading decision effects. Because of these features, SMCEs are uniquely suited for training participants in the art of network thinking in complex negotiations. Properly designed and executed, systemic multiconstituency exercises are next-generation teaching, training, and research platforms that carefully integrate negotiation, leadership, and decision-making challenges.Key words: negotiation, negotiation teaching, negotiation simulations, complexity, multiparty negotiation, constituencies, system effects, networks. IntroductionIn this article, we describe a method for training negotiators to be prepared for an increasingly complex world. The gap that has always existed between real-world negotiations and the quality and scope of experiential learning exercises has only grown as the world that negotiators confront has grown more complex in multiple ways.First, the number of formal and informal stakeholders that influence collective decisions across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors has increased. Because of globalization and the telecommunications revolution, actors now function across coalitions and networks. Each network operates within its own ecosystem of behaviors, assumptions, needs, and interests.Second, relationships between and among the global, regional, and local environments are rapidly changing. The distinctions between these three environments blur together. Negotiators are often unaware of the interconnectedness of conflicts and unable to decode how individuals and groups react to each other not just within but across conflicts and environments.Third, leaders around the world are hindered by the growing ineffectiveness of their conflict manageme...

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Current wargaming techniques are effective training and research instruments for military scenarios with fixed tools and boundaries on the problem. Control cells composed of officiants adjudicating and evaluating moves enforce these boundaries. Real-world crises, however, unfold in several dimensions in a chaotic context, a condition requiring decision-making under deep uncertainty. In this article, we assess how pedagogical exercises can be designed to effectively capture this level of complexity and describe a new framework for developing deeply immersive exercises. We propose a method for designing crisis environments that are dynamic, deep, and decentralized (3D). These obviate the need for a control cell and enhance the usefulness of exercises in preparing military and policy practitioners by better replicating real-world decision-making dynamics. This paper presents the application of this 3D method, which integrates findings from wargame and negotiation simulation design into immersive crisis exercises. We share observations from the research, design, and execution of “Red Horizon,” an immersive crisis exercise held three times at Harvard University with senior civilian and military participants from multiple countries. It further explores connections to contemporary trends in international relations scholarship.