conversation.
The tool we developed is something I call the calibrated,
or open-ended, question. What it does is remove aggression
from conversations by acknowledging the other side openly,
without resistance. In doing so, it lets you introduce ideas
and requests without sounding pushy. It allows you to
nudge.
I’ll explain it in depth later on, but for now let me say
that it’s really as simple as removing the hostility from the
statement “You can’t leave” and turning it into a question.
“What do you hope to achieve by going?”
DON’T TRY TO NEGOTIATE IN A FIREFIGHT
The moment I arrived in Manila on the Burnham-Sobero
case I was sent down to the Mindanao region, where the
Philippine military was lobbing bullets and rockets into a
hospital complex where the Abu Sayyaf and the hostages
were holed up.
This was no place for a negotiator, because it’s
impossible to have a dialogue in the middle of a firefight.
Then things got worse: when I woke up the next morning, I
learned that during the night the kidnappers had taken their
hostages and escaped.
The “escape” was the first sign that this operation was
going to be a rolling train wreck and that the Philippine
military was less than a trustworthy partner.
During debriefings following the episode, it was
revealed that during a cease-fire a military guy had collected