Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

were a whole lot of underhanded things going on. What
really ate at me was that this schmuck, who wasn’t an FBI-
trained hostage negotiator, had pulled off something that I
hadn’t been able to.
He’d gotten to speak to Martin Burnham on the phone.
For free.
That’s when I realized that this crooked pol’s success
where we had failed was a kind of metaphor for everything
that was wrong with our one-dimensional mindset.
Beyond our problems with the Philippine military, the
big reason we had no effective influence with the
kidnappers and hostages was that we had this very tit-for-tat
mentality. Under that mentality, if we called up the bad guys
we were asking for something, and if they gave it to us we
had to give them something back. And so, because we were
positive that the Burnhams were alive, we’d never bothered
to call and ask for proof of life. We were afraid to go into
debt.
If we made an “ask” and they granted it, we’d owe. Not
making good on a debt risked the accusation of bad-faith
negotiation and bad faith in kidnappings gets people killed.
And of course we didn’t ask the kidnappers to talk
directly to the hostage because we knew they’d say “no”
and we were afraid of being embarrassed.
That fear was a major flaw in our negotiating mindset.
There is some information that you can only get through
direct, extended interactions with your counterpart.
We also needed new ways to get things without asking