What We Do

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The Consensus Building Institute (CBI) improves the way leaders use negotiations to make organizational decisions, achieve agreements, and manage multiparty conflicts and planning efforts. We use proven principles, processes, and techniques that improve group decision-making on complex public and organizational issues.


Facilitate Collaboration
Leaders and communities around the world must find ways to work together to find solutions to important public issues while preserving critical relationships. Many know, all too well, the cost of prolonged public conflict — including mounting legal fees, excessive time delays, and damaged or ruined relationships.

CBI helps leaders, communities, organizations, and governments worldwide find better ways to work together on important public issues. We offer in-depth knowledge of group dynamics, multiparty negotiations, and intercultural interaction. Using mediation, facilitation, and a range of specialized tools we have developed for assessment, evaluation, process design, we help our clients integrate thought and action to achieve wiser, more stable, and fairer results.


Strengthen Organizations
More than ever, corporate and public leaders rely on highly functioning teams and well-structured strategic partnerships to achieve operational results. To succeed, they must navigate and negotiate competing team member mandates, pressure to capture more value from partners while maintaining relationships, and challenging, fast-changing market and political conditions.

CBI helps senior executives, team leaders, and relationship managers build their negotiation capacity, enabling them to achieve consistently better results in all their mission-critical interactions – both internal and external. We offer highly tailored services to address specific challenges facing an organization, its leaders, and key contributors.


Build Knowledge
CBI is unique in our field, committed to doing, teaching, and learning. CBI seeks not only to improve its own practice, but also to expand knowledge of the field through writing, thinking, and research. CBI conducts research projects focused on the use of negotiation and consensus building in a wide range of settings, and evaluates consensus building efforts and strategies. CBI has published guides for consensus building; evaluated efforts to address land use conflicts; developed the Workable Peace curriculum for use in high schools; and evaluated negotiation strategies and organizational change for corporations.

CBI is affiliated with MIT, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, and other academic institutions through its founders, Lawrence Susskind, board members, staff, and clients.