On 11.011: The Art and Science of Negotiation

Feb 2025

People often ask me why everyone who takes 11.011 says it changed their life. You are interested, too? Then let me tell you why it is the most impactful class I’ve taken at MIT—above and beyond gems like 6.106 (Performance Engineering), 8.05 (Quantum II), 18.405 (Complexity Theory), 6.S894 (GPUs), and 21T.102 (Voice and Speech).

Caveat emptor: 11.011 is a class about books and soul searching. It is designed to count for precisely nothing in your graduation requirements, except for a generic humanities. The class is hard work: typically 100 pages to read per week, 1000 words to write per week. Of course, it won’t feel like that: it will feel like there is no more useful way you could imagine to spend your time than to read these pages and write these words. Still, do not take the class because it is famous. Take the class because you are curious about the field of negotiation, or because you care about becoming a better person and using what you learn to improve the world.

So, what is 11.011? Aside from a class number that is both binary and palindromic?

The story begins with Professor Bruno Verdini, the best lecturer I have ever seen teach at MIT. The first time I met him—though I did not realize it at the time—was well before I arrived at MIT. It was in my sophomore year of high school. An alumnus of 11.011 named Drew Bent had just graduated MIT and taught at my school. I was agonizing over how to get a summer job at the company of my dreams—Khan Academy, which touches the lives of millions through free, world-class education—even though I was only 15 years old. One afternoon, Drew coached me based on his “favorite class at MIT, called 11.011.” He helped me see from the other side’s perspective. We brainstormed creative options, like me working on creating math content so that I needed less supervision. That afternoon changed my life because by evening time we had physically walked to the Khan Academy office and gotten me a summer job. Professor Verdini has the same effect as he had on Drew on his hundreds of other alumni, who are inspired and empowered to touch more lives by second degree connections.

Still, I did not know that Professor Verdini’s classroom was the locus of the people I admired most until the fall of 2022, when I took 11.011. It is difficult to strike the right note describing Professor Verdini’s classroom to someone who has not sat in it before. In fact, I can’t reveal too much! The live negotiations need to stay secret so that future cohorts can experience them.

But I can describe a few things about 11.011. What is apparent immediately is that Professor Verdini is eloquent. Fully formed essays seem to flow from his lips, even when answering a student’s question on the spot. But it is also apparent that Bruno Verdini does not hold lectures; the word session is more accurate, because the learning flow in class consists of three modes, none of which is a one-directional lecture. The three modes are (1) reading, (2) live practice, (3) reflection.

(1) Before each class session you read several selected chapters. The authors convey great wisdom and great ideas. Already the inner themes of 11.011 might begin to seep out: a paradigm that says, “When you and I come together, we can both leave better off than when we began.” You might begin to grasp some counterintuitive opposites, like that the best way to be selfish is to be selfless. Truth is freedom. Vulnerability is strength. Ethics is power. And the most important currency of all is trust. These are highly digested forms of the raw data the readings will put you through. But no matter how many good ideas your eyes look at, your body won’t learn to apply them unless you apply them. That motivates the second pillar of 11.011.

(2) Every Monday, you role-play in a high-stakes, live negotiation with a peer. At first it starts simple: one of you is buying, one of you is selling. Who can get the better price? But as the weeks go on the live negotiations get more involved to the point where you are negotiating between multiple people representing entire organizations, sometimes entire countries, where the “best” deal is not even clearly defined. This live practice forces you out of theory and into the grimy reality of lies and misdirection, or miraculous joint successes. It is time for practicing strategies outside the book—as delicate as communicating intention, interest, or calm through body language. Yet every week this live practice is seeded with the great ideas that are written down in books.

(3) Every Wednesday, in the class-wide debrief, there arises a most peculiar feature, available nowhere else in the world but in a negotiation classroom. While you have sold your house for $500,000, your friend has sold it for $900,000—precisely the same fictitious house, precisely the same roles, and yet you reached different deals. When else can you reflect on your negotiated outcome while looking at twenty independent outcomes—some of them disappointing, others astonishingly creative—influenced only by the choices each group makes? The power of all this raw data, all this raw experience, sinks in even more by the time the negotiations become more complex. Yet still the experience in you is raw. There is no class on Friday, because on Friday you collect up this raw experience and reflect on it. Are you the kind of person who will lie? How did you feel if someone lied to you? How will you incorporate this feeling, woven together with insights from the week’s readings, into your personal negotiation playbook going forward? Who will you be? Who do you want to be? Write it up in 1000 words.

These are the mechanics but still not nearly the soul of 11.011. Happily, I cannot tell you what that is. It is a secret, and anyway it wouldn’t mean much if I said it and you hadn’t experienced it. The essence of it is grappling with what life means to you and how you wish to act in life, and still that does not capture it. Wrestling through it yourself is the only way I know of to understand it.

To all of you who may wish to take 11.011: go on and preregister over the summer. The class is severely oversubscribed, which is why there is a lottery to enter. Everything is explained in Professor Verdini’s wonderful 25-page syllabus. Put some effort into the entrance essays.

If you want a taste of negotiation beforehand, either find a copy of the book that started it all—Getting to Yes by Fisher and Ury—or look into Professor Curhan’s lovely 3-day crash course over IAP, called Negotiation Analysis.

Professor Verdini and the teaching team put a lot of effort and care into the class. If you have the space in your semester to reciprocate that effort and care, 11.011 will be an experience like no other. I shouldn’t say such things because ideally you would not know anything when you entered the classroom. You would experience it all for the first time.

But I’ve written down parts of the story anyway, so here's the deal. I want you to remember that the course thrives on the reciprocal care you give it. Much of the work is in your own head, grappling with the ethics and dreams of everyday life. Much of the work is reading. If you skip either one, the class will disappoint you. Worse, you will disappoint your peers whose learning depends on you showing up prepared. So enter the class with an open mind. Try not to bring too many expectations. If you do all this, 11.011 has the potential to empower you not only with the skills to accomplish great things, but with the belief that great things are possible to accomplish.

The world needs leaders. The world needs negotiators.

The world needs mind, hand, and heart.

Those are, in summary, 11.011.