The second stage of a negotiation course almost always turns on the distinction that makes everything after it possible: a position is what a party says they want, and an interest is why they want it. Positions collide by design; interests frequently do not. The written work here is an analysis in which every party to your practice change appears twice, once at the level of what they have said and once at the level of what they are protecting. Your section may print this as NR 719 or NR719; it is the same course. Chamberlain publishes no syllabi outside Canvas. The placement here is our teaching judgment from the course's catalog arc; your section's rubric decides what your week actually asks.
What NR-719 Week 2 asks for
A telehealth heart failure program wanted to move diuretic titration to a protocol run by nurse practitioners between clinic visits. The clinical pharmacist assigned to the program objected, and his stated position was that every dose change should route through pharmacy review before it reached the patient. Read as a position, that is a straightforward obstacle: it doubles the turnaround on a program whose entire value is same-day adjustment. Read as an interest, it is something else. Two years earlier the same pharmacist had been named in a medication event review after a potassium supplement was continued alongside a dose change nobody flagged. His interest was not control of titration. It was never being the person who did not see it. That distinction had a solution in it, and the position did not: the program built an automated electrolyte flag with pharmacy visibility on exception, and the objection dissolved without anyone winning an argument.
That is the analytic move this stage is built around. The written deliverable typically asks you to map the parties to your practice change and analyze what each one wants and why, sometimes as a stakeholder analysis, sometimes as a negotiation preparation document, sometimes as a discussion response about a conflict you have witnessed. The shape varies; the graded content does not.
Doctoral-level performance here has a specific signature. It is not enough to guess at interests from a chair. Interests are inferred from evidence: what a role is measured on, what it is accountable for, what it has been penalized for before, where its budget sits, what its regulator requires. A paper that identifies a pharmacist's interest as patient safety has said nothing, because everyone in the building would claim that interest. A paper that identifies it as personal exposure in a documented review process has said something that can be acted on.
Watch the register too. Interest analysis reads as cynical when written carelessly, and graders notice. The point is not that colleagues have hidden agendas; it is that people are correctly loyal to obligations you may not have accounted for. Written generously, this analysis makes the other party look rational. Written badly, it makes them look self-serving, and it is the writer who ends up looking small.
The NR-719 Week 2 method, step by step
Six moves for building an interest map that a grader can check.
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List every party whose work changes, not just whose approval you need
Approval and adoption are different lists. A change approved by a medical director but executed by unit secretaries, respiratory therapists and a scheduling team has three parties who never appear in a weak stakeholder table and who can quietly refuse.
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Record each stated position in the party's own words
Quote or paraphrase what has actually been said, from a meeting, an email or a conversation, and mark clearly where you are inferring rather than reporting. The distinction between what was said and what you believe is itself a scored form of precision.
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Derive the interest from what the role is measured on
Look at the metrics, the budget line, the regulatory exposure and the last time the role was in trouble. Interests inferred from structure are defensible; interests inferred from personality are speculation and read as such.
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Separate the interest that is threatened from the one that is merely present
Every party holds several interests, and your proposal usually touches one. Name which one your change puts at risk and by how much, since that is the interest the negotiation will be about and the rest are context.
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Find the interests that are compatible rather than opposed
Write the pairs. Where your change serves an interest the other party already holds, the request becomes theirs to want. Most workable agreements are found here rather than in persuasion, and this is the paragraph that separates a strong paper from a competent one.
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Convert each threatened interest into a design requirement
If exposure is the interest, visibility on exception is a requirement. If throughput is the interest, no added minutes at the bedside is a requirement. A list of requirements is the practical output of interest analysis and the input to everything you negotiate next.
A layout and word budget for a stakeholder interest analysis
Our frame for this stage, sized for roughly 1,000 to 1,300 words with a table carrying the party-by-party detail. This outline is ours rather than anything the university issues, and your week's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree.
| Section | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| The change, restated in one paragraph | The ask from your opening work, compressed, so the analysis has a fixed object. | 70 to 100 |
| Party inventory | Every role that approves, executes or absorbs the change, with what each controls and what each cannot stop. | 170 to 210 |
| Positions as stated | What has been said, attributed to a role, with reported and inferred content clearly distinguished. | 180 to 220 |
| Interests, with their evidence | The obligation, metric or exposure behind each position, and how you know it rather than how you feel about it. | 250 to 300 |
| Compatible and opposed pairs | Where interests overlap with yours and where they genuinely conflict, named separately. | 180 to 220 |
| Design requirements | Each threatened interest turned into a condition your proposal must satisfy to be acceptable. | 150 to 200 |
Evidence craft for interest analysis
Cite the negotiation and organizational literature by name. The position and interest distinction, integrative versus distributive bargaining, and the role of framing in agreement are all published concepts with attributable sources and years. Using them without attribution is the fastest way to lose a support row while appearing to know the material.
Infer interests from structure and say what the structure is. Write that the service is accountable for the observation-status conversion rate and that the proposed pathway lengthens the observation window, rather than writing that the service is protective of its numbers. The first version can be verified, argued with and designed around. The second is an opinion about people.
Mark the boundary between reported and inferred throughout. Phrases such as stated in the July workgroup and, on the available evidence, likely to be protecting do different work, and mixing them lets a grader believe you are reporting speech you actually invented. Doctoral writing keeps that line visible.
De-identify colleagues and patients alike. Roles, not names; situations stripped of the detail that would identify a unit, a patient or an event. A negotiation analysis that could be recognized by the people in it is a document you should not have written down.
Attach a number to a claimed burden wherever one exists. If a party objects that the change adds work, find the minutes, the touches, the additional documentation fields or the extra pages. An objection with a measured size can be traded against; an objection stated as too much work cannot.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- Interests written as virtues. Patient safety and quality care describe everyone and distinguish nobody. If two parties in your table share an interest, you have not found their interests yet.
- Motive attribution. Writing that a director resists because he dislikes nursing autonomy converts analysis into accusation and is unverifiable either way.
- A table with no reasoning under it. A stakeholder grid pasted in without a paragraph explaining how each interest was inferred reads as a template exercise.
- Only opposed interests mapped. Papers that treat every party as an obstacle miss the compatible pairs, which is where the agreement was available.
- No output. An analysis that ends with the map has stopped one move early; the design requirements are what make it leadership work rather than description.
Before you submit
- Parties who execute the change appear alongside parties who approve it
- Every position is attributed to a role and marked as reported or inferred
- Each interest names the obligation, metric or exposure behind it
- At least one compatible interest pair is identified and used
- Negotiation concepts are cited with authors and years, not borrowed silently
- No individual is named or characterized by motive
- The analysis closes with design requirements, not with the map
Mapping stakeholders for NR-719?
Send the rubric and your case out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with interests derived from accountability rather than guessed at, and revisions run until the grade lands.