Failing at anything isn’t particularly fun, but the learning from failure can be tremendous if you take the time to reflect on the experience. If you take a few minutes to examine someone else’s failure, you benefit from the experience without the heartburn of having had to live through the event yourself.
Which is why, this week, we’re talking negotiation fails! Rather than just hammering away at why the actions or approach caused a failure, I’m going to walk you through a post-mortem of sorts, explaining what could have been done differently and what we can take away from the failure of COVAX to vaccinate developing nations.
In essence, this is an example of a multi-party negotiation gone sideways. A multi-party negotiation is (perhaps obviously) any deal or project involving more than two parties. It could be a research consortium, an open source group, or, in this case, a group trying to save lives in a pandemic by getting vaccines distributed. COVAX, an organization formed by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), Unicef, and Gavi – The Vaccine Alliance is intended to be a global operation, providing the COVID-19 vaccine to developing nations at ‘warp speed.’
This program coalesced around the Dr. Seth Franklin Berkley, an American epidemiologist and CEO of GAVI, and Dr. Cynthia Berkley, his wife, who works with the WHO to set up a mechanism for getting these vaccines to people. The project was called the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility, or simply COVAX. While the mission is altruistic, it has suffered from five common multiparty negotiation failures.
Before we address the failures, however, it helps to understand what makes a multi-party negotiation work. Fundamentally, a successful multi-party negotiation maintains a shared goal or vision among all parties. There’s diversity of members, suppliers, and financing, along with a clear, realistic understanding of how humans actually act. Additionally, there needs to be an understanding that initial momentum does not carry through the entire endeavor, and should not be mistaken as the ‘steady state’ of the operation. Finally, there must be clear and effective communication along with robust procurement processes to ensure execution of the initial goal or vision.
That said, let’s walk through where COVAX has fallen short.
1. Lack of diversification.
COVAX went all-in on sourcing vaccines from India, understandably because of their early success in managing infection rates and standing infrastructure of medication manufacturing. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we now know India was a late bloomer in infection rates, and is now one of the leaders of high infection rates (top two in infections per capita as of this writing). Because of this drastic increase of infection rates over time, regional bureaucracies in India couldn’t follow through on producing and moving the large numbers of needed vaccines, causing supply chain problems. They simply had no bandwidth to save the world for COVAX with their own nation in crisis.
The takeaway: When entering a new business relationship, always have a backup. Plan for what should happen if things go wrong. If you’re an online service supplier, ensure connection and system backup redundancies. If you’re forming a research consortium – have several primary funders in case one goes bust. If you’re developing a shopping center, get multiple anchor tenants.
Gambling by betting big on one supplier/funder/person/company will generate tremendous loss in a multiparty negotiation. Play it safe and diversify.
2. Misunderstanding human behavior.
Intellectually, curtailing infection rates worldwide helps everyone. While I’m not an epidemiologist, the medical professionals in my life tell me that the fewer hosts available for a pathogen, the lower the likelihood of spread and mutation to more highly infectious variants. The vaccine minimizes the chance for infections to run rampant and take down entire communities. Without vaccines to bring infection rates down, healthcare infrastructure and human resources are taxed to the extreme, regardless of the economic standing of the nation in question.
But to be successful in the end goal of administering billions of vaccines, COVAX must also account for human behavior. Specifically, humans want first to help those within their own group, especially if they’re up for re-election. If I’m a leader in country X, I want to take care of my people first. Then they can vote for me in the next election. Same if I’m a leader in country Y, or country Z. I’m going to militate to have my people first in line, rather than entering into an agreement with a selfless, ‘Let’s do what’s best for the many,’ collaborative spirit.
COVAX missed the fact that the best intentions lose when they’re fighting against emotional, subjective, self-serving human behavior. Which, by the way, pretty much all human behavior is. Actions taken by any individual depend on the lens through which that individual views them.
For an effective multi-party negotiation, it’s best to develop a structure of choice architecture that pre-selects the most rational choice for the good of as many people/nations by default. This kind of structure is non-coercive, and provides room for exceptions and opt-outs should leaders so select.
The take home: always always remember that human behavior is not based on rationale for the good of the many, but for the good of me. Perspective matters, and will absolutely influence the success or failure of a deal or project. Get in the habit of considering questions like:
- “How do people behave out of the gate?”
- “How do I expect them to behave, based on what I know of their cultural context, position, and perspective?”
- “What would be an ‘irrational’ move, and how can I prepare for that?”
- “How will I cope with cognitive dissonance if I hear information contrary to my own positional biases?”
3. Misreading/overemphasizing early victories.
With enough momentum down a hill, you can launch a boulder with enough force to fly it halfway around the world. Well, maybe not that far, but the fact holds that dynamic leaders with motivation and momentum can make things happen. Fast.
However, once that boulder comes to rest, it’s going to take a lot more time and energy to get it moving again, especially if it’s on flat ground. And so too does the long-haul of complex multi-party negotiations require a great deal of investment of time, energy, and resource.
What we’ve seen happen with COVAX is an initial burst of effective momentum followed by a lack of follow through. Drs. Berkley are dynamic and magnanimous leaders, who at the start of the project had tremendous momentum, leading to early successes. Case in point, COVAX did an amazing job getting vaccines shipped to developing nations within three months after the world’s richest countries started administering their first doses. This is absolutely remarkable as it can take upwards of a decade for the medicines of wealthy nations to trickle down to those that are still developing.
The parties involved should absolutely be proud of this work, but things can fall apart if this is perceived as the steady state, as we’ve seen in terms of supply chain issues, and also in the fourth major shortcoming of the COVAX project: improper communication, false equivalency, and generally missing the mark of the intended role of the consortium.
The take home: be proud of early accomplishments, but be ready to buckle down, get in the trenches, and do the actual work of negotiation in order to find ongoing success.
4. Poor communication and false equivalencies.
If you’ve spent any time in The Persuasion Lab, you know that each of us communicates our needs to the world using persuasion, influence, and negotiation. How skilled you are in these methods determines whether or not your needs are met in every arena of your life.
In our case study, COVAX accepted cheap substitutes in lieu of actual vaccine doses, and therefore did not get their needs met. This was due to lack of clear and effective communications along with poor procurement systems (see below).
In a conversation between two people, there are at least four voices at play: the audible voices of each party, plus each person’s internal monologue. Scale this up to a multi-party negotiation or organization, layer in different organizational and national cultures, plus the political interplay at a local and international level, plus literally speaking different languages… Needless to say, effective communication gets complex and difficult very quickly.
The semantic issue here is that many in the WHO have an equivalency problem: they want something — vaccines! Despite this desire, they let developed nations offer a false equivalence of money, which they didn’t need, and offers of which had the potential to inflate the prices of vaccines, effectively eliminating those nations most in need of vaccinations.
Nevertheless, the COVAX team started to accept money. For all the good money can do, it’s not a vaccine. You can’t inject a dollar into someone’s arm and minimize their risk of infection. Via these dealings, COVAX effectively morphed into a fundraising outfit, not an organization in the business of rapid distribution of vaccines.
This may have been in part due to the early success of getting actual vaccines boxed up and shipped out. Getting shots in the hands of folks who needed them ultra fast was assumed to be a steady-state, allowing for this conflation of needed resource.
The take home: Know your goals and what’s needed to make them happen. Then stick to your guns! If what you need is a manufactured product, negotiate so that you’re getting a manufactured product! If what you need is money, don’t negotiate for a white-labeled product.
5. Haggling vs robust procurement procedures.
If you’re unfamiliar with the particulars of procurement vs haggling you might think of it as the difference between baking cookies from prefab dough in a tube vs putting together a 5 course meal from scratch.
Haggling is baking cookies from the tube. You’re hungry, and the goal is to get food in your stomach ASAP, tasty and as easily as possible.
A robust procurement procedure is akin to inviting 10 of your closest friends for a stunning 5 course dinner party. The food matters, of course, and you’ll put time and energy into planning the menu, buying the best quality meat and produce. You’ll also plan for the time it takes to shop, cook, set the table, choose music to match the occasion, seating folks for engaging conversation, wine pairings…
In the case of COVAX, rather than preparing adequately for every aspect of the five course dinner by maintaining stringent requests for proposals (RFP) from contractors, talking through manufacturing processes, logistics of shipping and administration of vaccines, personnel requirements, finances, etc, etc, etc the conversations shifted to accounting only for money.
Staff were not negotiating to secure sources of vaccines meant to be administered, but instead were trying to get money to keep the doors open. Money’s great, and is an important resource to be sure. But writing a check is a stupidly oversimplified ‘solution’ when compared to everything it takes to get vaccines from the lab to the manufacturer to the distributor to the physicians to the patients. .
As we’ve seen, COVAX morphed from a vaccine distributor/vaccine aggregator/distributor to a fundraising organization. Very different roles. It’s easy to write a check; it’s more challenging to keep supply chains up and running at a quick pace to distribute billions of vaccines where they’re most needed.
Ultimately, COVAX and their target clients would have been better served by hiring a procurement team from a global 10 company (like, oh, a big pharma company already doing this kind of work) that understands pricing, distribution, and procurement.
The take home: don’t get your teenager who adores to eat cookies out of a tube cook the dinner for your 5 course, black tie dinner party. Haggling and procurement processes both have their place; don’t confuse the two! If in doubt, get someone on your team who understands the intricacies of what it takes to bring your desired outcome to fruition.