Mastering Negotiation through Design Thinking Principles with David Johnson

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Negotiate Anything is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 3 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made it the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm Kwame Christian and I'm the director of the American Negotiation Institute. We're growing and I want to introduce you to our new team members and new trainers. This will give you new and diverse perspectives on negotiation, conflict resolution. And that's why Shane Martin, our head of sales and partnerships, is going to serve as co host of the show from time to time. We're excited to continue to provide you with the best content that will help to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, our team conducts negotiation and conflict resolution trainings in the United States and abroad. Our trainings will give you the practical skills you need to resolve conflict, negotiate, lead, and persuade with confidence. Click the link in the description below to learn more about how we can make your difficult conversations easier.

Dave, thanks for joining us today, my friend.

Oh, my pleasure. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, it's great to have you. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do. Wow. Okay.

Well, I started my legal career in Miami, Florida, in the courtrooms of downtown Miami, Florida for about 10 years in the 1980s, which will give you a sense of how old I am. And if you know anything about Miami, you know anything about the 80s, you ever watched Miami Vice, then you know what the 80s was like in Miami. It was, I'll put it this way, a great place to learn how to practice courtroom law, let's put it that way. And no, I didn't do any criminal law. It was all civil side. But there was a lot going on in Miami and in all ways, culturally and otherwise, it was a terrific place to be, including watching and participating in the growth of the modeling and restaurant and tourism industry on South Beach. After 10 years in Miami, I moved west because I was born in Seattle and moved back west and went back to school, law school, at Stanford. Some of my friends teased me when I left Miami and said, okay, you know, Johnson's no good. He had to go to law school twice. But it was the right thing for me. I was doing an advanced degree, thinking about becoming a professional academic. I decided not to do that. Finished my degree, went to work in Silicon Valley, which at the time was in the midst of the dot com boom. So it was a really good time to find work and get going There worked in Silicon Valley in tech companies some time of that was in law firms. Most of it was in house inside the companies. I ended up gcing a few tech companies and then after about 10, 15 years of doing that, segued over to teaching. And I was lucky enough to get a spot teaching at the law school at Stanford, where I teach negotiation and advanced negotiation of transactions particularly. And I teach mostly law school and B school students, excuse me, in that course. And about five years ago, I ventured over to the D school, what we call the D school. It's technically Hasso Platner Institute of Design at Stanford University. And I say that, you know, with some admiration because Hasso Plattner is the founder of SAP and he funded the construction of the Institute of Design, the D School at Stanford. And I've always been interested in design. I even worked. I was a COO for a period of time at a company that did organizational design consulting in the Valley. So it's been more than just avocational for me. And ultimately it came around to putting together a course on negotiation by design, which is really the application of design thinking to negotiation and trying to explore and experiment with how design thinking might help negotiators do better and get better results.

This is great, Dave. I think it's so fascinating to see how your journey has led you to where you are today and how you're able to bring a new spin on the approach to negotiation. And I think the audience is going to get a lot out of this. And for the listeners out there, I'll give you a quick roadmap. So what we're going to do is first we're going to talk about what design thinking is and how it applies to negotiation. Then Dave's going to give us two practical tools that we can use. And then lastly, he's going to share the negotiators matrix, another great tool that we could use. So let's start off with design thinking. So for those who, who don't know what is design thinking?

So there's a lot of different definitions from a lot of different designers about design thinking. But the generally accepted notion is design thinking is a process. It's a process that has developed over decades and decades. It became a method that started to be taught, particularly in engineering school, for engineers who were designing products and then also products plus services. It's a way of thinking about solving problems. And by the way, software is a way. Software designing and software development is also a way of thinking about solving problems. So there's some overlap there. But design thinking emerged basically as a set of tools and set of instruction to help students improve their abilities as product engineers. And then it grew because it found design thinking foundation homes in other fields like computing, like, I've brought it over to law, as have others. But design thinking has also found its place in other disciplines beyond engineering, and computer science is one of them. Education is another. There's a great deal of course design going on in the last 20 years or so that is applying design thinking. So what is the core of design thinking? It is first and foremost approaching a problem that you're trying to solve by immersing yourself in the needs, wants and desires of the end user. Now, that sounds really obvious, but I can even tell you a story as to how not obvious that was. When the D School was first begun, about 15 years ago, it was housed in a trailer on the outskirts of campus. It was a new thing. And one of the courses was taken by a student named Sarah Greenberg, who is now the director, the executive director of the D School. She was an engineering student, and she and her partner were supposed to do this user centered, human centered design project. And her partner disappeared for about five days, went off and built a prototype of the product. That was the assignment. And on the last day brought it back to her and said, here, here's the pro, here's the prototype. He completely missed the whole idea. The, the proper process would be for the two students to go out and interview potential users, find out what users wanted in the product, and use that information to back into prototypes that might then meet the needs of the user and build in that direction. He, on the other hand, said, I think I know what users want. I'm going to go off and build something that I think these users want, and I'm going to deliver that, and that'll be the product. So that story sort of encapsulates the shift that needed to happen in engineering in order to make design work better for the end user. We call it the designer's mindset.

This is great. And this story, Dave, serves as a fantastic metaphor for a lot of the negotiations that I'm sure you've seen, as well as a professor and a practitioner as well, because a lot of times we get in our heads and we say, I know what we need to do in order to be successful here. So we say, hey, this is a problem. And then we go about trying to solve the problem unilaterally without considering what the other side needs.

Yeah. And in this instance, it will not. Half of your audience will not miss the fact that it was the male engineering student who went off and did it his way and then returned with the quote answer for the female student who then became the executive director of the D school. So, you know, kudos to those of you in your audience that caught that little snippet.

Oh, man, very typical, Very typical. But I think there was a little.

Mansplaining going on there, and he didn't even know it. Right.

But again, it's a great example, and I love the idea of thinking of this as a process. And so now when we take design thinking and bringing it to negotiation, what changes in your approach with this new mentality?

So let me put a little more. Hang a few more ornaments on the Christmas tree here. The designer's mindset has evolved to now at our school, anyway, include something we call the essential design abilities. There's right now eight of them. Some people, you know, talk about 10 of them, and I won't bore you with a list of them, but the ones that I like to think about relevant to negotiation is synthesizing information, communicating deliberately, and navigating ambiguity. And there's a fourth one in there that I'm forgetting at the moment. I'll come back to it. And so we have these specific abilities that sort of categorize a skill set, each in their own silo, categorize a skill set that we put students through to sort of, for lack of a better phrase, improve their designer toolkit ways of doing things. So the place that we start with our course on negotiation by design is with navigating ambiguity. And the reason is because we see that as sort of an overarching ability for negotiators. Almost every negotiation I've ever been in, of any significance anyway, has developed in some way, shape or form some ambiguity once you get into the negotiation. And the reason is one party brings their set of information to the table, the other party brings their set of information. And no matter how much you prepare, you still are working from incomplete information. So two things happen once you engage in the negotiation. One is more information emerges, either by me questioning you, you questioning me, etc. Etc. Or more often, somebody changes their mind a little bit. The position they stated before the negotiation began changes. Sometimes it's my position, sometimes it's theirs, their position, sometimes it's both positions. And so with a change of positioning plus new information, ambiguity arises. There's. There's uncertainty in the space. It's not necessarily bad. It just is. I think of it as, you know, increased fog. Since I live near the coast, you know, we have different measurements for different levels of fog. And so navigating ambiguity boils down to this or teaching the skill of navigating ambiguity is, number one, making sure that we train ourselves not to be thrown off track or lose our sense of direction in the fog. In other words, don't let the ambiguity throw us off. Know it's coming, it's going to happen, and be prepared for it. Then step two is don't guess about what. What's going on, necessarily. Where things are in this ambiguous space, I always return to what I know. I return to the facts that are irrefutable or facts that I'm really certain about myself, even if the other side doesn't agree with those facts. And I re synthesize the information that I have. I told a story the other day to class about a big negotiation I had, and one of the things I did in an ambiguous situation, I won't go into the details, but one of the things I did as soon as I started resynthesizing information once the negotiation began was to go back and reread sections of the other company's SEC filings. It's a public company. They have to file with the SEC, 10Qs and 10Ks, the quarterly and annual filings. And oh, lo and behold, these days they are signed under penalty of perjury by the CEO and cfo, which means they are reliable. Anything in that document has to be accurate, and they can't deny its accuracy. Otherwise, they're saying their officer signed under penalty of perjury and it's false. So they have to basically admit those facts. In negotiation, having reliable facts is key. So I go back and synthesize that information in a new way. I reframe my argument based on the ambiguity that's arisen and the facts that I know. And then I proceed back into the negotiation and I can start to put down markers to, how shall I say, map the ambiguous territory. And suddenly the fog starts to lift. When you can start planting markers with facts and irrefutable arguments, then the fog starts to lift and you can process your way through and you see the horizon and you're back into a good space to continue the negotiation. I've seen way too many negotiators get thrown off when things go sideways. It could be an emotional outburst from the other side. It could just be the new information, the surprise tactic, the entry of a surprise third party, whatever it might be. But staying grounded and just Navigating your way through that, embracing the ambiguity and navigating your way through is one of the biggest skills that we teach to our students in the design class.

Does your company invest in professional development training?

If you believe that your team would.

Benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable and we've done them all around the country. The great negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description.

To learn more and we will be right back after this. This is great, Dave. And one of the things that I like about this is the fact that we're seeing the blend of mindset and skill set here. Because with the mindset, we're addressing the reality that, hey, negotiations are ambiguous. There's no way for us to know everything that there is to possibly know about this situation, about the company and the person sitting in front of us. It's just impossible. And given that fact, ambiguity is going to come up from time to time. So we can't be thrown off by those surprises. We have to expect the unexpected. And so by expecting it, we're going to be less thrown off. And then the last part is we have the skill set to do something about it. And so this goes into the process of actually negotiating, focusing on those facts and building from there and then finding ways to resolve the ambiguities that arise with the skills that the people learn in your class, for example.

Yeah. And you know, I'll be honest to put it on the table, another piece of this training, because we do teach, I teach negotiation from a position of pure self interest. Now all negotiators, I believe, should be acting from a position of pure self interest. You don't want to make a bad deal. One of the things I like to teach in class one, seminar number one in negotiation is don't make a bad deal. Because there are things like bullying, persuasion, deal momentum, intimidation that can get a lot of people into trouble in making a bad deal, particularly when they're opposing a competitive and skilled negotiator making a no, having a no deal is better than a bad deal. And so the ability to survive, navigate a Fog. Remember, a fog bank could be intentionally created by the other side. So having the ability to navigate through that fog is a skill in defense of another. A sharp player, a competitive player on the other side. But since we're negotiating out of our self interest, there are times when we might also be the ones generating the fog to see how our counterparty chooses to deal with it. It may in fact disclose things about our counterparty that may prove that they may not be the partner that we want to do a business deal with, or it may prove that they are very adept at handling ambiguity and uncertainty and are more likely to be the kind of partner that we want in a business deal. So it does. Almost everything you teach in negotiation cuts both ways. It's either a defense against a really strong strategy on the other side, or conversely, it's a really good strategy for us to try against the other side.

This is great. And as you were saying this, I was saying to myself, this sounds like something that would be in an old negotiate negotiation treatise, like Sun Tzu's Art of War. This is really good stuff because again, I like the fact that you address it from a position of pure self interest. I'm going to get back to that. But also the fact that you're right. We have the reality of bullies. For example, we have Rebecca Zung, a fellow attorney who came on the show talking about how to negotiate with narcissists and high conflict individuals. Those people exist. They are real. But we have to remember that we have autonomy and control over our decision making process and we can't be forced into a bad deal. We have to agree to a bad deal.

Yeah, yeah. I talk a lot about agency and making sure that we maintain conscious awareness of the depth, breadth of our agency and our authority in a negotiation. In a business negotiation, we have equal agency with anybody else we're negotiating with. Even if they have more power, we still possess our agency. If you're an employee in a company, your agency includes walking out the door and never coming back. Now that may have downsides for quitting your job, but if a company is trying to bully you, you have to start thinking about your agency and not allowing yourself to be bullied just because the company has power over you in the nature of a paycheck and maybe a recommendation for a new job if you choose to leave. There is a difference between power and leverage. And I should probably drop this because I like this example so much. It comes from Richard Schell's book, who I like a great deal, Bargaining for Advantage. It's a great primer. It's a great first book on negotiation. If anybody's interested, Shell Bargaining for Advantage. But he tells the story this way to discern the difference between power and leverage. And we've all been through this in one way or another. You're at home at dinner time and you have your six year old daughter at the dinner table refusing to eat her vegetables. Now, whether it's you or somebody else, the parent sits down and says, honey, I want you to eat your vegetables. And she says, no. Well, in this situation, the parent has all the power. I mean all the power. The roof over the head, the clothing, the safety, feeding, taking care of, et cetera, et cetera. All the power over a six year old child. Undeniable. But they cannot force the little girl to eat her vegetables. The little girl has the leverage, she has the agency and she's exercising it. She has the choice whether to eat the vegetables, be a good girl, do what her parents tell her, or not eat the vegetables and see what happens. And then it's up to the parents to either punish or just walk away from it. But that's the difference between having power and having leverage. And I use this often with, in talking with startup companies who say, how do I negotiate with Google and apple? They're the 800 pound gorilla in this space. And they say, well, find your leverage, find your leverage, just like the little girl. And she ends up getting an extra dessert or an extra hour of TV time in exchange for eating her vegetables. Her parents will give it to her every time. And so leverage works.

I love that example. And you're absolutely right. And I think again, in our negotiations it forces us to think a little bit more creatively because it's easy to get into that mindset of learned helplessness where we say, well, I'm up against the, the, the, the, the big dogs here and that there. I don't have a leg to stand on. So I just have to accept the fact that they're going to, they're going to punish me in this negotiation. But if you think creatively, you can find a unique source of leverage that you can use to get a little bit more at the table.

Yeah, I've heard it's a common story, but I've heard it's probably sort of a given out there. Women will say that when it comes to cars, buying cars or getting cars repaired, and the data backs this up, they just can't get as good a deal as men can. And that's a sad truth. But part of the reason is the bias that those businesses have against women because they know they can take advantage of them and bully them, although they tend to bully in a nice way because they've learned that that works, but it's still bullying. Let's be clear about that. So the thing for anybody who's in that position, male or female, needs to do is develop alternatives, because the alternatives give you leverage. And, you know, the alternative could be quotes from three different shops while you're talking to the fourth shop, or it could be saying you have quotes from two or three different shops, even if you don't while you're negotiating with the fourth shop. Just using. Finding leverage. Using leverage will almost always get you a better deal.

Absolutely. No, those are great examples. And with the time we have remaining, because I feel like we could have spent the rest of the time talking about that, which means, Dave, you know, you're going to be back on to explore some more of those ideas. Let's move to the second part of the interview where we're talking about the practical tools. And the two tools that you wanted to focus on were the empathy maps, number one, and then the why, how lattice. So let's start off with the empathy map.

Yeah. So one way that we. This tool is intended to do what I spoke about earlier, which is to take lawyers and in other negotiators and break them out of their mindset of how am I analyzing this case? And get them in the preparation of a negotiation. How do I analyze this case? How does my client see this case? This is how we're going to go into the negotiation or a mediation even, and get them to think about how the other side views the case. Now, sometimes, you know, if it's a big case, the team will appoint a devil's advocate, you know, tell us the other side's argument. That doesn't get it done. In my view, that's only part of the answer. You can use that tool. The empathy map is a tool that's designed to force us to walk through the steps to discern ultimately what we believe, develop a hypothesis for what we believe is truly motivating the other side in the negotiation. And basically, you can envision it this way. Imagine a bullseye, three concentric rings, large, middle, small. So what we do is we use the outer circle first, and we call that the, say, slash, do, circle. When you sit down and prepare, you write down. We use post it notes. At the D School. We love our post it notes, and they do work in this situation. But you can do this on your desk. Just draw the circles on a piece of paper and write down in the outer circle what you know, the other side has said or done. And if it's a company, you know this company has acquired X patents or X companies in the last one to five years. The CEO has said these things in public statements or these things they have, the company has said in their public filings. Just what you're doing is you're capturing data, you're capturing information that's highly reliable from the other side. And you're getting as much date, as many data points as you can in that outer circle. Now you can set the data aside for the moment. You're going to draw inferences, you're going to make reasonable inferences from those data to try and figure out what the individual decision makers at the company. This is probably somebody in the C suite who's going to be at the negotiation table, one of the key decision makers, if not the ultimate decision maker, an influencer. So sometimes they'll send the GC to negotiate. The GC will go back to the CFO CEO and say, this is what's going on. We should do this, we shouldn't do that. And try and figure out what that decision maker or that influencer is thinking and feeling about this negotiation by inferring those emotional states from the data. So if it's a company, and I gave the example the other night, if it's a company that has filed a 10Q that has showed serious cuts in personnel, well, that I can, I can infer pretty easily from that that they are reducing either innovation work, R and D or product development work or sales work. But I can draw inferences about what the company plan is based on some of these facts. I don't know for sure, but, but I can draw reasonable inferences. So then in the inner circle, I'll write out six or eight solid inferences. In the middle circle, and then in the bullseye, I'm going to put anywhere between one to three motivations. I'm going to distill from my inferences a hypothesis. These are the motivations of this counterparty, in this instance, a company that's coming to the table. What are the motivations? What do they really, really want that they may not be telling us? They may be coming, you know, telling this great story about a deal that's going to go five years, eight years downstream. They're going to do this partnership with us. They're either going to be a vendor or we're going to do a strategic partnership, whatever. But that story is what the story they want us to believe. What I want to know is what do I really think their motivations are? Because everything in a negotiation emanates from the true motivations of the individuals at the table, across the table from you. Now, those hypotheses might not be 100% accurate. I may find things in the negotiation that make me shift my assessment of my hypothesis or let go of it altogether, or shift to another hypothesis. But this process, which you can train yourself to do with the empathy map. And then after five or 10 times, you don't need the map anymore. The idea is to create a schematic in your brain where every time you prepare for a negotiation, you walk through the steps. Let me look at the facts, let me infer some of the emotions of the people at the table, and then let me drive down and figure out what I think their motivations are. And then from those motivations, you can shape a strategy to work with those motivations either directly, straight on, or maybe from an angle and probably improve your ability to either get a deal or get a better deal in the negotiation.

I think this is great because we always say empathize, empathize, empathize. But first of all, what does that really mean? And even if you get the definition of empathy, where in the context of a negotiation, trying to get a better understanding of how they see, think and feel about the situation. Okay, great, I understand that theoretically. Now how do I do that? Because it doesn't always come naturally to people. And I really like the fact that this empathy map gives us a systematic approach to empathizing on an effective and strategic level.

So the next thing is the why, how lattice. Because it pivots right off of the motivations from the empathy map. So what I'm going to do is look at the motivations that I've developed in the empathy map. Pick one and I'm going to park it, basically, let's call it in the center of the sheet of paper. I'm going to go in a couple of directions in this sheet of paper. So take your 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper, write the motivation smack in the middle. I did one of these last night and just it happened to be needs greater respect from colleagues was the motivation of an employee in an employee situation, employee conflict situation. And so now you go in two directions, why and how. So you start by going asking the question, why does this person. Again, we're in this person's mind, not our mind we don't have to agree with them, but we're expanding and extrapolating from their point of view. So why does this person feel like they need more respect? And we answer the question, we go up a level and we write an answer. Well, because she's the only woman in a male dominated division. And this happened to be software engineering, so it happened to be true. Thank you very much, Susan Fowler. And then you ask the next question above that, why is that the issue? And you go up higher because the company itself is biased in its hiring. And you take steps up to answer, why does she feel that way? And then you go down below and you ask, how? And so from respect, gaining more respect, you drop down one and you ask, how can we accomplish her getting more respect? And then you hypothesize an answer. Well, we can hire more women into the division, or we could pay her equal or more than the men, or we could give her perks that balance out the fact that if she's a woman in the only in a, in a, in a cube farm of 20 men, maybe we should give her a private office where she can spend a few hours a day and just get away from the harassment that she's suffering and is documented, that sort of thing. So you ladder up with the question why, you ladder down with question how. Then you look at all of those responses and you can pull them together. We used to call it the why how ladder. And then I decided to call it the lattice. Because you take those results and then you start to build a lattice which is, you know, you can envision a lattice of most any kind, which is the beginning of a strategy based on the motivation, it starts to create a structure for the strategy of why she wants it and how you can make it happen, including, what can my client, what can I do if I'm the GC in the company, or what can my client, if I'm outside counsel for the company, what can my client do to help her achieve the answers to how and have those things meet the why? And so now you've developed from just basic facts at the outer ring of the empathy map. You've taken yourself all the way to a fully human centered, user centered evaluation of what you and your client can do to help solve the real issue that you believe is being brought to the table by your counterparty.

I love this and I think this is just a great example of design thinking applied to negotiation because it's so systematic and you can see it's a very clear process and some People might say, I'm not empathetic, I'm not creative. Well, this gave you a very simple way to, to hack empathy and come up with creative solutions. I really like this.

I like that. I've never used that term before. I am going steal it mercilessly right now, my friend. Let me add this, which is using the tools. And I've seen this firsthand and I've seen this firsthand with students who come into class who say I'm not creative. I don't really feel like I have a lot of empathy. They use the tool, you know what, it develops their empathy. We all have it. Some people express it more than others, some people access it more than others, some people don't use it a whole lot. But we all have it. Unless you're a stone cold sociopath. And I hear tell there are a few of them running around the states today, but I just don't pay attention to them.

Exactly. Let's pretend they don't exist. And with the time we have left, let's touch on the negotiators matrix and see how deep we can go. Because I have Joe Navarro in the, in the waiting room.

Okay. I don't want to step on Joe's toes. Okay. So quickly the idea of a two by two matrix comes to me from Intel. I had a guest speaker at my class once, the general counsel of intel, the big semiconductor company that was founded by Andy Grove. Andy Grove was famous when he started the company as the founder CEO for never using his founder CEO office. He made it his mission to sit in a cube farm with all of his engineers. He also came up with what they call Groveisms or Andyisms. One of them, one of many that is still around today, is if you have something technical that you want to explain to people and have them understand it, you should be able to reduce it to a two by two matrix. So I came up with the idea of the designers, the negotiation by design matrix, let's call it that. And if you can imagine a matrix, and this is going to apply particularly to lawyers, so watch out because I am a little bit critical of the legal education system as it is right now. So imagine a two by two box, okay? The upper left quadrant in this particular matrix is the word logic. And so above that box on the horizontal axis is the word reasoning. And on the vertical next to that box is the word data. So the quadrant sets up as the merger of reasoning and data gets you logic. And that's where lawyers live. We are trained from the jump to Use information and we get trained in the case method and we read a lot of cases and we look for the facts of the case and then we reason and apply the rule of the law of the case and we try and arrive at the result, we criticize the opinion, if you got it right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that's where lawyers live in that upper left hand quadrant. And my hypothesis is there are three other quadrants of ways that we could think about problems in the world, including, but not limited as lawyers, including but not limited to negotiators that can expand how we think about problems and improve our results. So from that left hand quadrant, if you take data which is in the vertical upper left and you go all the way across to the upper right hand quadrant and you put over the top. So next to reasoning on the vert on the horizontal, sorry, next to reasoning to the right is empathy. So the right hand quadrant is empathy and data. And I put heightened awareness in that box. Heightened awareness is my phrase for the athlete's notion of being in the zone. Heightened awareness is my personal takeaway. If you've ever listened to David Foster Wallace's commencement famous commencement speech called this is water and I recommend it to anybody who just look it up on YouTube, there are excerpts of it and you can find the text online as well. 2005 commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. And the big takeaway from his speech is that we have a choice about how we want to see the world. And he says it takes a heightened sense of awareness of the world around us to be able to discern all the possibilities in the world so that we can then exercise our agency and make choice. So I dilute that, not dilute that, I distill that down to heightened awareness is in the upper right hand quadrant. Now go with me to the lower left quadrant underneath the vertical of reasoning and the horizontal. Now we're going to put intuition. So if you take reasoning and intuition, that quadrant is the why how lattice that we just discussed. We're using some intuition to make inferences and we're using some reasoning in building out the, building out the how to solve the problem and why the person wants the problem solved in a certain way. That leaves the fourth quadrant, the far right lower corner. That is then empathy and intuition. That's the empathy map. It's the, the, the emphasis on empathy and intuition to infer a motivation for the other side. So you have logic, upper left hand corner, heightened awareness, upper right hand corner. So we start, I think we all start sort of in home turf, upper left hand corner. Logic. I'm pointing at you and I shouldn't be. I apologize. It feels like I'm pointing at you. Logic. You shift over to heightened awareness to improve your ability to see the world larger. You go down to the empathy map, which is a tool that allows you to see your counterparty or your partner or an employee or anybody that you're dealing with in a more empathetic way. And then over to the left, you use the why how lattice to apply reasoning and intuition to developing a solution for whatever the problem might be. That is the negotiators, lawyers, business persons design matrix for expanding your ways of thinking about solving problems.

This is great. This is great. And again, I like the fact that this is a tool that can be used for lawyers and negotiators everywhere to have a more holistic approach to negotiation, because I think naturally some of us will be more inclined to find ourselves in one part of the matrix more so than others. And so this is a good check to put on ourselves to consider other positions as well. So I think that's really important.

Yeah, well, when we find ourselves in the matrix, we all know that Kwame is the one.

So thank you, my friend. I think that's a good place to end, Dave. So I appreciate this and thank you so much for coming on the show. And before you go, can you let listeners know about how they can get in touch with you, learn more about your work and your courses, too?

Yeah. If you go to the D School website, just Google Stanford D School, you'll see my bio and I think an email you can reach me at. And you can. And if you're interested in design at all that website alone, we have a public library. It is a wealth of information, including videos that you're free to use. A lot of the material is copyright, common copyright and usable with attribution. So feel free to do a deep dive on that website.

That's great, Dave. Thank you so much, my friend. I really appreciate it.

All right, take care. Thank you.

Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club club by listening to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team, so welcome aboard. What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you, and I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.