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

Heaven. If Christ came out on the Dawn of the Third Day,
why not Watson?”
It was a brilliant use of deep listening. By combining that
subtext of Watson’s words with knowledge of his worldview
she let us show Watson that we not only were listening, but
that we had also heard him.
If we’d understood his subtext correctly, this would let
him end the standoff honorably and to do so with the feeling
that he was surrendering to an adversary that respected him
and his beliefs.
By positioning your demands within the worldview your
counterpart uses to make decisions, you show them respect
and that gets you attention and results. Knowing your
counterpart’s religion is more than just gaining normative
leverage per se. Rather, it’s gaining a holistic understanding
of your counterpart’s worldview—in this case, literally a
religion—and using that knowledge to inform your
negotiating moves.
Using your counterpart’s religion is extremely effective
in large part because it has authority over them. The other
guy’s “religion” is what the market, the experts, God, or
society—whatever matters to him—has determined to be fair
and just. And people defer to that authority.
In the next conversation with Watson, we mentioned that
the next morning was the Dawn of the Third Day. There was
a long moment of silence on the other end of the line. Our
Negotiation Operation Center was so quiet you could hear
the heartbeat of the guy next to you.