Crisis averted, but barely.
The point here is that your job as a negotiator isn’t just to
get to an agreement. It’s getting to one that can be
implemented and making sure that happens. Negotiators
have to be decision architects: they have to dynamically and
adaptively design the verbal and nonverbal elements of the
negotiation to gain both consent and execution.
“Yes” is nothing without “How.” While an agreement is
nice, a contract is better, and a signed check is best. You
don’t get your profits with the agreement. They come upon
implementation. Success isn’t the hostage-taker saying,
“Yes, we have a deal”; success comes afterward, when the
freed hostage says to your face, “Thank you.”
In this chapter, I’ll show how to drive toward and
achieve consent, both with those at the negotiating table and
with the invisible forces “underneath” it; distinguish true
buy-in from fake acquiescence; and guarantee execution
using the Rule of Three.
“YES” IS NOTHING WITHOUT “HOW”
About a year after the Dos Palmas crisis, I was teaching at
the FBI Academy in Quantico when the Bureau got an
urgent call from the State Department: an American had
been kidnapped in the Ecuadoran jungle by a Colombia-
based rebel group. As the FBI’s lead international hostage
negotiator, this was my baby, so I put a team together and
set up operation headquarters in Quantico.
For a few years, José and his wife, Julie, had been