Collaboration and negotiation is hard enough in business, and its particularly hard to do in the pressurized legislation development over the past week as we've all witnessed. Here's a new suggestion to allow a deal to bake at human speed.
Collect all the BlackBerry's so no one can email/leak what's happening.
According to the Wall Street Journal, extraordinary measures to assure isolation of closed door meetings did reduce the tension in one particular high-pressure meeting on Sunday:
The House speaker's office was furious about leaks coming out of Saturday's afternoon meeting. In order for Capitol Hill aides to stay in the meeting, they had to hand over their BlackBerrys, said one participant. A Pelosi staffer walked through the meeting with a trashcan. The devices were later put on a table with Post-it notes identifying each owner.
