Are you compressed yet?

Listening to the BBC's Today programme last week, Steve Baker MP, chair of the European Research Group (ERG) of Conservative Brexiteers, made a statement that made me wake up and pay attention.  It was not the relevance of his words to the Brexit debate that struck me but rather their relevance to negotiation in a mediation.

Mr Baker was bemoaning the intervention of the Remainers and the fact that the Benn Act required Prime Minister Boris Johnson to seek an extension from the EU in the event that a deal is not approved by Parliament.  The comment that struck me was this:

'We cannot negotiate a good deal unless we get to that point of compression where both parties must reach an agreement...'

It struck me that this is precisely true in the context of commercial negotiations.  It helps to explain why many mediations are successful and others are not.  Armed with this insight, I have seen negotiators try to create false deadlines but these often fail as they do not produce sufficient 'compression' to force both parties to compromise.  This helps to explain why mediations can drag on into the wee small hours when the compression was not sufficient earlier in the day.  The true compression forces both parties to the very edge of the precipice where they have to make a choice to reach an agreement or to step over.

Only time will tell whether Boris succeeds in getting his new deal through, but the way that he has sought to create first his initial Halloween deadline and now in his push for a possible general election in December, is clearly an attempt to get to that point of compression where both parties must reach an agreement.