Action Needs a Thinking Partner: Why stalled negotiations need more than another proposal

Río Atrato, Colombia. Photo by Nelammog via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

In the days following the August 2026 earthquake in Colombia, I found myself tracking what was happening in Chocó.

I had felt the earthquake myself. I knew how frightening it had been from the relative safety of Medellín, and I was deeply concerned about what was happening in a part of my country that has been historically poor, predominantly Afro-Colombian and Indigenous, and too often overlooked.

So, I followed the news.

I am not an emergency manager, and I was not inside the response. I was a mediator following public information and trying to understand a contradiction.

And I started pulling at a thread.

The Colombian Aerospace Force reported transporting 22 tons of humanitarian assistance into Chocó. During that same week, a community leader in Quibdó reported that his neighborhood had received no humanitarian assistance.

Both things could be true.

Aid had arrived in the department.

Aid had not reached the people who needed it.

When those two facts sit next to each other, the question changes.

It is no longer simply:

Do we need more aid?

It becomes:

Where is the flow stopping?

Is the assistance sitting in a warehouse?

Is the next leg blocked by a damaged road, the absence of a boat, a fuel shortage or a security restriction?

Does anyone have a reliable picture of the affected communities?

Are different agencies holding different pieces of information that nobody has integrated?

I did not know which explanation was correct.

That was precisely the point.

The first reported problem—people need food—is unquestionably real. But the first reported problem does not necessarily identify the constraint preventing food from reaching them.

A military aircraft can successfully deliver aid.

A warehouse can successfully receive and inventory it.

A local government can successfully submit requests.

Every individual dashboard can look green.

Meanwhile, a community can still say:

“We have received nothing.”

The failure may not live inside any one job.

It may live in the spaces between the jobs.

And then it hit me:

I know this pattern.

I have spent years watching it unfold at bargaining tables.

The Problem Between the Problems

When a negotiation stalls, the instinct is obvious: bargain harder.

Put another proposal on the table.

Make a counterproposal.

Caucus.

Change the language.

Move the numbers.

Call the principal.

Extend the deadline.

Try again.

None of those actions is inherently wrong. Negotiations require movement. Eventually, someone has to make a proposal, take a risk, trade something, say yes or say no.

But activity can hide a harder question:

Why is all this action not producing movement?

Sometimes the answer is straightforward. The parties are too far apart. Someone lacks authority. There is not enough money. The political cost is too high.

But sometimes the parties are working harder and harder to solve the problem they think they have while the actual constraint sits somewhere underneath—or between—the stated problems.

Management says:

“The union will not move on scheduling.”

The union says:

“Management refuses to address staffing.”

Each side may be accurately describing the problem it can see.

Management may be focused on coverage, operational flexibility and supervisory discretion.

The union may be focused on workload, overtime, retention, childcare and whether there will be enough people to make any schedule work.

Both sides can be intelligent.

Both sides can be prepared.

Both sides can be working in good faith.

And the negotiation can still fail because each side is reasoning from inside its own part of the system.

The stated issue is real. It is simply not the whole problem.

Two Loops

Complex negotiations need two loops running at the same time.

The first is the visible one:

ACTION LOOP Prepare → propose → respond → counter → caucus → revise → trade → repeat

The second is less visible:

THINKING LOOP Observe → integrate information → detect patterns → challenge assumptions → identify constraints → test understanding → feed learning back into Action

This is not a distinction between people who think and people who act.

Negotiators think constantly. They have to. Each team is tracking economics, authority, risk, internal politics, workplace history, relationships and the expectations of its constituency.

The distinction is this:

The Action Loop thinks within the work. The Thinking Loop thinks across the work.

Someone has to notice that the parties are using the same word to describe different problems.

Someone has to ask whether the seventh proposal is failing for the same unexamined reason as the first six.

Someone has to integrate what one side knows with what the other side knows without pretending the parties have identical interests.

Someone has to ask whether the position on the table is the problem—or evidence about the system producing the problem.

That cross-system thinking is not a luxury. It is work.

If nobody has the bandwidth, permission and responsibility to do it, it will not reliably happen simply because everyone in the room is capable.

Urgency makes this harder.

Doing something feels better than standing still. Another proposal looks like progress.

Another caucus fills the time. Another concession creates movement.

But motion is not necessarily progress.

If twenty trucks are headed toward the wrong transfer point, adding another twenty trucks will not get aid to the community any faster.

And if six proposals have failed because the parties are negotiating an output rather than the system producing it, a seventh proposal may not move the table.

One good question might.

I Do Not Just Carry Water

Mediators are often described by what we carry.

We carry proposals.

We carry numbers.

We carry messages from one room to another.

Sometimes that is necessary. Parties may need help communicating. They may need a neutral person to deliver information, test a possible move or help them hear something they cannot yet hear directly from each other.

But if all I do is carry water back and forth, much of my value is being left outside the room.

I do not just carry the products of the parties’ thinking.

I protect and expect higher-quality thinking.

I protect it by creating conditions in which people can examine an assumption without losing face.

I make disagreement safer.

I separate the hypothesis from the person who proposed it.

I notice contradictions, missing information and words that appear to mean the same thing but do not.

I ask the person who has been quiet what they see.

I slow premature conclusions without stopping momentum.

I help the room remain curious a little longer.

And I expect more.

I do not accept repetition as reasoning.

I do not assume that confidence is evidence.

I do not treat a position as a complete explanation simply because it has been repeated all day.

I expect capable people to examine what they believe, what they know, what they are assuming and what would have to be true for their current explanation to be wrong.

Not because I believe I am the smartest person in the room.

Because I believe they are capable of thinking as well as the stakes require.

That expectation is a form of respect.

Neutral Does Not Mean Passive

The parties own the negotiation.

They know their workplace.

They decide what to disclose.

They assess risk.

They make proposals.

They accept or reject agreements.

The mediator does not command the Action Loop and does not get to announce the “real” answer.

But neutrality does not require passivity.

I can be neutral about the outcome without being neutral about the quality of the thinking used to reach it.

The parties retain decisional authority.

I hold the thinking process to a higher standard.

That means asking questions such as:

What problem are you actually trying to solve?

What are you assuming?

What evidence supports that explanation?

Are both sides solving the same problem?

What is this position trying to protect?

Why did the last proposal fail?

What information are we not integrating?

What would have to be true for your explanation to be wrong?

Sometimes those questions uncover room for movement.

Sometimes they reveal that the conflict is exactly what it appears to be.

Not every disagreement is a misunderstanding. Sometimes the issue really is money. Sometimes one side benefits from the status quo. Sometimes a proposal transfers real authority or risk. Sometimes the parties understand each other perfectly and still disagree.

Higher-quality thinking does not manufacture harmony or pretend that every conflict contains a painless win-win solution.

It allows the parties to understand, as accurately as possible, what is producing the conflict and what they are actually being asked to decide.

That is especially important when power is part of the system.

Who has access to the information?

Whose account is believed?

Who can withstand delay?

Who controls the resources?

Who bears the consequences if there is no agreement?

A mediator who refuses to examine those questions is not protecting the parties’ thinking. She is refusing to see the conflict.

The Work You Cannot Photograph

Part of the reason this function is misunderstood is that its product is often invisible.

You can photograph trucks.

You can photograph boxes of food.

You can count proposals, caucuses and tentative agreements.

It is harder to photograph the moment someone asks the question that reveals the bottleneck.

At a bargaining table, it may be the moment the parties realize that the fight over scheduling is being produced by an implementation failure from the last agreement.

It may be the moment management recognizes that what sounds like resistance to flexibility is really fear of arbitrary decision-making.

It may be the moment the union recognizes that what sounds like a refusal to hire is really a lack of authority over the budget.

The discovery does not resolve the negotiation by itself.

But now the parties are negotiating the actual problem.

That changes the value of every proposal that comes next.

The real question is structural:

Who has the bandwidth, permission and responsibility to look across the entire negotiation while everyone else is working inside it?

Who notices that the information does not match the story?

Who identifies the assumption everyone else has stopped noticing?

Who helps highly capable people remain highly capable when urgency, pressure and institutional demands are pulling their attention in ten directions at once?

That is part of the mediator’s work.

I began thinking about this while watching aid struggle to move through a disaster-response system in Chocó.

I recognized the pattern because I have seen negotiations struggle in the same way.

The parties do not always need another proposal.

Sometimes they need someone whose responsibility is to examine the thinking producing the proposals.

That is the work of a good mediator.

My job is not to tell the parties what to decide. It is to help them see the system they are deciding inside, challenge what they have stopped questioning, and expect them to think as well as the stakes require.

Too often, a mediator is brought in only after the parties have exhausted themselves repeating the same moves.

If your negotiation is generating activity but not progress, do not wait for the seventh version of the same failed proposal.

You may not need another messenger.

You may need a thinking partner.

That is the work I do.