a 17 b Adapting to the Adaptive: How Can We Teach Negotiation for Wicked Problems? Jayne Seminare Docherty & Leonard Lira * Editors’ Note: This chapter picks up where the “wicked problems team” left off in Venturing Beyond the Classroom: with the need to formulate effective teaching strategies for an exceptionally im- portant area of inquiry, in which our understanding is, as yet, far short of perfection. Docherty and Lira are examples of professionals whose students cannot wait for anything close to perfection: both in peacebuilding and in the military, a professional must work with the understanding that is available. It is signiicant that in their very dif- ferent environments, Docherty and Lira have been learning from each other, adapting ideas from the military into peacebuilding and vice versa, in order to formulate teaching programs that can work even within the single perspective of either discipline. Their experiments are groundbreaking, and of importance to many other professional ields. Introduction In prior writings in this series (Chrustie et al. 2010; Honeyman and Coben 2010; Docherty 2010; Lira 2010), we and our colleagues in the “wicked problems team” explored the nature of wicked or adaptive * Jayne Seminare Docherty is a professor at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Her irst book Learning Lessons from Waco was an analysis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s attempt at hostage negotiation with the Branch Davidian sect, and her subsequent work has frequently involved the intersection and relation- ships between uniformed forces and civil society, ethnic minorities, and religious groups. Her email address is jayne.docherty@gmail.com. Leonard Lira is a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army and an assistant professor in the Department of Joint, Interagency, and Multinational Operations of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. His email address is leonard.lira@ us.army.mil.