Fisher and Ury split positions from interests in 1981. Forty years later, almost no software implements the distinction. Here is what happens when you do.
Fisher and Ury published Getting to Yes in 1981. The central claim — that parties to a negotiation often arrive at better outcomes when they move from positions to interests — is now uncontroversial in mediation theory. Four decades later, almost no software implements the distinction.
The position is what a party says they want. "I want a 20% raise." "I want a private office." "The corridor must be closed." The interest is what the position is trying to secure. "I want compensation that reflects my contribution." "I need a workspace where I can focus." "My community needs a guarantee that supply lines cannot be cut." Positions are narrow and oppositional; interests are broader and, often, compatible across parties.
Why does this matter for the graph? Because the same text that produces a position also contains the interest, almost always. But the interest has to be inferred — from surrounding context, from what the party did not say, from what the other side’s position would mean for this party’s situation. A system that only extracts explicit claims will miss every interest, and every resolution that lives underneath the positions.
The ACO treats Position and Interest as distinct primitives with a typed link between them. This has two practical consequences. First, extraction prompts can ask for the Interest explicitly — and fail transparently when the interest cannot be inferred from the evidence, rather than guessing and pretending. Second, graph queries can look for interest overlaps across parties, which is where resolution lives.
The honest caveat: interest inference is interpretive. Two good-faith annotators will disagree on whether a particular interest was correctly inferred from a source span. The ACO handles this by tiering the field: stated, inferred-with-citation, or analyst-reconstructed. Each tier carries a different confidence level and is surfaced explicitly to the user. Better to be calibrated than to be wrong with false precision.