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

Like you’d expect of a negotiation with a guy
threatening to destroy a good part of the U.S. capital, it was
righteously tense. Sharpshooters had their weapons trained
on Watson, and they had the “green light” to shoot if he
made any crazy moves.
In any negotiation, but especially in a tense one like this,
it’s not how well you speak but how well you listen that
determines your success. Understanding the “other” is a
precondition to be able to speak persuasively and develop
options that resonate for them. There is the visible
negotiation and then all the things that are hidden under the
surface (the secret negotiation space wherein the Black
Swans dwell).
Access to this hidden space very often comes through
understanding the other side’s worldview, their reason for
being, their religion. Indeed, digging into your counterpart’s
“religion” (sometimes involving God but not always)
inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and
into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart.
Once you’ve understood your counterpart’s worldview,
you can build influence. That’s why as we talked with
Watson I spent my energy trying to unearth who he was
rather than logically arguing him into surrender.
From this we learned that Watson had been finding it
increasingly hard to make a living on his 1,200-acre tobacco
farm, which had been in his family for five generations.
After being hit by a drought and having his crop quota cut
by half, Watson decided he couldn’t afford the farm