Employees in a negotiation training workshop are chatting happily in a company cafeteria near San Francisco. They're not on break. They're on assignment. Their objective: to discover three things they didn't know--and wouldn't have guessed--about each other. The exercise isn't about the information, though. It's about the methods they used to get the information, and how those same techniques can be used to identify commonalities to ease negotiations of all types. Although negotiation affects virtually every aspect of life, the skills rarely are taught. Today, many companies in the San Francisco Bay area are turning to the art of improvisation to teach conflict resolution and to improve communications among their executives. Success in negotiation, as well as in improvisation, depends not only on listening to speakers' words, but also on observing their non-verbal cues. Negotiation is all about building rapport. People do business with those they know, like, and trust.