Negotiators tend to concentrate too closely on the here and now. By incorporating future concerns into your talks, you’ll make sounder decisions and guard against crises.

In the midst of the current U.S.financial crisis, accusations of greed on Wall Street have sounded across the globe. Greed may be a significant factor in the collapse of credit markets, but it’s not the only one. Overlooked in cries to punish the “bad apples” is the role of a mistake that virtually all negotiators make: ignoring how our short-term decisions will affect us and others in the future.In their book Predictable Surprises:The Disasters You Should HaveSeen Coming and How to PreventThem (Harvard Business SchoolPress, 2004), Max H. Bazerman and Michael D. Watkins describe the financial scandals of 2001 and 2002that led to the fall of Enron, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, and other companies.They label such crises “predictable surprises”—disasters that shock those involved even though they had the information needed to anticipate them.