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

nuanced ways of listening.
This is vital to people of all walks of life, from
negotiators to inventors and marketers. What you don’t
know can kill you, or your deal. But to find it out is
incredibly difficult. The most basic challenge is that people
don’t know the questions to ask the customer, the user . . .
the counterpart. Unless correctly interrogated, most people
aren’t able to articulate the information you want. The world
didn’t tell Steve Jobs that it wanted an iPad: he uncovered
our need, that Black Swan, without us knowing the
information was there.
The problem is that conventional questioning and
research techniques are designed to confirm known knowns
and reduce uncertainty. They don’t dig into the unknown.
Negotiations will always suffer from limited
predictability. Your counterpart might tell you, “It’s a lovely
plot of land,” without mentioning that it is also a Superfund
site. They’ll say, “Are the neighbors noisy? Well, everyone
makes a bit of noise, don’t they?” when the actual fact is
that a heavy metal band practices there nightly.
It is the person best able to unearth, adapt to, and exploit
the unknowns that will come out on top.
To uncover these unknowns, we must interrogate our
world, must put out a call, and intensely listen to the
response. Ask lots of questions. Read nonverbal clues and
always voice your observations with your counterpart.
This is nothing beyond what you’ve been learning up to
now. It is merely more intense and intuitive. You have to