Are We Practising Against the Right Opponent?

As England prepare for their World Cup semi-final against Argentina, Harry Kane reflected on Thomas Tuchel's view that England have not yet produced the same level of performance in matches that they regularly show in training. Kane summed up Tuchel's challenge simply:

"He just wants to see that version of us."

Thomas Tuchel knows how good his players can be - he sees them in training every day. The question isn't whether England possess the necessary skills, but whether they can reproduce them when the pressure is greatest and the opposition is real.

If England want to know whether they're ready for Argentina, they'll try to make training resemble Argentina as closely as possible. No training session can ever recreate the real match, but the closer the simulation, the greater the confidence that if it works in training, it will also work when it matters.

The same principle applies to negotiation.

Most organisations don't struggle to teach people negotiation skills. The bigger challenge is helping people apply those skills consistently when they're sitting opposite a customer, supplier or procurement team in a live commercial negotiation.

Rather than asking whether people are practising enough, perhaps we should be asking whether practise is preparing them for the negotiation they're actually going to have.

Creating that type of practise is harder than it first appears because it depends on two things coming together.

The first is reduced familiarity with the person you're practising against. Even when negotiating with customers or suppliers you know reasonably well, there is usually far less familiarity than exists between colleagues who work together every day. That difference influences how people communicate, challenge one another and respond under pressure.

The second is the negotiation itself. The scenario needs to reflect the commercial conversation people are genuinely preparing for.

Most organisations achieve one of those objectives, but not always both.

Internal role plays often provide highly relevant commercial scenarios because they're based on the organisation's own objectives and goals. The trade-off is that participants are usually practising with colleagues who know them well.

Public training programmes often provide a greater degree of unfamiliarity. Participants practise with people from different organisations, bringing different behaviours, experiences and negotiating styles. However, the scenarios are necessarily more generic because they need to work for everyone in the room.

The closer we can bring those two elements together - reduced familiarity with the other person and a negotiation that closely reflects the commercial situation people are preparing for - the more realistic and representative practise becomes.

Perhaps the real problem is that we've put the friction in the wrong place.

For many organisations, the difficult part isn't the practise itself. It's finding the time, organising colleagues, coordinating diaries and creating realistic role plays. It's hardly surprising that practise happens less often than intended.

Then, when people do practise, we often make the exercise easier than the negotiation they're preparing for - familiar colleagues ask familiar questions, personalities are known and objections become more predictable.

I think we should reverse that.

We should make practise easier to access, but more demanding and realistic once it begins.

The purpose of practise isn't to prove what people already know. It's to expose weaknesses before a customer, supplier or procurement team does.

This is where AI has the potential to make a genuine contribution.

The question isn't whether capability is developed face-to-face or through AI. Different organisations will choose different approaches depending on their objectives, culture and circumstances. For many, the strongest solution may well be a blend of both.

The more important question is whether people have frequent opportunities to practise in an environment that genuinely prepares them for the negotiations they'll face.

AI makes it much easier to combine the two ingredients that have traditionally been difficult to bring together. It can present an unfamiliar counterparty while recreating a realistic commercial situation, without much of the effort involved in organising repeated role plays.

In other words, it reduces the friction around practise while increasing the realism within it.

Commercial leaders already know what many of their people are capable of in the training room. The real test is whether those same behaviours appear when they're sitting across the table from a negotiator and the outcome really matters.

Perhaps that's why the most important question isn't whether people are practising enough.

It's whether we've designed practise that gives the best version of them the greatest chance to emerge when the negotiation really matters.

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