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

outside early on in the standoff—a precaution to ensure that
none of the bank robbers could flee the scene. We all knew
this, of course, on some level, but when the time came for
Bobby to give himself up and walk out the door, it’s like our
brains went into sleep mode. No one on the SWAT team
thought to remind anyone on the negotiating team of this
one significant detail, so for a couple long beats Bobby
couldn’t get out, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach that
whatever progress we’d just made with this guy would be
for nothing.
So there we were, scrambling to recover. Soon, two
SWAT guys moved forward toward the entrance, with
ballistic shields, guns drawn, to take the locks and the
barricade off the door—and at this point they still didn’t
know what they were facing on the other side. It was a
super-tense moment. There could have been a dozen guns
on these two SWAT guys, but there was nothing for them to
do but make their slow approach. Those guys were rock
solid. They unlocked the door, backed away, and finally we
were good to go.
Bobby came out—his hands in the air. I’d walked him
through a specific set of instructions on what to do when he
came out the door, what to expect. A couple of SWAT guys
patted him down. Bobby turned and looked and said,
“Where’s Chris? Take me to Chris.”
Finally, they brought him around to me, and we were
able to debrief him inside our makeshift command post.
This was the first we learned that there was only one other