Highlights: Chris Voss | Never Split the Difference | Talks at Google

First of all, there's a lot more space between yes and no than most of us realize. You know, sometimes we get into sort of a binary. On, off, yes, no, sort of thinking. We don't realize how much space there really is there. If we just give the other side a little bit of time to sort of think a moment, if you will. There's some data out there that indicates to us that a moment is just three seconds. And three seconds can be an eternity for mind process. If we're pleasant to interact with, it actually helps the other person think better because your mind works up to 31% more effectively if you're in a positive frame of mind. So when you're in a positive frame of mind, it triggers it in somebody else and it makes them smarter just by smiling at them. You've got a wonderful tone of voice. So she's already making this person smarter by the way she interacts with her. She says, your counterpart says no, which she now sort of centers herself and triggers. You give her a moment in time and the next thing you know she's throwing ideas at you and working it out. And that's finding that space between yes and no. And many times it's triggered when the other person actually says no, because they feel protected and they feel safe. Because you never know what's going through the other person's mind when you start talking with them. There's probably four or five things that have been going through their mind throughout the day. So giving them a chance to sort of focus on you is the other thing that no does. And I'll give you another hint. We never call anybody on the phone and say, have you got a few minutes to talk ever? Because if you say that to somebody, a whole bunch of things start going through their mind. How long is a few minutes? If I have a few minutes, do I want to talk to you? Do I even like you? All these things go through their mind. Whenever we call someone, we say, is now bad time to talk? And you get one or two responses on that. The person will say, no, no, it's never a bad time to talk. What do you want to talk about? And they're very focused. Or they'll say, yeah, as a matter of fact, it is, but I can talk at 2 o' clock tomorrow. And you get a scheduled time to talk. Now, the follow up to that, if nothing good happens in that space, that happens after that. The next most important thing to do is get the other person to say, that's right, not your right, but that's right. And you get a. That's right. When you summarize the situation from the other person's point of view. Don't be afraid to summarize a situation that sounds like it's against your best interest. I mean, that's actually the key to it. And we've broken open a number of negotiations, but it's a summary of what the other person. The facts and how the other person sees them. And that's right. Will then move you forward in like, ridiculously phenomenal ways. Because think of the number of times when you've heard someone on TV or, or you've seen a slogan that you totally agreed with and your reaction is, that's right. You know that's right is when you completely agree with something and you think it's a complete truth. So that's a powerful thing to get somebody to say. They're telling you they feel empathy with you for that at that brief moment. And there's a difference between empathy and sympathy. But when they feel empathy from you, they feel connected with you and they want to collaborate. So if you get a no, the very next most important thing to try to get out of somebody is. That's right. There's a difference between a high value trade and compromise. Compromise. Splitting the difference, meeting halfway. That's usually kind of. I'm sorry, but it's usually kind of a lazy approach. And you leave money on the table, you leave better outcomes on the table when you compromise or you meet in the middle. I like to say, never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better. Everybody has patterns. Everybody is driven by emotions. You know now that there's much more of a recognition of emotional intelligence, it's not that hard to make that case. But if we were, if we were in a business meeting and I were to say it sounds like you're emotional about this, that still would be an insult. But if I were to say it sounds like you're passionate about this, you'd be like, that's right. A terrain. That's right. Remember? So what's the difference between passion and emotions? I don't know. It's a matter of terminology. And then also we were talking about Danny Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. There's more and more data out there that indicates there's an emotional component to every decision we make. Each and every decision we make our mind up based on what we care about. Therefore, what you care about is an emotion, how you feel about things. So let's Start with the idea that we're emotional to begin with. A hostage taker, if he's upset, is just more of himself or herself. They're not different. They're just more themselves, intensely so. Hostage negotiations is a set of tools and skills that can deal with people in very intense emotions. They're equally effective when the emotions are less intense. And the flip side is, half the time, we act like things are the end of the world anyway. I mean, anybody that's had trouble getting to sleep at night means you were tossing and turning over something that was bothering you, it bothered you enough so that you couldn't get to sleep. Anybody that's ever felt stress, you're just taking yourself hostage because you're worried about losing something. So when we start running it backward, then actually there's some emotional wiring in everything that happens. So let's start from the premise. To begin with, let's have some tools that work really well. Emotional intelligence tools. You know, there's still a very intense drive to be rational. You know, getting to yes, which is a fundamentally phenomenally sound book, but it really is based on a drive to become rational. Or even the recognition says, separate a person's positions from their interests. Okay, wow, that sounds very rational. Why don't you tell me why you want what you want? Well, most people think if I tell you why I want it, then you've just got all the power over me. You've just gotten at my deepest, darkest secrets. Or I've revealed all my weaknesses and I've revealed all my vulnerabilities. So that is an idea that just doesn't work. You know, tell me why you want this. Oh, because I can't pay my bills. Oh. You know, then I've got leverage, Quote leverage. And most of the books that have come out have been along this drive for rationality. How can we approach this in this methodical, pragmatic, rational approach to negotiation? My Harvard brothers and sisters are now very much more recognizing that empathy is the tool for negotiation effectiveness. And my book, you know, we call it actual tactical empathy. Understanding what we can do with someone's emotions and help sort of frame their decision making. Now, the other thing is there's never a negotiation that anybody is ever in when they're not holding cards, if you will. If you're not hiding pieces of information, there will never come a time when you're in a negotiation that you don't have proprietary, important information to you that you're worried about letting the other side have ever. So if that's true for you. It's also true for the other side. So here's two people holding pieces of information that they're not showing the other side they know the other side doesn't have. And the unknown. Unknowns are kind of when those two things overlap. Because I don't know what you're hiding and you don't know what I'm hiding. There's going to be a lot of stuff in the space there that could be huge if we could just figure it out. Some of it might be just why you want what you want, which again, never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better. One of my students, a male, is negotiating with his wife over a Christmas tree. Very practical guy. Practical guy wants an artificial tree. Lots of practical reasons for an artificial tree doesn't catch on fire. You buy it once, you never have to, you know, all the reasons. And he can't understand why she won't go along with having the artificial tree. Makes so much sense. And so sometimes it's like, well, why is this person crazy? Where are they coming from? And he searched his mind a little bit and he thought, well, the only thing that could possibly be driving her was, you know, maybe something from when she was a kid. So he said to her, he used a tool that we call label, and he just labeled it. He said, it seems like maybe you had real trees growing up. And immediately she starts to tell him about her memories of Christmas as a child and how they stuck with her and how important it was to her that their children have those same kind of memories through life and they get a real treat. Because as soon as he found out why she wanted what she wanted, he completely came over to her side. He knew that that was a better outcome. Nearly every negotiation is like that if we give it a chance. And getting to the point where the other side is comfortable sharing that information is really what the point of everything in the book is about. You know, a great summary from somebody is when you summarize it in a way that they would never be able to say themselves. The story in the book is when I got my son to change the way he was playing football, and he was a lineman, and linemen are great football players. It's very blue collar skill. Kind of a combination of a hard hat construction worker and a Nassau scientist because they got to hit things, they put their heads down, they crash into stuff. And the stuff they're trying to crash in is trying to get away from them. So it's like Trying to shoot a missile with another missile. A football lineman. Is a very complicated, complicated job. And as a quarterback, I never appreciated how complicated the job was. Because they just did it. And they moved him from lineman to linebacker. And he went from being told to hit everything he saw. To get out of way of everything. You only hit one thing, It's a guy with the ball. Everything else, you duck, he wouldn't do it. And the other way you know you're wrong. Is when you're trying to explain something to somebody. And look at you and say, you're right. Somebody says you're right to you. What they're really asking you to do is shut up and go away. They don't want you to talk anymore. And so as my coach, or as his coach and me are both explaining to him. How he's supposed to be playing linebacker. Guess what he would say to us. You're right. And we'd be like, well, yeah, because we like hearing that. We love being told that we're right. And then he'd go right back to it the very next day was do it the wrong way. And I thought, you know, what is going through his mind? What's the matter with him? And finally I took him off to the side one day. And I said, you think that dodging a block is unmanly. You feel like getting out of the way of somebody who's trying to hit you makes you a coward. And he got real quiet for a second. And then he said, that's right. And he started ducking blocks the next day. And he told me the other day, because we talk about this a lot. He said, you know, I never would have been able to explain that for myself until you said it. I didn't know it was true. And never in a million years what I would have thought doing it was acting like a coward. But it was absolutely what was driving me. And so when you can summarize it again from the other. Because if you say that to him like that. It was almost like I was trying to talk him into it. Well, it's cowardly, but I was just recognizing it for him. Even though it sounded like it was against what I was trying to get. It just gave him an epiphany. And it was really a black swan for him. One of my first negotiations after I got trained on the hotline. Was with the woman who's now the ex Mrs. Voss. And I had learned on the hotline. That when you heard anger in somebody's voice. That you would say, you sound angry. And it would make it go away. And it was like magic, you know, it worked for me on the hotline all the time. And someone calling on a hotline, there's going to be anger that's going to be driving them one way or the other. So I'm in a conversation with the now ex Mrs. Voss over discussion of something that was fundamental to our relationship at the time. And I heard anger. So, you know, I'm kind of like, ah, got my hostage negotiation skills here. I can handle this as going to be easy. So I look at her and I say, you sound angry. Yes. I see you shaking your head over there. You know, that probably didn't go well. She like blew up. She's like angry. And I remember at the time going like, ah, but I'm a hostage negotiator. That's not supposed to happen. Well, the problem was it wasn't just that she was angry. She was angry at me and she held me responsible for it. And what I said stopped short of that. A more accurate thing would have been, it seems like I've been unreasonable. It seems like I've been unfair. It seems like I have never given you a chance. It seems like I haven't respected you. It seems like I haven't respected your autonomy. Something closer that she could have said, that's right too. And it's harder when we're closer to them or if we don't feel responsible. If they think we're responsible, it's harder for us to recognize that. So in the movie the Negotiator, first of all, early on, there's a line between Samuel Jackson character and woman playing his wife. And she says, well, you're a negotiator. You lie for a living. Lying is a really bad idea. And I don't believe, I never believed that in an adjustage negotiation. And I don't believe in a business negotiation. One of the reasons that I hit it off with my friends at Harvard real early on, Bob Mnookin running the program up there, they put a heavy emphasis on teaching people not to lie. And just off the top of his head while I was up there the first time he said, chris, you know, what do hostage negotiators think about lying? And I said, don't lie to anybody you're not going to kill. And they kind of laughed, you know, and they thought that was kind of funny. And then they got uncomfortable because they realized I meant it. But then I said, you know, but even then it's probably a bad idea because somebody that they know is going to find out you lied. So I don't believe in lying. I think lying is a bad approach in negotiation. The other side's going to find out in a business deal you lie, they're going to find out and they're still in your world. I also don't believe, you know, in the attacking kind of a negotiator. I mean, the tough path. Pound the other side. It's just bad for business long term. People don't want to make deals with you anymore after a while. I mean, when I first got up to the Harvard program on negotiation in their class, I resorted to my hard bargaining techniques that I'd learned as a kidnapping negotiator. Kidnappers are businessmen, they're commodities businessmen. Whether we think it's horrific, they think it's a business. And I had learned some very hard bargaining techniques that I used to just really pound people with. And they didn't know that I did it to them. I did it in a very invisible way. The problem was word got out. So the first two or three times I really slaughtered the other side. And then they started talking about it. It's like your reputation getting out in the industry. And pretty soon no one would talk to me. I mean, I'd sit down for negotiation, they'd stare at me because they're afraid to say anything. Well, I spoke to a CEO in the energy business a couple of years after that, and he said, I've got such a reputation in my industry as being a hard bargain and nobody will deal with me. I got an agreement sitting on my desk right now. The other CEO was there with me the whole time we negotiated every term. He's afraid to sign it. Because if you make a deal with me now, by definition you've been beaten. And people now no longer want to admit that they've dealt with me. So no one will make a deal. So if you're a hard bargainer and you really beat the other side, word gets out and it isn't long and you can't make deals anymore. Everybody shows up in a negotiation having rehearsed their argument, having rehearsed their talking points. The reality is, until they get that out of their head, they're not going to be able to listen to anything that I say. So while they're focused on what they have to say, I want to hear what it is, because they're not going to be able to listen to me until they've had their say, number one. Number two, I now believe there's probably going to be some really important information for me to pick up that I didn't otherwise have. As a general rule, I can get in a negotiation in 10 or 15 minutes, information that would have taken me at least two weeks to acquire or otherwise, if I could ever have gotten it. And there are certain things about what's going on in your world that no matter how much research I do, I can never find that out. Your boss may have given you a hard time about the last deal that you cut. You may have internal pressures to get something done. You may have no pressures to get anything done. You might not be hungry at all. There's no amount of research that I can do outside that I can find that out. I have to find it out from you. So I'm going to get the conversation started so that we're talking. You're comfortable talking with. With me as soon as possible. And so, yeah, I want you to go first. I want to hear where you're coming from. If somebody's talking to you, you've got something they want, period. You know, I always said there's always leverage. There's a whole. You're asking, what kind of leverage is there? What can I give them? You know, my colleague Jim Camp likes to say there's no such thing as leverage because it all exists in the eye of the beholder, in the mind of the beholder. I've got another colleague says it doesn't matter what leverage they have on you. What matters is what they think of the leverage you have on them. Again, it all ends up being in the eye of the beholder. If you're talking to me at all, I've got something you want. Otherwise you wouldn't talk to me.