Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
“I’m sorry, Robert, how do I know he’s even alive?” I said, using an apology and his first name, seeding more warmth into the interaction in order to complicate his gambit to bulldoze me. “I really am sorry, but how can I get you any money right now, much less one million dollars, if I don’t even know he’s alive?”
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I was employing what had become one of the FBI’s most potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.
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The Black Swan Group, we call this tactic calibrated questions: queries that the other side can respond to but that have no fixed answers. It buys you time. It gives your counterpart the illusion of control—they are the one with the answers and power after all—and it does all that without giving them any idea of how constrained they are by it.
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the frame of the conversation had shifted from how I’d respond to the threat of my son’s murder to how the professor would deal with the logistical issues involved in getting the money.
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How he would solve my problems. To
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Andy would throw out an offer and give a rationally airtight explanation for why it was a good one—an inescapable logic trap—and I’d answer with some variation of “How am I supposed to do that?”
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While I wasn’t actually saying “No,” the questions I kept asking sounded like it. They seemed to insinuate that the other side was being dishonest and unfair. And that was enough to make them falter and negotiate with themselves.
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“I’m just asking questions,” I said. “It’s a passive-aggressive approach. I just ask the same three or four open-ended questions over and over and over and over. They get worn out answering and give me everything I want.”
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authoritative acronyms like BATNA and ZOPA, rational notions of value, and a moral concept of what was fair and what was not. And
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Getting to Yes,2 a groundbreaking treatise on negotiation that totally
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Their core assumption was that the emotional brain—that animalistic, unreliable, and irrational beast—could be overcome through a more rational, joint problem-solving mindset.
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One, separate the person—the emotion—from the problem; two, don’t get wrapped up in the other side’s position (what they’re asking for) but instead focus on their interests (why they’re asking for it) so that you can find what they really want; three, work cooperatively to generate win-win options; and, four, establish mutually agreed-upon standards for evaluating those possible solutions.
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the Framing Effect, which demonstrates that people respond differently to the same choice depending on how it is framed (people place greater value on moving from 90 percent to 100 percent—high probability to certainty—than from 45 percent to 55 percent, even though they’re both ten percentage points).
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Loss Aversion, which shows how people are statistically more likely to act to avert a loss than to achieve an equal gain. Kahneman later codified his research in the 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow.3 Man, he wrote, has two systems of thought: System 1, our animal mind, is fast, instinctive, and emotional; System 2 is slow, deliberative, and logical. And System 1 is far more influential. In fact, it guides and steers our rational thoughts. System 1’s inchoate beliefs, feelings, and impressions are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. They’re the spring that feeds the river. We react emotionally (System 1) to a suggestion or question. Then that System 1 reaction informs and in effect creates the System 2 answer.
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From that moment onward, our emphasis would have to be not on training in quid pro quo bargaining and problem solving, but on education in the psychological skills needed in crisis intervention situations. Emotions and emotional intelligence would have to be central to effective negotiation, not things to be overcome. What were needed were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our empathy. We needed something easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute.
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It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.
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Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to the calm and logical place where they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.
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Tactical Empathy. This is listening as a martial art, balancing the subtle behaviors of emotional intelligence and the assertive skills of influence, to gain access to the mind of another person. Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do.
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Negotiation serves two distinct, vital life functions—information gathering and behavior influencing—and includes almost any interaction where each party wants something from the other side. Your career, your finances, your reputation, your love life, even the fate of your kids—at some point all of these hinge on your ability to negotiate.
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Effective negotiation is applied people smarts, a psychological edge in every domain of life: how to size someone up, how to influence their sizing up of you, and how to use that knowledge to get what you want. But beware: this is not
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No. A successful hostage negotiator has to get everything he asks for, without giving anything back of substance, and do so in a way that leaves the adversaries feeling as if they have a great relationship.
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Great negotiators are able to question the assumptions that the rest of the involved players accept on faith or in arrogance, and thus remain more emotionally open to all possibilities, and more intellectually agile to a fluid situation.
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I hadn’t yet learned to be aware of a counterpart’s overuse of personal pronouns—we/they or me/I. The less important he makes himself, the more important he probably is (and vice versa).
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We are easily distracted. We engage in selective listening, hearing only what we want to hear, our minds acting on a cognitive bias for consistency rather than truth. And that’s just the start. Most people approach a negotiation so preoccupied by the arguments that support their position that they are unable to listen attentively. In one of the most cited research papers in psychology,1 George A. Miller persuasively put forth the idea that we can process only about seven pieces of information in our conscious mind at any given moment. In other words, we are easily overwhelmed.
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Instead of prioritizing your argument—in fact, instead of doing any thinking at all in the early goings about what you’re going to say—make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. In that mode of true active listening—aided by the tactics you’ll learn in the following chapters—you’ll disarm your counterpart. You’ll make them feel safe.
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The goal is to identify what your counterparts actually need (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) and get them feeling safe enough to talk and talk and talk some more about what they want.
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Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard and we risk undermining the rapport and trust we’ve built. There’s plenty of research that now validates the passage of time as one of the most important tools for a negotiator. When you slow the process down, you also calm it down.
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I didn’t put it like a question. I made a downward-inflecting statement, in a downward-inflecting tone of voice. The best way to describe the late-night FM DJ’s voice is as the voice of calm and reason. When deliberating on a negotiating strategy or approach, people tend to focus all their energies on what to say or do, but it’s how we are (our general demeanor and delivery) that is both the easiest thing to enact and the most immediately effective mode of influence.
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When we radiate warmth and acceptance, conversations just seem to flow. When we enter a room with a level of comfort and enthusiasm, we attract people toward us. Smile at someone on the street, and as a reflex they’ll smile back. Understanding that reflex and putting it into practice is critical to the success of just about every negotiating skill there is to learn.
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When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). It applies to the smile-er as much as to the smile-ee: a smile on your face, and in your voice, will increase your own mental agility.
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You can be very direct and to the point as long as you create safety by a tone of voice that says I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s figure things out.
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Mirroring, also called isopraxism, is essentially imitation. It’s another neurobehavior humans (and other animals) display in which we copy each other to comfort each other. It can be done with speech patterns, body language, vocabulary, tempo, and tone of voice. It’s generally an unconscious behavior—we are rarely aware of it when it’s happening—but it’s a sign that people are bonding, in sync, and establishing the kind of rapport that leads to trust. It’s a phenomenon (and now technique) that follows a very basic but profound biological principle: We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar.
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It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective. By
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The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.
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If you take a pit bull approach with another pit bull, you generally end up with a messy scene and lots of bruised feelings and resentment. Luckily, there’s another way without all the mess. It’s just four simple steps: 1. Use the late-night FM DJ voice. 2. Start with “I’m sorry . . .” 3. Mirror. 4. Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on your counterpart. 5. Repeat.
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“I’m sorry, two copies?” she mirrored in response, remembering not only the DJ voice, but to deliver the mirror in an inquisitive tone. The intention behind most mirrors should be “Please, help me understand.” Every time you mirror someone, they will reword what they’ve said. They will never say it exactly the same way they said it the first time. Ask someone, “What do you mean by that?” and you’re likely to incite irritation or defensiveness. A mirror, however, will get you the clarity you want while signaling respect and concern for what the other person is saying. “Yes,” her boss responded, “one for us and one for the customer.” “I’m sorry, so you are saying that the client is asking for a copy and we need a copy for internal use?” “Actually, I’ll check with the client—they haven’t asked for anything. But I definitely want a copy. That’s just how I do business.” “Absolutely,” she responded. “Thanks for checking with the customer. Where would you like to store the in-house copy? There’s no more space in the file room here.” “It’s fine. You can store it anywhere,” he said, slightly perturbed now. “Anywhere?” she mirrored again, with calm concern. When another person’s tone of voice or body language is inconsistent with his words, a good mirror can be particularly useful. In this case, it caused her boss to take a nice, long pause—something he did not often do. My student sat silent. “As a matter of fact, you can put them in my office,” he said, with more composure than he’d had the whole conversation. “I’ll get the new assistant to print it for me after the project is done. For now, just create two digital backups.” A day later her boss emailed and wrote simply, “The two digital backups will be fine.”
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The language of negotiation is primarily a language of conversation and rapport: a way of quickly establishing relationships and getting people to talk and think together.
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good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find. ■ Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously.
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People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. ■ To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. ■ Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built.
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■ Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart.
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But think about that: How can you separate people from the problem when their emotions are the problem?
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Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window. That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them.
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You can learn almost everything you need—and a lot more than other people would like you to know—simply by watching and listening, keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your mouth shut.
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Think about the therapist’s couch as you read the following sections. You’ll see how a soothing voice, close listening, and a calm repetition of the words of your “patient” can get you a lot further than a cold, rational argument.
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Instead, I imagined myself in their place. “It looks like you don’t want to come out,” I said repeatedly. “It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.”
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In my negotiating course, I tell my students that empathy is “the ability to recognize the perspective of a counterpart, and the vocalization of that recognition.” That’s an academic way of saying that empathy is paying attention to another human being, asking what they are feeling, and making a commitment to understanding their world.
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Most of us enter verbal combat unlikely to persuade anyone of anything because we only know and care about our own goals and perspective.
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We didn’t just put ourselves in the fugitives’ shoes. We spotted their feelings, turned them into words, and then very calmly and respectfully repeated their emotions back to them. In a negotiation, that’s called labeling. Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels.
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Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack.
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For most people, it’s one of the most awkward negotiating tools to use. Before they try it the first time, my students almost always tell me they expect their counterpart to jump up and shout, “Don’t you dare tell me how I feel!” Let me let you in on a secret: people never even notice.
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Once you’ve spotted an emotion you want to highlight, the next step is to label it aloud. Labels can be phrased as statements or questions. The only difference is whether you end the sentence with a downward or upward inflection. But no matter how they end, labels almost always begin with roughly the same words: It seems like . . . It sounds like . . . It looks like . . . Notice we said “It sounds like . . .” and not “I’m hearing that . . .” That’s because the word “I” gets people’s guard up. When you say “I,” it says you’re more interested in yourself than the other person, and it makes you take personal responsibility for the words that follow—and the offense they might cause. But when you phrase a label as a neutral statement of understanding, it encourages your counterpart to be responsive.
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The last rule of labeling is silence. Once you’ve thrown out a label, be quiet and listen. We all have a tendency to expand on what we’ve said, to finish, “It seems like you like the way that shirt looks,” with a specific question like “Where did you get it?” But a label’s power is that it invites the other person to reveal himself.
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Imagine a grandfather who’s grumbly at a family holiday dinner: the presenting behavior is that he’s cranky, but the underlying emotion is a sad sense of loneliness from his family never seeing him. What good negotiators do when labeling is address those underlying emotions. Labeling negatives diffuses them (or defuses them, in extreme cases); labeling positives reinforces them.
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As an emotion, anger is rarely productive—in you or the person you’re negotiating with. It releases stress hormones and neurochemicals that disrupt your ability to properly evaluate and respond to situations. And it blinds you to the fact that you’re angry in the first place, which gives you a false sense of confidence. That’s not to say that negative feelings should be ignored. That can be just as damaging. Instead, they should be teased out. Labeling is a helpful tactic in de-escalating angry confrontations, because it makes the person acknowledge their feelings rather than continuing to act out.
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Try this the next time you have to apologize for a bone-headed mistake. Go right at it. The fastest and most efficient means of establishing a quick working relationship is to acknowledge the negative and diffuse it. Whenever
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And when I make a mistake—something that happens a lot—I always acknowledge the other person’s anger. I’ve found the phrase “Look, I’m an asshole” to be an amazingly effective way to make problems go away.
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Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts. One
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“I wanted to inform you,” it read, “that in order to receive your tickets for the upcoming season opener against the New York Giants, you will need to pay your outstanding balance in full prior to September 10.” It was the stupidly aggressive, impersonal, tone-deaf style of communication that is the default for most business. It was all “me, me, me” from TJ, with no acknowledgment of the ticket holder’s situation. No empathy. No connection. Just give me the money. Maybe I don’t need to say it, but the script didn’t work. TJ left messages; no one called back.
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the faster we can interrupt the amygdala’s reaction to real or imaginary threats, the faster we can clear the road of obstacles, and the quicker we can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust. We do that by labeling the fears. These labels are so powerful because they bathe the fears in sunlight, bleaching them of their power and showing our counterpart that we understand.
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By digging beneath what seems like a mountain of quibbles, details, and logistics, labels help to uncover and identify the primary emotion driving almost all of your counterpart’s behavior, the emotion that, once acknowledged, seems to miraculously solve everything else. DO AN ACCUSATION AUDIT On
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I always end up with more volunteers than I need. Now, look at what I did: I prefaced the conversation by labeling my audience’s fears; how much worse can something be than “horrible”? I defuse them and wait, letting it sink in and thereby making the unreasonable seem less forbidding.
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The first step of doing so is listing every terrible thing your counterpart could say about you, in what I call an accusation audit.
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Anna opened by acknowledging ABC’s biggest gripes. “We understand that we brought you on board with the shared goal of having you lead this work,” she said. “You may feel like we have treated you unfairly, and that we changed the deal significantly since then. We acknowledge that you believe you were promised this work.”
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“What else is there you feel is important to add to this?” By labeling the fears and asking for input, Anna was able to elicit an important fact about ABC’s fears, namely that ABC was expecting this to be a high-profit contract because it thought Anna’s firm was doing quite well from the deal.
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Watch what they do closely, as it’s brilliant: they acknowledge ABC’s situation while simultaneously shifting the onus of offering a solution to the smaller company. “It sounds like you have a great handle on how the government contract should work,” Anna said, labeling Angela’s expertise. “Yes—but I know that’s not how it always goes,” Angela answered, proud to have her experience acknowledged. Anna then asked Angela how she would amend the contract so that everyone made some money, which pushed Angela to admit that she saw no way to do so without cutting ABC’s worker count.
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To start, watch how Ryan turns that heated exchange to his advantage. Following on the heels of an argument is a great position for a negotiator, because your counterpart is desperate for an empathetic connection. Smile, and you’re already an improvement. “Hi, Wendy, I’m Ryan. It seems like they were pretty upset.” This labels the negative and establishes a rapport based on empathy. This in turn encourages Wendy to elaborate on her situation, words Ryan then mirrors to invite her to go further. “Yeah. They missed their connection. We’ve had a fair amount of delays because of the weather.”
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After Wendy explains how the delays in the Northeast had rippled through the system, Ryan again labels the negative and then mirrors her answer to encourage her to delve further. “It seems like it’s been a hectic day.” “There’ve been a lot of ‘irate consumers,’ you know? I mean, I get it, even though I don’t like to be yelled at. A lot of people are trying to get to Austin for the big game.” “The big game?” “UT is playing Ole Miss football and every flight into Austin has been booked solid.” “Booked solid?” Now let’s pause. Up to this point, Ryan has been using labels and mirrors to build a relationship with Wendy. To her it must seem like idle chatter, though, because he hasn’t asked for anything. Unlike the angry couple, Ryan is acknowledging her situation. His words ping-pong between “What’s that?” and “I hear you,” both of which invite her to elaborate. Now that the empathy has been built, she lets slip a piece of information he can use. “Yeah, all through the weekend.
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Here’s where Ryan finally swoops in with an ask. But notice how he acts: not assertive or coldly logical, but with empathy and labeling that acknowledges her situation and tacitly puts them in the same boat. “Well, it seems like you’ve been handling the rough day pretty well,” he says. “I was also affected by the weather delays and missed my connecting flight. It seems like this flight is likely booked solid, but with what you said, maybe someone affected by the weather might miss this connection. Is there any possibility a seat will be open?” Listen to that riff: Label, tactical empathy, label. And only then a request.
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As you try to insert the tools of tactical empathy into your daily life, I encourage you to think of them as extensions of natural human interactions and not artificial conversational tics.
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Imagine yourself in your counterpart’s situation. The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas (you may well find them crazy). But by acknowledging the other person’s situation, you immediately convey that you are listening. And once they know that you are listening, they may tell you something that you can use. ■ The reasons why a counterpart will not make an agreement with you are often more powerful than why they will make a deal, so focus first on clearing the barriers to agreement. Denying barriers or negative influences gives them credence; get them into the open.
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Pause. After you label a barrier or mirror a statement, let it sink in. Don’t worry, the other party will fill the silence. ■ Label your counterpart’s fears to diffuse their power. We all want to talk about the happy stuff, but remember, the faster you interrupt action in your counterpart’s amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear, the faster you can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust. ■ List the worst things that the other party could say about you and say them before the other person can. Performing an accusation audit in advance prepares you to head off negative dynamics before they take root. And because these accusations often sound exaggerated when said aloud, speaking them will encourage the other person to claim that quite the opposite is true. ■ Remember you’re dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood. So use labels to reinforce and encourage positive perceptions and dynamics.
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“Yes” and “Maybe” are often worthless. But “No” always alters the conversation.
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all related to negotiation?” “No.” “Looks like you answered your own question,” she said. “No. Now go away.” “Go away?” I protested. “Really?” “Yep. As in, ‘Leave me alone.’ Everybody wants to be a hostage negotiator, and you have no résumé, experience, or skills. So what would you say in my position? You got it: ‘No.’” I paused in front of her, thinking, This is not how my negotiating career ends. I had stared down terrorists; I wasn’t going to just leave. “Come on,” I said. “There has to be something I can do.” Amy shook her head and gave one of those ironic laughs that mean the person doesn’t think you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell. “I’ll tell you what. Yes, there is something you can do: Volunteer at a suicide hotline. Then come talk to me. No guarantees, got it?” she said. “Now, seriously, go away.”
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started to see that while people played the game of conversation, it was in the game beneath the game, where few played, that all the leverage lived. In our chat, I saw how the word “No”—so apparently clear and direct—really wasn’t so simple. Over the years, I’ve thought back repeatedly to that conversation, replaying how Amy so quickly turned me down, again and again. But her “No’s” were just the gateway to “Yes.” They gave her—and me—time to pivot, adjust, and reexamine, and actually created the environment for the one “Yes” that mattered.
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At first, I thought that sort of automated response signaled a failure of imagination. But then I realized I did the same thing with my teenage son, and that after I’d said “No” to him, I often found that I was open to hearing what he had to say. That’s because having protected myself, I could relax and more easily…
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Jim Camp, in his excellent book, Start with NO,1 counsels the reader to give their adversary (his word for counterpart) permission to say “No” from the outset of a negotiation. He calls it “the right to veto.” He observes that people will fight to the death to preserve their right to say “No,” so give them that right and the…
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When I read Camp’s book, I realized this was something we’d known as hostage negotiators for years. We’d learned that the quickest way to get a hostage-taker out was to take the time to talk them out, as opposed to “demanding” their surrender. Demanding their surrender, “telling” them to come out, always ended up…
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It comes down to the deep and universal human need for autonomy. People need to feel in control. When you preserve a person’s autonomy by clearly giving them permission to say “No” to your ideas, the emotions calm, the effectiveness of the decisions go up, and the other party can really look at your proposal. They’re allowed to hold it in their hands, to turn it around. And it gives you time to elaborate or pivot in order to convince your counterpart that the change you’re proposing is more…
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Politely saying “No” to your opponent (we’ll go into this in more depth in Chapter 9), calmly hearing “No,” and just letting the other side know that they are welcome to say “No” has a positive impact on any negotiation. In fact, your invitation for the other side to say “No” has an…
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Then, after pausing, ask solution-based questions or simply label their effect: “What about this doesn’t work for you?” “What would you need to make it work?” “It seems like there’s something here that bothers you.” People have a need to say, “No.” So don’t just hope to hear it at some point; get them to say it early.
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His negotiation style is all me, me, me, ego, ego, ego. And when the people on the other side of the table pick up those signals, they’re going to decide that it’s best to politely, even furtively, ignore this Superman . . . by saying “Yes”! “Huh?” you say. Sure, the word they’ll say right off is “Yes,” but that word is only a tool to get this blowhard to go away. They’ll weasel out later, claiming changing conditions, budget issues, the weather. For now, they just want to be released because Joe isn’t convincing them of anything; he’s only convincing himself. I’ll let you in on a secret. There are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment. A counterfeit “yes” is one in which your counterpart plans on saying “no” but either feels “yes” is an easier escape route or just wants to disingenuously keep the conversation going to obtain more information or some other kind of edge. A confirmation “yes” is generally innocent, a reflexive response to a black-or-white question; it’s sometimes used to lay a trap but mostly it’s just simple affirmation with no promise of action. And a commitment “yes” is the real deal; it’s a true agreement that leads to action, a “yes” at the table that ends with a signature on the contract. The commitment “yes” is what you want, but the three types sound almost the same so you have to learn how to recognize which one is being used.
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the only way to get these callers to take action was to have them own the conversation, to believe that they were coming to these conclusions, to these necessary next steps, and that the voice at the other end was simply a medium for those realizations. Using all your skills to create rapport, agreement, and connection with a counterpart is useful, but ultimately that connection is useless unless the other person feels that they are equally as responsible, if not solely responsible, for creating the connection and the new ideas they have.
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Got it, you say. It’s not about me. We need to persuade from their perspective, not ours. But how? By starting with their most basic wants. In every negotiation, in every agreement, the result comes from someone else’s decision. And sadly, if we believe that we can control or manage others’ decisions with compromise and logic, we’re leaving millions on the table. But while we can’t control others’ decisions, we can influence them by inhabiting their world and seeing and hearing exactly what they want. Though the intensity may differ from person to person, you can be sure that everyone you meet is driven by two primal urges: the need to feel safe and secure, and the need to feel in control. If you satisfy those drives, you’re in the door. As we saw with my chat with Daryl, you’re not going to logically
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convince them that they’re safe, secure, or in control. Primal needs are urgent and illogical, so arguing them into a corner is just going to push your counterpart to flee with a counterfeit “Yes.”
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Good negotiators welcome—even invite—a solid “No” to start, as a sign that the other party is engaged and thinking.
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That’s why I tell my students that, if you’re trying to sell something, don’t start with “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” Instead ask, “Is now a bad time to talk?” Either you get “Yes, it is a bad time” followed by a good time or a request to go away, or you get “No, it’s not” and total focus.
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by the time she sat down with him, she had picked one of the most strongly worded “No”-oriented setup questions I have ever heard. “Do you want the FBI to be embarrassed?” she said. “No,” he answered. “What do you want me to do?” she responded. He leaned back in his chair, one of those 1950s faux-leather numbers that squeak meaningfully when the sitter shifts. He stared at her over his glasses and then nodded ever so slightly. He was in control. “Look, you can keep the position,” he said. “Just go back out there and don’t let it interfere with your other duties.” And a minute later Marti walked out with her job intact.
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When I heard Marti do that, I was like, “Bang!” By pushing for a “No,” Marti nudged her supervisor into a zone where he was making the decisions. And then she furthered his feelings of safety and power with a question inviting him to define her next move. The important thing here is that Marti not only accepted the “No”; she searched it out and embraced it. At a recent sales conference, I asked the participants for the one word they all dread. The entire group yelled, “No!” To them—and to almost everyone—“No” means one thing: end of discussion. But that’s not what it means. “No” is not failure. Used strategically it’s an answer that opens the path forward.
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Getting to the point where you’re no longer horrified by the word “No” is a liberating moment that every negotiator needs to reach. Because if your biggest fear is “No,” you can’t negotiate. You’re the hostage of “Yes.” You’re handcuffed. You’re done. So
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As you can see, “No” has a lot of skills. ■ “No” allows the real issues to be brought forth; ■ “No” protects people from making—and lets them correct—ineffective decisions; ■ “No” slows things down so that people can freely embrace their decisions and the agreements they enter into; ■ “No” helps people feel safe, secure, emotionally comfortable, and in control of their decisions; ■ “No” moves everyone’s efforts forward.
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The problem, in reality, was that the “Yes pattern” scripts had been giving poor rates of return for years. All the steps were “Yes,” but the final answer was invariably “No.” Then Ben read Jim Camp’s book Start with NO in my class and began to wonder if “No” could be a tool to boost donations.
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Sometimes, if you’re talking to somebody who is just not listening, the only way you can crack their cranium is to antagonize them into “No.” One great way to do this is to mislabel one of the other party’s emotions or desires. You say something that you know is totally wrong, like “So it seems that you really are eager to leave your job” when they clearly want to stay. That forces them to listen and makes them comfortable correcting you by saying, “No, that’s not it. This is it.”
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you send a polite follow-up and they stonewall you again. So what do you do? You provoke a “No” with this one-sentence email. Have you given up on this project? The point is that this one-sentence email encapsulates the best of “No”-oriented questions and plays on your counterpart’s natural human aversion to loss. The “No” answer the email demands offers the other party the feeling of safety and the illusion of control while encouraging them to define their position and explain it to you.
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We’ve instrumentalized niceness as a way of greasing the social wheels, yet it’s often a ruse. We’re polite and we don’t disagree to get through daily existence with the least degree of friction. But by turning niceness into a lubricant, we’ve leeched it of meaning. A smile and a nod might signify “Get me out of here!” as much as it means “Nice to meet you.” That’s death for a good negotiator, who gains their power by understanding their counterpart’s situation and extracting information about their counterpart’s desires and needs. Extracting that information means getting the other party to feel safe and in control. And while it may sound contradictory, the way to get there is by getting the other party to disagree, to draw their own boundaries, to define their desires as a function of what they do not want.
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■ Break the habit of attempting to get people to say “yes.” Being pushed for “yes” makes people defensive. Our love of hearing “yes” makes us blind to the defensiveness we ourselves feel when someone is pushing us to say it. ■ “No” is not a failure. We have learned that “No” is the anti-“Yes” and therefore a word to be avoided at all costs. But it really often just means “Wait” or “I’m not comfortable with that.” Learn how to hear it calmly. It is not the end of the negotiation, but the beginning. ■ “Yes” is the final goal of a negotiation, but don’t aim for it at the start. Asking someone for “Yes” too quickly in a conversation—“Do you like to drink water, Mr. Smith?”—gets his guard up and paints you as an untrustworthy salesman. ■ Saying “No” makes the speaker feel safe, secure, and in control, so trigger it. By saying what they don’t want, your counterpart defines their space and gains the confidence and comfort to listen to you. That’s why “Is now a bad time to talk?” is always better than “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” ■ Sometimes the only way to get your counterpart to listen and engage with you is by forcing them into a “No.” That means intentionally mislabeling one of their emotions or desires or asking a ridiculous question—like, “It seems like you want this project to fail”—that can only be answered negatively. ■ Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat
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them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you. ■ If a potential business partner is ignoring you, contact them with a clear and concise “No”-oriented question that suggests that you are ready to walk away. “Have you given up on this project?” works wonders.
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CNU developed what is a powerful staple in the high-stakes world of crisis negotiation, the Behavioral Change Stairway Model (BCSM). The model proposes five stages—active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral change—that take any negotiator from listening to influencing behavior.
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Before you convince them to see what you’re trying to accomplish, you have to say the things to them that will get them to say, “That’s right.” The “that’s right” breakthrough usually doesn’t come at the beginning of a negotiation. It’s invisible to the counterpart when it occurs, and they embrace what you’ve said. To them, it’s a subtle epiphany.
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page document that instructed Benjie to change course. We were going to use nearly every tactic in the active listening arsenal: 1. Effective Pauses: Silence is powerful. We told Benjie to use it for emphasis, to encourage Sabaya to keep talking until eventually, like clearing out a swamp, the emotions were drained from the dialogue. 2. Minimal Encouragers: Besides silence, we instructed using simple phrases, such as “Yes,” “OK,” “Uh-huh,” or “I see,” to effectively convey that Benjie was now paying full attention to Sabaya and all he had to say. 3. Mirroring: Rather than argue with Sabaya and try to separate Schilling from the “war damages,” Benjie would listen and repeat back what Sabaya said. 4. Labeling: Benjie should give Sabaya’s feelings a name and identify with how he felt. “It all seems so tragically unfair, I can now see why you sound so angry.” 5. Paraphrase: Benjie should repeat what Sabaya is saying back to him in Benjie’s own words. This, we told him, would powerfully show him you really do understand and aren’t merely parroting his concerns. 6. Summarize: A good summary is the combination of rearticulating the meaning of what is said plus the acknowledgment of the emotions underlying that meaning (paraphrasing + labeling = summary). We told Benjie he needed to listen and repeat the “world according to Abu Sabaya.” He needed to fully and completely summarize all the nonsense that Sabaya had come up with about war damages and fishing rights and five hundred years of oppression. And once he did that fully and completely, the only possible response for Sabaya, and anyone faced with a good summary, would be “that’s right.”
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It works every time. Tell people “you’re right” and they get a happy smile on their face and leave you alone for at least twenty-four hours. But you haven’t agreed to their position. You have used “you’re right” to get them to quit bothering you.
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The power of getting to that understanding, and not to some simple “yes,” is revelatory in the art of negotiation. The moment you’ve convinced someone that you truly understand her dreams and feelings (the whole world that she inhabits), mental and behavioral change becomes possible, and the foundation for a breakthrough has been laid.
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Use these lessons to lay that foundation: ■ Creating unconditional positive regard opens the door to changing thoughts and behaviors. Humans have an innate urge toward socially constructive behavior. The more a person feels understood, and positively affirmed in that understanding, the more likely that urge for constructive behavior will take hold. ■ “That’s right” is better than “yes.” Strive for it. Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs. ■ Use a summary to trigger a “that’s right.” The building blocks of a good summary are a label combined with paraphrasing. Identify, rearticulate, and emotionally affirm “the world according to . .
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when you get a call from brutal criminals who say they’ll kill your aunt unless you pay them immediately, it seems impossible to find leverage in the situation. So you pay the ransom and they release your relative, right? Wrong. There’s always leverage. Negotiation is never a linear formula: add X to Y to get Z. We all have irrational blind spots, hidden needs, and undeveloped notions.
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Once you understand that subterranean world of unspoken needs and thoughts, you’ll discover a universe of variables that can be leveraged to change your counterpart’s needs and expectations. From using some people’s fear of deadlines and the mysterious power of odd numbers, to our misunderstood relationship to fairness, there are always ways to bend our counterpart’s reality so it conforms to what we ultimately want to give them, not to what they initially think they deserve.
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We’re always taught to look for the win-win solution, to accommodate, to be reasonable. So what’s the win-win here? What’s the compromise? The traditional negotiating logic that’s drilled into us from an early age, the kind that exalts compromises, says, “Let’s just split the difference and offer them $75,000. Then everyone’s happy.” No. Just, simply, no. The win-win mindset pushed by so many negotiation experts is usually ineffective and often disastrous. At best, it satisfies…
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Of course, as we’ve noted previously, you need to keep the cooperative, rapport-building, empathetic approach, the kind that creates a dynamic in which deals can be made. But you have to get rid of that naïveté. Because compromise—“splitting the difference”—can lead to terrible outcomes. Compromise is often a “bad deal” and a key theme we’ll hit in this chapter is that “no deal is better than a bad…
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To make my point on compromise, let me paint you an example: A woman wants her husband to wear black shoes with his suit. But her husband doesn’t want to; he prefers brown shoes. So what do they do? They compromise, they…
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one brown shoe. Is this the best outcome? No! In fact, that’s the worst possible outcome. Either of the two other outcomes—black or brown—would be better than the compromise. Next time you want to compromise, remind yourself of those mismatched shoes. So why are we so infatuated with the notion of compromise if it often leads to poor results? The real problem with compromise is that it has come to be known as this great concept, in…
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I’m here to call bullshit on compromise right now. We don’t compromise because it’s right; we compromise because it is easy and because it saves face. We compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie. Distilled to its essence, we compromise to be safe. Most people in a negotiation are driven by…
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So don’t settle and—here’s a simple rule—never split the difference. Creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk, annoyance, confusion, and conflict. Accommodation and compromise produce none of that. You’ve got to embrace the hard stuff.…
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Time is one of the most crucial variables in any negotiation. The simple passing of time and its sharper cousin, the deadline, are the screw that pressures every deal to a conclusion. Whether your deadline is real and absolute or merely a line in the sand, it can trick you into believing that doing a deal now is more important than getting a good deal. Deadlines regularly make people say and do impulsive things that…
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Deadlines are often arbitrary, almost always flexible, and hardly ever trigger the consequences we think—or are told—they will. Deadlines are the bogeymen of negotiation, almost exclusively self-inflicted figments of our imagination, unnecessarily unsettling us for no good reason. The mantra we coach our clients on is, “No deal is better than a bad deal.”
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How close we were getting to their self-imposed deadline would be indicated by how specific the threats were that they issued. “Give us the money or your aunt is going to die” is an early stage threat, as the time isn’t specified. Increasing specificity on threats in any type of negotiations indicates getting closer to real consequences at a real specified time.
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Car dealers are prone to give you the best price near the end of the month, when their transactions are assessed. And corporate salespeople work on a quarterly basis and are most vulnerable as the quarter comes to a close.
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Now, knowing how negotiators use their counterpart’s deadlines to gain leverage would seem to suggest that it’s best to keep your own deadlines secret.
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Allow me to let you in on a little secret: Cohen, and the herd of negotiation “experts” who follow his lead, are wrong. Deadlines cut both ways. Cohen may well have been nervous about what his boss would say if he left Japan without an agreement. But it’s also true that Cohen’s counterparts wouldn’t have won if he’d left without a deal. That’s the key: When the negotiation is over for one side, it’s over for the other too.
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Business at the University of California, Berkeley, says that hiding a deadline actually puts the negotiator in the worst possible position. In his research, he’s found that hiding your deadlines dramatically increases the risk of an impasse. That’s because having a deadline pushes you to speed up your concessions, but the other side, thinking that it has time, will just hold out for more.
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In that sense, hiding a deadline means you’re negotiating with yourself, and you always lose when you do so.
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First, by revealing your cutoff you reduce the risk of impasse. And second, when an opponent knows your deadline, he’ll get to the real deal- and concession-making more quickly.
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NO SUCH THING AS FAIR In the third week of my negotiations class, we play my favorite type of game, that is, the kind that shows my students how much they don’t understand themselves (I know—I’m cruel). It’s called the Ultimatum Game, and it goes like this: After the students split into pairs of a “proposer” and an “accepter,” I give each proposer $10. The proposer then has to offer the accepter a round number of dollars. If the accepter agrees he or she receives what’s been offered and the proposer gets the rest. If the accepter refuses the offer, though, they both get nothing and the $10 goes back to me.
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Then I lay out how they’re wrong. First, how could they all be using reason if so many have made different offers? That’s the point: They didn’t. They assumed the other guy would reason just like them. “If you approach a negotiation thinking that the other guy thinks like you, you’re wrong,” I say. “That’s not empathy; that’s projection.”
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The most powerful word in negotiations is “Fair.” As human beings, we’re mightily swayed by how much we feel we have been respected. People comply with agreements if they feel they’ve been treated fairly and lash out if they don’t.
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Most people make an irrational choice to let the dollar slip through their fingers rather than to accept a derisory offer, because the negative emotional value of unfairness outweighs the positive rational value of the money. This irrational reaction to unfairness extends all the way to serious economic deals.
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In fact, of the three ways that people drop this F-bomb, only one is positive. The most common use is a judo-like defensive move that destabilizes the other side. This manipulation usually takes the form of something like, “We just want what’s fair.” Think back to the last time someone made this implicit accusation of unfairness to you, and I bet you’ll have to admit that it immediately triggered feelings of defensiveness and discomfort. These feelings are often subconscious and often lead to an irrational concession.
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The second use of the F-bomb is more nefarious. In this one, your counterpart will basically accuse you of being dense or dishonest by saying, “We’ve given you a fair offer.” It’s a terrible little jab meant to distract your attention and manipulate you into giving in. Whenever someone tries this on me, I think back to the last NFL lockout. Negotiations were getting down to the wire and the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) said that before they agreed to a final deal they wanted the owners to open their books. The owners’ answer? “We’ve given the players a fair offer.” Notice the horrible genius of this: instead of opening their books or declining to do so, the owners shifted the focus to the NFLPA’s supposed lack of understanding of fairness. If you find yourself in this situation, the best reaction is to simply mirror the “F” that has just been lobbed at you. “Fair?” you’d respond, pausing to let the word’s power do to them as it was intended to do to you. Follow that with a label: “It seems like you’re ready to provide the evidence that supports that,” which alludes to opening their books or otherwise handing over information that will either contradict their claim to fairness or give you more data to work with than you had previously. Right away, you declaw the attack.
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The last use of the F-word is my favorite because it’s positive and constructive. It sets the stage for honest and empathetic negotiation. Here’s how I use it: Early on in a negotiation, I say, “I want you to feel like you are being treated fairly at all times. So please stop me at any time if you feel I’m being unfair, and we’ll address it.” It’s simple and clear and sets me up as an honest dealer.
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If you can get the other party to reveal their problems, pain, and unmet objectives—if you can get at what people are really buying—then you can sell them a vision of their problem that leaves your proposal as the perfect solution.
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Know the emotional drivers and you can frame the benefits of any deal in language that will resonate.
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Or imagine that I offer you $20 to run a three-minute errand and get me a cup of coffee. You’re going to think to yourself that $20 for three minutes is $400 an hour. You’re going to be thrilled. What if then you find out that by getting you to run that errand I made a million dollars. You’d go from being ecstatic for making $400 an hour to being angry because you got ripped off. The value of the $20, just like the value of the coffee mug, didn’t change. But your perspective of it did. Just by how I position the $20, I can make you happy or disgusted by it.
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By far the best theory for describing the principles of our irrational decisions is something called Prospect Theory. Created in 1979 by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, prospect theory describes how people choose between options that involve risk, like in a negotiation. The theory argues that people are drawn to sure things over probabilities, even when the probability is a better choice. That’s called the Certainty Effect. And people will take greater risks to avoid losses than to achieve gains. That’s called Loss Aversion. That’s why people who statistically have no need for insurance buy it. Or consider this: a person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of receiving $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of getting $9,499 will usually avoid risk and take the 100 percent certain safe choice, while the same person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of losing $10,000 or a 100 percent chance of losing $9,499 will make the opposite choice, risking the bigger 95 percent option to avoid the loss. The chance for loss incites more risk than the possibility of an equal gain.
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To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that they have something concrete to lose if the deal falls through. 1. ANCHOR THEIR EMOTIONS
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To bend your counterpart’s reality, you have to start with the basics of empathy. So start out with an accusation audit acknowledging all of their fears. By anchoring their emotions in preparation for a loss, you inflame the other side’s loss aversion so that they’ll jump at the chance to avoid it. On my
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“I got a lousy proposition for you,” I said, and paused until each asked me to go on. “By the time we get off the phone, you’re going to think I’m a lousy businessman. You’re going to think I can’t budget or plan. You’re going to think Chris Voss is a big talker. His first big project ever out of the FBI, he screws it up completely. He doesn’t know how to run an operation. And he might even have lied to me.” And then, once I’d anchored their emotions in a minefield of low expectations, I played on their loss aversion. “Still, I wanted to bring this opportunity to you before I took it to someone else,” I said. Suddenly, their call wasn’t about being cut from $2,000 to $500 but how not to lose $500 to some other guy.
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2. LET THE OTHER GUY GO FIRST . . . MOST OF THE TIME.
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had a student named Jerry who royally screwed up his salary negotiation by going first (let me say that this happened before he was my student). In an interview at a New York financial firm, he demanded $110,000, in large part because it represented a 30 percent raise. It was only after he started that he realized that the firm had started everybody else in his program at $125,000. That’s why I suggest you let the other side anchor monetary negotiations.
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That’s not to say, “Never open.” Rules like that are easy to remember, but, like most simplistic approaches, they are not always good advice. If you’re dealing with a rookie counterpart, you might be tempted to be the shark and throw out an extreme anchor.
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3. ESTABLISH A RANGE While going first rarely helps, there is one way to seem to make an offer and bend their reality in the process. That is, by alluding to a range.
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this: When confronted with naming your terms or price, counter by recalling a similar deal which establishes your “ballpark,”
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In a recent study,4 Columbia Business School psychologists found that job applicants who named a range received significantly higher overall salaries than those who offered a number, especially if their range was a “bolstering range,” in which the low number in the range was what they actually wanted.
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They had to put something on the cover anyway, so it had zero cost to them and I gave them a steep discount on my fee. I constantly use that as an example in my negotiations now when I name a price. I want to stimulate my counterpart’s brainstorming to see what valuable nonmonetary gems they might have that are cheap to them but valuable to me. 5. WHEN YOU DO TALK NUMBERS, USE ODD ONES Every number has a psychological significance that goes beyond its value. And I’m not just talking about how you love 17 because you think it’s lucky. What I mean is that, in terms of negotiation, some numbers appear more immovable than others. The biggest thing to remember is that numbers that end in 0 inevitably feel like temporary placeholders, guesstimates that you can easily be negotiated off of. But anything you throw out that sounds less rounded—say, $37,263—feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation. Such numbers feel serious and permanent to your counterpart, so use them to fortify your offers.
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6. SURPRISE WITH A GIFT You can get your counterpart into a mood of generosity by staking an extreme anchor and then, after their inevitable first rejection, offering them a wholly unrelated surprise gift.
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Unexpected conciliatory gestures like this are hugely effective because they introduce a dynamic called reciprocity; the other party feels the need to answer your generosity in kind. They will suddenly come up on their offer, or they’ll look to repay your kindness in the future. People feel obliged to repay debts of kindness.
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“How am I supposed to do that?” he asked in the next call.
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The kidnapper made another general threat against the aunt and again demanded the cash. That’s when I had the nephew subtly question the kidnapper’s fairness. “I’m sorry,” the nephew responded, “but how are we supposed to pay if you’re going to hurt her?”
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HOW TO NEGOTIATE A BETTER SALARY
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BE PLEASANTLY PERSISTENT ON NONSALARY TERMS
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an extra week of vacation
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SALARY TERMS WITHOUT SUCCESS TERMS IS RUSSIAN ROULETTE Once you’ve negotiated a salary, make sure to define success for your position—as well as metrics for your next raise. That’s meaningful for you and free for your boss,
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SPARK THEIR INTEREST IN YOUR SUCCESS AND GAIN AN UNOFFICIAL MENTOR Remember the idea of figuring what the other side is really buying? Well, when you are selling yourself to a manager, sell yourself as more than a body for a job; sell yourself, and your success, as a way they can validate their own intelligence and broadcast it to the rest of the company.
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Ask: “What does it take to be successful here?”
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“$134.5k—$143k.” In that one little move, Angel weaved together a bunch of the lessons from this chapter. The odd numbers gave them the weight of thoughtful calculation. The numbers were high too, which exploited his boss’s natural tendency to go directly to his price limit when faced by an extreme anchor. And they were a range, which made Angel seem less aggressive and the lower end more reasonable in comparison.
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filled ways. Using that knowledge is only, well, rational. As you work these tools into your daily life, remember the following powerful lessons: ■ All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared. ■ Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides. ■ Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests.
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■ The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them. ■ You can bend your counterpart’s reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from. ■ People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.
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Most important, we learned that successful negotiation involved getting your counterpart to do the work for you and suggest your solution himself. It involved giving him the illusion of control while you, in fact, were the one defining the conversation.
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The tool we developed is something I call the calibrated, or open-ended, question. What it does is remove aggression from conversations by acknowledging the other side openly, without resistance. In doing so, it lets you introduce ideas and requests without sounding pushy. It allows you to nudge.
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I’ll explain it in depth later on, but for now let me say that it’s really as simple as removing the hostility from the statement “You can’t leave” and turning it into a question. “What do you hope to achieve by going?”
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And all negotiation, done well, should be an information-gathering process that vests your counterpart in an outcome that serves you.
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That’s when I had my “Holy shit!” moment and realized that this is the technique I’d been waiting for. Instead of asking some closed-ended question with a single correct answer, he’d asked an open-ended, yet calibrated one that forced the other guy to pause and actually think about how to solve the problem.
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It’s a “how” question, and “how” engages because “how” asks for help.
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Best of all, he doesn’t owe the kidnapper a damn thing. The guy volunteers to put the girlfriend on the phone: he thinks it’s his idea. The guy who just offered to put the girlfriend on the line thinks he’s in control. And the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.
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The genius of this technique is really well explained by something that the psychologist Kevin Dutton says in his book Split-Second Persuasion.1 He talks about what he calls “unbelief,” which is active resistance to what the other side is saying, complete rejection. That’s where the two parties in a negotiation usually start.
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If you don’t ever get off that dynamic, you end up having showdowns, as each side tries to impose its point of view. You get two hard skulls banging against each other, like in Dos Palmas. But if you can get the other side to drop their unbelief, you can slowly work them to your point of view on the back of their energy, just like the drug dealer’s question got the kidnapper to volunteer to do what the drug dealer wanted.
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Our job as persuaders is easier than we think. It’s not to get others believing what we say. It’s just to stop them unbelieving. Once we achieve that, the game’s half-won. “Unbelief is the friction that keeps persuasion in check,” Dutton says. “Without it, there’d be no limits.”
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What’s so powerful about the senior doctor’s technique is that he took what was a showdown—“I’m going to leave” versus “You can’t leave”—and asked questions that led the patient to solve his own problem . . . in the way the doctor wanted. It was still a kind of showdown, of course, but the doctor took the confrontation and bravado out of it by giving the patient the illusion of control.
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you can just say the price is a bit more than you budgeted and ask for help with one of the greatest-of-all-time calibrated questions: “How am I supposed to do that?” The critical part of this approach is that you really are asking for help and your delivery must convey that.
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My advice for her was simple: I told her to engage them in a conversation where she summarized the situation and then asked, “How am I supposed to do that?”
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Now, think about how my client’s question worked: without accusing them of anything, it pushed the big company to understand her problem and offer the solution she wanted. That in a nutshell is the whole point of open-ended questions that are calibrated for a specific effect.
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Like the softening words and phrases “perhaps,” “maybe,” “I think,” and “it seems,” the calibrated open-ended question takes the aggression out of a confrontational statement or close-ended request that might otherwise anger your counterpart. What makes them work is that they are subject to interpretation by your counterpart instead of being rigidly defined. They allow you to introduce ideas and requests without sounding overbearing or pushy. And that’s the difference between “You’re screwing me out of money, and it has to stop” and “How am I supposed to do that?”
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But calibrated questions are not just random requests for comment. They have a direction: once you figure out where you want a conversation to go, you have to design the questions that will ease the conversation in that direction while…
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First off, calibrated questions avoid verbs or words like “can,” “is,” “are,” “do,” or “does.” These are closed-ended questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or a “no.” Instead, they start with a list of words people know as reporter’s questions: “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “…
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But let me cut the list even further: it’s best to start with “what,” “how,” and sometimes “why.” Nothing else. “Who,” “when,” and “where” will often just get your counterpart to share a fact without thinking. And “why” can backfire. Regardless of what language the word “why” is translated into,…
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The only time you can use “why” successfully is when the defensiveness that is created supports the change you are trying to get them to see. “Why would you ever change from the way you’ve always done things and try my approach?” is an example. “Why would your company ever change from your long-standing vendor and choose our…
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don’t touch it. Having just two words to start with might not seem like a lot of ammunition, but trust me, you can use “what” and “how” to calibrate nearly any question. “Does this look like something you would like?” can become “How does this look to you?” or “What about this works for you?” You can even ask, “What about this doesn’t work for…
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You should use calibrated questions early and often, and there are a few that you will find that you will use in the beginning of nearly every negotiation. “What is the biggest challenge you face?” is one of those questions. It just gets the other side to teach you something about themselves, which is critical to any negotiation because all negotiation is an information-gathering process. Here are some other great standbys that I use in almost every negotiation, depending on the situation: ■ What about this is important to you? ■ How can I help to make this better for us? ■ How would you like me to proceed? ■ What is it that brought us into this situation? ■ How can we solve this problem? ■ What’s the objective? / What are we trying to accomplish here? ■ How am I supposed to do that? The implication of any well-designed calibrated question is that you want what the other guy wants but you need his intelligence to overcome the problem. This really appeals to very aggressive or egotistical counterparts. You’ve not only implicitly asked for help—triggering goodwill and less defensiveness—but you’ve engineered a…
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Let’s pause for a minute here, because there’s one vitally important thing you have to remember when you enter a negotiation armed with your list of calibrated questions. That is, all of this is great, but there’s a rub: without self-control and emotional regulation, it doesn’t work. The very first thing I talk about when I’m training new negotiators is the critical importance of self-control. If you can’t control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence the emotions of another party?
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The script we came up with hit all the best practices of negotiation we’ve talked about so far. Here it is by steps: 1. A “No”-oriented email question to reinitiate contact: “Have you given up on settling this amicably?”
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2. A statement that leaves only the answer of “That’s right” to form a dynamic of agreement: “It seems that you feel my bill is not justified.” 3. Calibrated questions about the problem to get him to reveal his thinking: “How does this bill violate our agreement?” 4. More “No”-oriented questions to remove unspoken barriers: “Are you saying I misled you?” “Are you saying I didn’t do as you asked?” “Are you saying I reneged on our agreement?” or “Are you saying I failed you?” 5. Labeling and mirroring the essence of his answers if they are not acceptable so he has to consider them again: “It seems like you feel my work was subpar.” Or “. . . my work was subpar?” 6. A calibrated question in reply to any offer other than full payment, in order to get him to offer a solution: “How am I supposed to accept that?” 7. If none of this gets an offer of full payment, a label that flatters his sense of control and power: “It seems like you are the type of person who prides himself on the way he does business—rightfully so—and has a knack for not only expanding the pie but making the ship run more efficiently.” 8. A long pause and then one more “No”-oriented question: “Do you want to be known as someone who doesn’t fulfill agreements?”
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Even with all the best techniques and strategy, you need to regulate your emotions if you want to have any hope of coming out on top.
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But you have to keep away from knee-jerk, passionate reactions. Pause. Think. Let the passion dissipate. That allows you to collect your thoughts and be more circumspect in what you say. It also lowers your chance of saying more than you want to.
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Who has control in a conversation, the guy listening or the guy talking? The listener, of course. That’s because the talker is revealing information while the listener, if he’s trained well, is directing the conversation toward his own goals. He’s harnessing the talker’s energy for his own ends. When you try to work the skills from this chapter into your daily life, remember that these are listener’s tools. They are not about strong-arming your opponent into submission. Rather, they’re about using the counterpart’s power to get to your objective. They’re listener’s judo.
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Don’t try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation. ■ Avoid questions that can be answered with “Yes” or tiny pieces of information. These require little thought and inspire the human need for reciprocity; you will be expected to give something back. ■ Ask calibrated questions that start with the words “How” or “What.” By implicitly asking the other party for help, these questions will give your counterpart an illusion of control and will inspire them to speak at length, revealing important information. ■ Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language. ■ Calibrate your questions to point your counterpart toward solving your problem. This will encourage them to expend their energy on devising a solution. ■ Bite your tongue. When you’re attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question. ■ There is always a team on the other side. If you are not influencing those behind the table, you are vulnerable.
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Calibrated “How” questions are a surefire way to keep negotiations going. They put the pressure on your counterpart to come up with answers, and to contemplate your problems when making their demands.
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With enough of the right “How” questions you can read and shape the negotiating environment in such a way that you’ll eventually get to the answer you want to hear. You just have to have an idea of where you want the conversation to go when you’re devising your questions. The trick to “How” questions is that, correctly used, they are gentle and graceful ways to say “No” and guide your counterpart to develop a better solution—your solution. A gentle How/No invites collaboration and leaves your counterpart with a feeling of having been treated with respect.
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As Julie did, the first and most common “No” question you’ll use is some version of “How am I supposed to do that?” (for example, “How can we raise that much?”). Your tone of voice is critical as this phrase can be delivered as either an accusation or a request for assistance. So pay attention to your voice.
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This question tends to have the positive effect of making the other side take a good look at your situation. This positive dynamic is what I refer to as “forced empathy,” and it’s especially effective if leading up to it you’ve already been empathic with your counterpart. This engages the dynamic of reciprocity to lead them to do something for you. Starting with José’s kidnapping, “How am I supposed to do that?” became our primary response to a kidnapper demanding a ransom. And we never had it backfire.
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Besides saying “No,” the other key benefit of asking “How?” is, quite literally, that it forces your counterpart to consider and explain how a deal will be implemented. A deal is nothing without good implementation. Poor implementation is the cancer that eats your profits. By making your counterparts articulate implementation in their own words, your carefully calibrated “How” questions will convince them that the final solution is their idea. And that’s crucial. People always make more effort to implement a solution when they think it’s theirs. That is simply human nature. That’s why negotiation is often called “the art of letting someone else have your way.” There are two key questions you can ask to push your counterparts to think they are defining success their way: “How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we address things if we find we’re off track?” When they answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in.
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As I’ve noted, when they say, “You’re right,” it’s often a good indicator they are not vested in what is being discussed. And when you push for implementation and they say, “I’ll try,” you should get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Because this really means, “I plan to fail.”
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When you hear either of these, dive back in with calibrated “How” questions until they define the terms of successful implementation in their own voice. Follow up by summarizing what they have said to get a “That’s right.”
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It turns out that the head of the division that needed the training killed the deal. Maybe this guy felt threatened, slighted, or otherwise somehow personally injured by the notion that he and his people “needed” any training at all. (A surprisingly high percentage of negotiations hinge on something outside dollars and cents, often having more to do with self-esteem, status, and other nonfinancial needs.) We’ll never know now.
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We could have avoided all that had we asked a few calibrated questions, like: How does this affect everybody else? How on board is the rest of your team? How do we make sure that we deliver the right material to the right people? How do we ensure the managers of those we’re training are fully on board?
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I instructed him to keep peppering the violent jerk with “How?” How am I supposed to . . . ? How do we know . . . ? How can we . . . ? There is great power in treating jerks with deference. It gives you the ability to be extremely assertive—to say “No”—in a hidden fashion. “How do we know if we pay you that you won’t hurt Alastair?” Aaron asked. In the Chinese martial art of tai chi, the goal is to use your opponent’s aggressiveness against him—to turn his offense into your way to defeat him. That’s the approach we took with Alastair’s kidnapper: we wanted to absorb his threats and wear him down. We made sure that even scheduling a call with us was complex. We delayed making email responses. Through all these tactics, we gained the upper hand while giving the kidnapper the illusion of control. He thought he was solving Aaron’s problems while we were just reading him and wasting his time. You see, it’s best not to go chin to chin with aggressiveness like that of Alastair’s kidnapper; rather, default to using “what” and “how” questions to avoid making bids or adjusting your own negotiating position. Dodge and weave.
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There are plenty of other tactics, tools, and methods for using subtle verbal and nonverbal forms of communication to understand and modify the mental states of your counterpart. As I run through some of them here, I want you to take a moment to internalize each one. These are the kind of tools that can help observant negotiators hit home runs. THE 7-38-55 PERCENT RULE
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In two famous studies on what makes us like or dislike somebody,1 UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian created the 7-38-55 rule. That is, only 7 percent of a message is based on the words while 38 percent comes from the tone of voice and 55 percent from the speaker’s body language and face.
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This happens because there are actually three kinds of “Yes”: Commitment, Confirmation, and Counterfeit. As we discussed in Chapter 5, so many pushy salesman try to trap their clients into the Commitment “Yes” that many people get very good at the Counterfeit “Yes. “ One great tool for avoiding this trap is the Rule of Three. The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.
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When I first learned this skill, my biggest fear was how to avoid sounding like a broken record or coming off as really pushy. The answer, I learned, is to vary your tactics. The first time they agree to something or give you a commitment, that’s No. 1. For No. 2 you might label or summarize what they said so they answer, “That’s right.” And No. 3 could be a calibrated “How” or “What” question about implementation that asks them to explain what will constitute success, something like “What do we do if we get off track?”
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In a study of the components of lying,2 Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra and his coauthors found that, on average, liars use more words than truth tellers and use far more third-person pronouns. They start talking about him, her, it, one, they, and their rather than I, in order to put some distance between themselves and the lie.
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And they discovered that liars tend to speak in more complex sentences in an attempt to win over their suspicious counterparts. It’s what W. C. Fields meant when he talked about baffling someone with bullshit. The researchers dubbed this the Pinocchio Effect because, just like Pinocchio’s nose, the number of words grew along with the lie.
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PAY ATTENTION TO THEIR USAGE OF PRONOUNS The use of pronouns by a counterpart can also help give you a feel for their actual importance in the decision and implementation chains on the other side of the table. The more in love they are with “I,” “me,” and “my” the less important they are. Conversely, the harder it is to get a first person pronoun out of a negotiator’s mouth, the more important they are. Just like in the Malhotra study where the liar is distancing himself from the lie, in a negotiation, smart decision makers don’t want to be cornered at the table into making a decision. They will defer to the people away from the table to keep from getting pinned down.
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outlet mall a few months after the Kansas experience and I picked out some shirts in one of the stores. At the front counter the young lady asked me if I wanted to join their frequent buyer program. I asked her if I got a discount for joining and she said, “No.” So I decided to try another angle. I said in a friendly manner, “My name is Chris. What’s the Chris discount?” She looked from the register, met my eyes, and gave a little laugh. “I’ll have to ask my manager, Kathy,” she said and turned to the woman who’d been standing next to her. Kathy, who’d heard the whole exchange, said, “The best I can do is ten percent.” Humanize yourself. Use your name to introduce yourself. Say it in a fun, friendly way. Let them enjoy the interaction, too. And get your own special price. HOW TO GET YOUR COUNTERPARTS TO BID AGAINST THEMSELVES
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the best way to get your counterparts to lower their demands is to say “No” using “How” questions. These indirect ways of saying “No” won’t shut down your counterpart the way a blunt, pride-piercing “No” would. In fact, these responses will sound so much like counterbids that your counterparts will often keep bidding against themselves. We’ve found that you can usually express “No” four times before actually saying the word. The first step in the “No” series is the old standby: “How am I supposed to do that?” You have to deliver it in a deferential way, so it becomes a request for help. Properly delivered, it invites the other side to participate in your dilemma and solve it with a better offer. After that, some version of “Your offer is very generous, I’m sorry, that just doesn’t work for me” is an elegant second way to say “No.”
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always signs of weakness.) Then you can use something like “I’m sorry but I’m afraid I just can’t do that.” It’s a little more direct, and the “can’t do that” does great double duty. By expressing an inability to perform, it can trigger the other side’s empathy toward you. “I’m sorry, no” is a slightly more succinct version for the fourth “No.” If delivered gently, it barely sounds negative at all. If you have to go further, of course, “No” is the last and most direct way. Verbally, it should be delivered with a downward inflection and a tone of regard; it’s not meant to be “NO!”
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The price you offered is very fair, and I certainly wish that I could afford it. Bruno has worked very hard for this business, and he deserves to be compensated appropriately. I am very sorry, but wish you the best of luck. Notice how they made no counteroffer and said “No” without using the word? Joaquin was shocked when the following day he received an email from the advisor lowering the price to €28,346. Joaquin and Jesus then crafted their second gentle “No”: Thank you for your offer. You were generous to reduce the price, which I greatly appreciate. I really wish that I could pay you this amount, but I am sincere in that I cannot afford this amount at this time. As you know, I am in the middle of a divorce and I just cannot come up with that type of money. Again, I wish you the best of luck.
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■ Ask calibrated “How” questions, and ask them again and again. Asking “How” keeps your counterparts engaged but off balance. Answering the questions will give them the illusion of control. It will also lead them to contemplate your problems when making their demands. ■ Use “How” questions to shape the negotiating environment. You do this by using “How can I do that?” as a gentle version of “No.” This will subtly push your counterpart to search for other solutions—your solutions. And very often it will get them to bid against themselves. ■ Don’t just pay attention to the people you’re negotiating with directly; always identify the motivations of the players “behind the table.” You can do so by asking how a deal will affect everybody else and how on board they are. ■ Follow the 7-38-55 Percent Rule by paying close attention to tone of voice and body language. Incongruence between the words and nonverbal signs will show when your counterpart is lying or uncomfortable with a deal. ■ Is the “Yes” real or counterfeit? Test it with the Rule of Three: use calibrated questions, summaries, and labels to get your counterpart to reaffirm their agreement at least three times. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction. ■ A person’s use of pronouns offers deep insights into his or her relative authority. If you’re hearing a lot of “I,” “me,” and “my,” the real power to decide probably lies elsewhere. Picking up a lot of “we,” “they,” and “them,” it’s more likely you’re dealing directly with a savvy decision maker keeping his options open. ■ Use your own name to make yourself a real person to the other side and even get your own personal discount. Humor and humanity are the best ways to break the ice and remove roadblocks.
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I gave him an understanding nod and pursed my lips. The key to beginning a haggle is to rattle the other guy ever so gently. You do it in the nicest way possible. If I could thread that needle, I had a good chance at getting my price. “I can pay $30,000,” I said. “And I can pay it up front, all cash. I’ll write a check today for the full amount. I’m sorry, I’m afraid I just can’t pay any more.” His smile flickered a little bit at the edges, as if it were losing focus. But he tightened it down and shook his head. “I’m sure you can understand we can’t do that. The sticker price is $36,000, after all.” “How am I supposed to do that?” I asked deferentially. “I’m sure,” he said, then paused as if he wasn’t sure what he’d meant to say. “I’m sure we can figure something out with financing the $36,000.” “It’s a beautiful truck. Really amazing. I can’t tell you how much I’d love to have it. It’s worth more than what I’m offering. I’m sorry, this is really embarrassing. I just can’t do that price.” He stared at me in silence, a little befuddled now. Then he stood and went into the back for what seemed like an eternity. He was gone so long that I remember saying to myself, “Damn! I should have come in lower! They’re going to come all the way down.” Any response that’s not an outright rejection of your offer means you have the edge. He returned and told me like it was Christmas that his boss had okayed a new price: $34,000. “Wow, your offer is very generous and this is the car of my dreams,” I said. “I really wish I could do that. I really do. This is so embarrassing. I simply can’t.”
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He dropped into silence and I didn’t take the bait. I let the silence linger. And then with a sigh he trudged off again. He returned after another eternity. “You win,” he said. “My manager okayed $32,500.” He pushed a paper across the desk that even said “YOU WIN” in big letters. The words were even surrounded with smiley faces. “I am so grateful. You’ve been very generous, and I can’t thank you enough. The truck is no doubt worth more than my price,” I said. “I’m sorry, I just can’t do that.” Up he stood again. No smile now. Still befuddled. After a few seconds, he walked back to his manager and I leaned back. I could taste victory. A minute later—no eternity this time—he returned and sat. “We can do that,” he said. Two days later, I drove off in my Salsa Red Pearl Toyota 4Runner—for $30,000. God I love that truck. Still drive it today.
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A study of American lawyer-negotiators1 found that 65 percent of attorneys from two major U.S. cities used a cooperative style while only 24 percent were truly assertive. And when these lawyers were graded for effectiveness, more than 75 percent of the effective group came from the cooperative type; only 12 percent were Assertive. So if you’re not Assertive, don’t despair. Blunt assertion is actually counterproductive most of the time. And
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ANALYST Analysts are methodical and diligent. They are not in a big rush. Instead, they believe that as long as they are working toward the best result in a thorough and systematic way, time is of little consequence. Their self-image is linked to minimizing mistakes. Their motto: As much time as it takes to get it right.
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ACCOMMODATOR The most important thing to this type of negotiator is the time spent building the relationship. Accommodators think as long as there is a free-flowing continuous exchange of information time is being well spent. As long as they’re communicating, they’re happy. Their goal is to be on great terms with their counterpart. They love the win-win. Of the three types, they are most likely to build great rapport without actually accomplishing anything. Accommodators want to remain friends with their counterpart even if they can’t reach an agreement. They are very easy to talk to, extremely friendly, and have pleasant voices. They will yield a concession to appease or acquiesce and hope the other side reciprocates.
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If you have identified yourself as an Accommodator, stick to your ability to be very likable, but do not sacrifice your objections. Not only do the other two types need to hear your point of view; if you are dealing with another Accommodator they will welcome it. Also be conscious of excess chitchat: the other two types have no use for it, and if you’re sitting across the table from someone like yourself you will be prone to interactions where nothing gets done.
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ASSERTIVE The Assertive type believes time is money; every wasted minute is a wasted dollar. Their self-image is linked to how many things they can get accomplished in a period of time. For them, getting the solution perfect isn’t as important as getting it done.
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If you are an Assertive, be particularly conscious of your tone. You will not intend to be overly harsh but you will often come off that way. Intentionally soften your tone and work to make it more pleasant. Use calibrated questions and labels with your counterpart since that will also make you more approachable and increase the chances for collaboration.
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Like the great ear-biting pugilist Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
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As a well-prepared negotiator who seeks information and gathers it relentlessly, you’re actually going to want the other guy to name a price first, because you want to see his hand. You’re going to welcome the extreme anchor. But extreme anchoring is powerful and you’re human: your emotions may well up. If they do there are ways to weather the storm without bidding against yourself or responding with anger. Once you learn these tactics, you’ll be prepared to withstand the hit and counter with panache.
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First, deflect the punch in a way that opens up your counterpart. Successful negotiators often say “No” in one of the many ways we’ve talked about (“How am I supposed to accept that?”) or deflect the anchor with questions like “What are we trying to accomplish here?” Responses like these are great ways to refocus your counterpart when you feel you’re being pulled into the compromise trap.
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You can also respond to a punch-in-the-face anchor by simply pivoting to terms. What I mean by this is that when you feel you’re being dragged into a haggle you can detour the conversation to the nonmonetary issues that make any final price work.
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And if the other side pushes you to go first, wriggle from his grip. Instead of naming a price, allude to an incredibly high number that someone else might charge. Once when a hospital chain wanted me to name a price first, I said, “Well, if you go to Harvard Business School, they’re going to charge you $2,500 a day per student.” No matter what happens, the point here is to sponge up information from your counterpart. Letting your counterpart anchor first will give you a tremendous feel for him. All you need to learn is how to take the first punch.
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But only as calculated acts, never a personal attack. In any bare-knuckle bargaining session, the most vital principle to keep in mind is never to look at your counterpart as an enemy. The person across the table is never the problem. The unsolved issue is. So focus on the issue. This is one of the most basic tactics for avoiding emotional escalations.
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Taking a positive, constructive approach to conflict involves understanding that the bond is fundamental to any resolution. Never create an enemy.
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The Ackerman model is an offer-counteroffer method, at least on the surface. But it is a very effective system for beating the usual lackluster bargaining dynamic, which has the predictable result of meeting in the middle. The systematized and easy-to-remember process has only four steps: 1. Set your target price (your goal). 2. Set your first offer at 65 percent of your target price. 3. Calculate three raises of decreasing increments (to 85, 95, and 100 percent). 4. Use lots of empathy and different ways of saying “No” to get the other side to counter before you increase your offer. 5. When calculating the final amount, use precise, nonround numbers like, say, $37,893 rather than $38,000. It gives the number credibility and weight. 6. On your final number, throw in a nonmonetary item (that they probably don’t want) to show you’re at your limit. The genius of this system is that it incorporates the psychological tactics we’ve discussed—reciprocity, extreme anchors, loss aversion, and so on—without you needing to think about them.
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too. Just like people are more likely to send Christmas cards to people who first send cards to them, they are more likely to make bargaining concessions to those who have made compromises in their direction. Second, the diminishing size of the increases—notice that they decrease by half each time—convinces your counterpart that he’s squeezing you to the point of breaking. By the time they get to the last one, they’ll feel that they’ve really gotten every last drop.
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Identify your counterpart’s negotiating style. Once you know whether they are Accommodator, Assertive, or Analyst, you’ll know the correct way to approach them. ■ Prepare, prepare, prepare. When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation. So design an ambitious but legitimate goal and then game out the labels, calibrated questions, and responses you’ll use to get there. That way, once you’re at the bargaining table, you won’t have to wing it. ■ Get ready to take a punch. Kick-ass negotiators usually lead with an extreme anchor to knock you off your game. If you’re not ready, you’ll flee to your maximum without a fight. So prepare your dodging tactics to avoid getting sucked into the compromise trap. ■ Set boundaries, and learn to take a punch or punch back, without anger. The guy across the table is not the problem; the situation is. ■ Prepare an Ackerman plan. Before you head into the weeds of bargaining, you’ll need a plan of extreme anchor, calibrated questions, and well-defined offers. Remember: 65, 85, 95, 100 percent. Decreasing raises and ending on nonround numbers will get your counterpart to believe that he’s squeezing you for all you’re worth when you’re really getting to the number you want.
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Every case is new. We must let what we know—our known knowns—guide us but not blind us to what we do not know; we must remain flexible and adaptable to any situation; we must always retain a beginner’s mind; and we must never overvalue our experience or undervalue the informational and emotional realities served up moment by moment in whatever situation we face.
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I began to hypothesize that in every negotiation each side is in possession of at least three Black Swans, three pieces of information that, were they to be discovered by the other side, would change everything. My experience since has proven this to be true.
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This is why my company changed its format for preparing and engaging in a negotiation. No matter how much research our team has done prior to the interaction, we always ask ourselves, “Why are they communicating what they are communicating right now?” Remember, negotiation is more like walking on a tightrope than competing against an opponent. Focusing so much on the end objective will only distract you from the next step, and that can cause you to fall off the rope. Concentrate on the next step because the rope will lead you to the end as long as all the steps are completed.
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techniques for uncovering Black Swans, but first I’d like to examine what makes them so useful. The answer is leverage. Black Swans are leverage multipliers. They give you the upper hand.
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POSITIVE LEVERAGE Positive leverage is quite simply your ability as a negotiator to provide—or withhold—things that your counterpart wants. Whenever the other side says, “I want . . .” as in, “I want to buy your car,” you have positive leverage.
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NEGATIVE LEVERAGE Negative leverage is what most civilians picture when they hear the word “leverage.” It’s a negotiator’s ability to make his counterpart suffer. And it is based on threats: you have negative leverage if you can tell your counterpart, “If you don’t fulfill your commitment/pay your bill/etc., I will destroy your reputation.”
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That said, a word of warning: I do not believe in making direct threats and am extremely careful with even subtle ones. Threats can be like nuclear bombs. There will be a toxic residue that will be difficult to clean up. You have to handle the potential of negative consequences with care, or you will hurt yourself and poison or blow up the whole process. If you shove your negative leverage down your counterpart’s throat, it might be perceived as you taking away their autonomy. People will often sooner die than give up their autonomy. They’ll at least act irrationally and shut off the negotiation.
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NORMATIVE LEVERAGE Every person has a set of rules and a moral framework. Normative leverage is using the other party’s norms and standards to advance your position. If you can show inconsistencies between their beliefs and their actions, you have normative leverage. No one likes to look like a hypocrite.
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Access to this hidden space very often comes through understanding the other side’s worldview, their reason for being, their religion. Indeed, digging into your counterpart’s “religion” (sometimes involving God but not always) inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. Once you’ve understood your counterpart’s worldview, you can build influence. That’s
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and expect that to work. The reason for that is something called the “paradox of power”—namely, the harder we push the more likely we are to be met with resistance. That’s why you have to use negative leverage sparingly.
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Research studies have shown that people respond favorably to requests made in a reasonable tone of voice and followed with a “because” reason.
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But the moment when we’re most ready to throw our hands up and declare “They’re crazy!” is often the best moment for discovering Black Swans that transform a negotiation. It is when we hear or see something that doesn’t make sense—something “crazy”—that a crucial fork in the road is presented: push forward, even more forcefully, into that which we initially can’t process; or take the other path, the one to guaranteed failure, in which we tell ourselves that negotiating was useless anyway. In their great book Negotiation Genius,4 Harvard Business School professors Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman provide a look at the common reasons negotiators mistakenly call their counterparts crazy. I’d like to talk through them here.
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MISTAKE #1: THEY ARE ILL-INFORMED Often the other side is acting on bad information, and when people have bad information they make bad choices. There’s a great computer industry term for this: GIGO—Garbage In, Garbage Out.
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that the problem was not craziness, but a lack of information and trust. So the executive had an outside accounting firm audit the numbers and send the results to the employee. The result? The employee dropped the suit. The clear point here is that people operating with incomplete information appear crazy to those who have different information. Your job when faced with someone like this in a negotiation is to discover what they do not know and supply that information.
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MISTAKE #2: THEY ARE CONSTRAINED In any negotiation where your counterpart is acting wobbly, there exists a distinct possibility that they have things they can’t do but aren’t eager to reveal. Such constraints can make the sanest counterpart seem irrational. The other side might not be able to do something because of legal advice, or because of promises already made, or even to avoid setting a precedent. Or they may just not have the power to close the deal.
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MISTAKE #3: THEY HAVE OTHER INTERESTS
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Here are a few ways to unearth these powerful Black Swans: GET FACE TIME
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“You got to get him to dinner. You’re going to say, ‘Would it be a bad idea for me to take you to your favorite steak house and we just have a few laughs, and we don’t talk business?’” The idea was that no matter the reason—whether the contact was embarrassed, or didn’t like my client, or just didn’t want to discuss the situation—the only way the process was going to move forward was through direct human interaction. So
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OBSERVE UNGUARDED MOMENTS While you have to get face time, formal business meetings, structured encounters, and planned negotiating sessions are often the least revealing kinds of face time because these are the moments when people are at their most guarded.
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Also pay close attention to your counterpart during interruptions, odd exchanges, or anything that interrupts the flow. When someone breaks ranks, people’s façades crack just a little. Simply noticing whose cracks and how others respond verbally and nonverbally can reveal a gold mine.
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Students often ask me whether Black Swans are specific kinds of information or any kind that helps. I always answer that they are anything that you don’t know that changes things.
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“If he or she is selling such a cash cow, it seems like the seller must have doubts about future market fundamentals,” he said.
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People generally fear conflict, so they avoid useful arguments out of fear that the tone will escalate into personal attacks they cannot handle. People in close relationships often avoid making their own interests known and instead compromise across the board to avoid being perceived as greedy or self-interested.
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You’re going to have to embrace regular, thoughtful conflict as the basis of effective negotiation—and of life. Please remember that our emphasis throughout the book is that the adversary is the situation and that the person that you appear to be in conflict with is actually your partner. More than a little research has shown that genuine, honest conflict between people over their goals actually helps energize the problem-solving process in a collaborative way. Skilled negotiators have a talent for using conflict to keep the negotiation going without stumbling into a personal battle.
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Here are some of the best techniques for flushing out the Black Swans—and exploiting them. Remember, your counterpart might not even know how important the information is, or even that they shouldn’t reveal it. So keep pushing, probing, and gathering information. ■ Let what you know—your known knowns—guide you but not blind you. Every case is new, so remain flexible and adaptable. Remember the Griffin bank crisis: no hostage-taker had killed a hostage on deadline, until he did. ■ Black Swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage: positive (the ability to give someone what they want); negative (the ability to hurt someone); and normative (using your counterpart’s norms to bring them around). ■ Work to understand the other side’s “religion.” Digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. That’s where Black Swans live. ■ Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners whose job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss. ■ Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone they share a cultural similarity with, so dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground. ■ When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren’t. Faced with this situation, search for constraints, hidden desires, and bad information. ■ Get face time with your counterpart. Ten minutes of face time often reveals more than days of research. Pay special attention to your counterpart’s verbal and nonverbal communication at unguarded moments—at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line.
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Negotiation is a psychological investigation. You can gain a measure of confidence going into such an investigation with a simple preparatory exercise we advise all our clients to do. Basically, it’s a list of the primary tools you anticipate using, such as labels and calibrated questions, customized to the particular negotiation.
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Think through best/worst-case scenarios but only write down a specific goal that represents the best case.
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Say you’re on a car lot trying to sell your old BMW 3-series. If you already have another dealer who’s given you a written offer for $10,000, that’s your BATNA. The problem is that BATNA tricks negotiators into aiming low. Researchers have found that humans have a limited capacity for keeping focus in complex, stressful situations like negotiations. And so, once a negotiation is under way, we tend to gravitate toward the focus point that has the most psychological significance for us.
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I tell my clients that as part of their preparation they should think about the outcome extremes: best and worst. If you’ve got both ends covered, you’ll be ready for anything. So know what you cannot accept and have an idea about the best-case outcome, but keep in mind that since there’s information yet to be acquired from the other side, it’s quite possible that best case might be even better than you know.
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There are fill-in-the-blank labels that can be used in nearly every situation to extract information from your counterpart, or defuse an accusation: It seems like _________ is valuable to you. It seems like you don’t like _________. It seems like you value __________. It seems like _________ makes it easier. It seems like you’re reluctant to _________. As an example, if you’re trying to renegotiate an apartment lease to allow subletters and you know the landlord is opposed to them, your prepared labels would be on the lines of “It seems as though you’re not a fan of subletters” or “It seems like you want stability with your tenants.”
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Prepare three to five calibrated questions to reveal value to you and your counterpart and identify and overcome potential deal killers.
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Most of us tend to assume that the needs of the other side conflict with our own. We tend to limit our field of vision to our issues and problems, and forget that the other side has its own unique issues based on its own unique worldview. Great negotiators get past these blinders by being relentlessly curious about what is really motivating the other side.
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There will be a small group of “What” and “How” questions that you will find yourself using in nearly every situation. Here are a few of them: What are we trying to accomplish? How is that worthwhile? What’s the core issue here? How does that affect things? What’s the biggest challenge you face? How does this fit into what the objective is? QUESTIONS TO IDENTIFY BEHIND-THE-TABLE DEAL KILLERS When implementation happens by committee, the support of that committee is key. You’ll want to tailor your calibrated questions to identify and unearth the motivations of those behind the table, including: How does this affect the rest of your team? How on board are the people not on this call? What do your colleagues see as their main challenges in this area?
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You’ll be tempted to concentrate on money, but put that aside for now. A surprisingly high percentage of negotiations hinge on something outside dollars and cents. Often they have more to do with self-esteem, status, autonomy, and other nonfinancial needs.
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SECTION V: NONCASH OFFERS Prepare a list of noncash items possessed by your counterpart that would be valuable. Ask yourself: “What could they give that would almost get us to do it for free?” Think of the anecdote I told a few chapters ago about my work for the lawyers’ association: My counterpart’s interest was to pay me as little cash as possible in order to look good in front of his board.
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