Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations - by William Ury
Date read: 2018-11-18How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
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A follow-up to the acclaimed best-seller Getting to Yes, this book is considered a follow-up for when you have to deal with a particularly difficult negotiation. When the person you're negotiating with does not want to budge or is trying to use bullying tactics. Recommended for those looking to improve their negotiation skills in all areas.
Contents:
- INTERESTS
- OPTIONS
- STANDARDS
- ALTERNATIVES
- DON'T REACT: GO TO THE BALCONY
- DON'T ARGUE: STEP TO THEIR SIDE
- DON'T REJECT: REFRAME
- DON'T PUSH: BUILD THEM A GOLDEN BRIDGE
- DON'T ESCALATE: USE POWER TO EDUCATE
My Notes
There are real-world barriers that get in the way of cooperation. The five most common ones are:
- Your reaction - When you’re under stress, or when you encounter a NO, or feel you are being attacked, you naturally feel like striking back. Or, alternatively, you may react by impulsively giving in just to end the negotiation and preserve the relationship.
- Their emotion - Behind their attacks may lie anger and hostility. Behind their rigid positions may lie fear and distrust.
- Their position - The barrier in the way is the other side’s positional behavior: their habit of digging into a position and trying to get you to give in.
- Their dissatisfaction - Even if you can satisfy their interests, they may fear losing face if they have to back down. And if it is your idea, they may reject it for that reason alone.
- Their power - If they can get what they want by power plays, why should they cooperate with you?
Your single greatest opportunity as a negotiator is to change the game. Instead of playing their way, let them have your way—the way of joint problem-solving.
Breakthrough negotiators do the same: They treat their opponents as negotiating partners who are presenting an opportunity to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement.
Before every meeting, prepare. After every meeting, assess your progress, adapt your strategy, and prepare again. The secret of effective negotiation is that simple: prepare, prepare, prepare.
If you want a rule of thumb, think about preparing a minute for every minute of interaction with the other side.
There are five important points along the way to a mutually satisfactory agreement: interests, options for satisfying those interests, standards for resolving differences fairly, alternatives to negotiation, and proposals for agreement.
You uncover your interests by asking the simple question Why? “Why do I want that? What problem am I trying to solve?”
It’s important to rank your interests so that you don’t make the all-too-common mistake of trading off an important interest for a less important one.
It is therefore just as important to understand their interests as your own.
The single most important skill in negotiation is the ability to put yourself in the other side’s shoes. If you are trying to change their thinking, you need to begin by understanding what their thinking is.
Effective negotiators do not just divvy up a fixed pie. They first explore how to expand the pie.
Invent first, evaluate later. Suspend judgment for a few minutes and try to come up with as many ideas as possible. Include ideas that at first seem like wild ideas, remembering that many of the best ideas in the world started out as wild ideas everyone disparaged. After brainstorming a multitude of options, you can review them and evaluate how well they satisfy your interests—and the other side’s too.
An independent standard is a measuring stick that allows you to decide what is a fair solution. Common standards are market value, equal treatment, the law, or simply the way the issue has been resolved before.
The purpose of negotiation is to explore whether you can satisfy your interests better through an agreement than you could by pursuing your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA).
BATNA is the key to negotiating power. Your power depends less on whether you are bigger, stronger, more senior, or richer than the other person than on how good your BATNA is. If you have a viable alternative, then you have leverage in the negotiation. The better your BATNA, the more power you have.
Knowing the other side’s BATNA can be just as important as knowing your own. It gives you an idea of the challenge you face: developing an agreement that is superior to their best alternative.
When you find yourself facing a difficult negotiation, you need to step back, collect your wits, and see the situation objectively.
Imagine you are negotiating on a stage and then imagine yourself climbing onto a balcony overlooking the stage. The “balcony” is a metaphor for a mental attitude of detachment. From the balcony you can calmly evaluate the conflict almost as if you were a third party.
The simplest way to buy time to think in the middle of a tense negotiation is to pause and say nothing.
Feel the anger, frustration, or fear—even imagine attacking your opponent if you like — but don’t channel your feelings and impulses into action.
Slow down the conversation by playing it back. Tell your counterpart: “Let me just make sure I understand what you’re saying.” Review the discussion up to that point.
An easy way to slow down the negotiation is to take careful notes. Writing down what your counterpart says gives you a good excuse: “I’m sorry, I missed that. Could you please repeat it?” Keeping a record not only buys you time to think, but also shows that you are taking the other person seriously.
Never make an important decision on the spot. Go to the balcony and make it there.
“You’ve put a lot of time and thought into this, haven’t you?” As they nod agreement, continue, “In that case, I’d like to do it justice by studying it carefully before responding.” Fold up the document and put it away, saying: “I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”
Stepping to their side means doing three things:
- Listen to what they have to say.
- Acknowledge their point, their feelings, and their competence and status.
- Agree with them wherever you can.
Look for any opportunity to agree—even if it is only in a humorous way.
Look for occasions when you can say yes to them without making a concession.
Each yes you elicit from the other side further reduces tension. As you accumulate agreement, even if only on what they are saying, you create an atmosphere in which they are more likely to say yes to a substantive proposal.
The standard mind-set is either/or: Either you are right or the other side is. The alternative mind-set is both/and.
You can say to them, “I can see why you feel the way you do. It’s entirely reasonable in terms of the experience you’ve had. My experience, however, has been different.”
The other side will be more receptive if you first acknowledge their views with a “yes” and then preface your own with an “and.”
As you express your views, you will be less likely to provoke the other side if you speak about yourself rather than about them. After all, your own experience is all you really know about anyway.
Common phrases to use are: “I feel…,” “I get upset when…,” “I’m not comfortable with…,” and “The way I see it is…”
Treat your opponent like a partner. Instead of rejecting what your opponent says, accept it—and reframe it as an opportunity to talk about the problem.
Reframing means redirecting the other side’s attention away from positions and toward the task of identifying interests, inventing creative options, and discussing fair standards for selecting an option.
Reframe it by saying, “That’s interesting. Why do you want that? Help me understand the problem you are trying to solve.”
Instead of giving the other side the right answer, try to ask the right question. Instead of trying to teach them yourself, let the problem be their teacher.
Ask “Why?” If asking why doesn’t work, try asking why not. Propose an option and ask “Why not do it this way?” or “What would be wrong with this approach?”
If revealing your interests makes you feel vulnerable, you don’t need to tell all at the start. Give the other side a little information about your interests, ask them about theirs, then give them more information, and so on. Build trust incrementally.
The next step is to engage the other side in discussing options. To introduce a host of possible solutions without challenging their position, use one of the most powerful phrases in the English language: “What if?”
Another way to engage the other side in a discussion of options is to ask for their advice.
“You must have good reasons for thinking that’s a fair solution. I’d like to hear them.”
As the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote more than three centuries ago: “People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered by themselves than by those found by others.”
Preface your question with “how,” “why,” “why not,” “what,” or “who.” Your counterpart cannot easily answer no to questions such as “What’s the purpose of this policy?” “Who has the authority to grant an exception?” and “How would you advise me to proceed?”
If the other side declares “Take it or leave it!” or “You have until five o’clock, or the deal is off!” you cannot be sure whether they mean it or are just bluffing. So test their seriousness by ignoring the tactic. Keep talking about the problem as if you didn’t hear what they said, or change the subject altogether. If they are serious, they will repeat their message.
Don’t forget that you can sometimes turn the other side’s stone wall to your advantage. If they have given you an inflexible deadline, for example, you can say, “I’d like to be able to convene the board to make you a more generous offer, but in view of the time problem, this is the best I can do at the moment.”
Your attacker is making two claims: first, that your proposal is no good; and second, that you are no good. You have the power to choose which claim you want to address. By choosing the more legitimate concern about the proposal, you can effectively sidestep the personal attack and direct your opponent’s attention toward the problem.
The alternative to rejecting the trick is to play along with it. Respond as if the other side were negotiating in good faith, but act a little slow and ask probing questions in order to test their sincerity. In other words, play dumb like a fox. If the other side is sincere, your questions will do no harm. If they are trying to deceive you, you will expose the trick. Since you have not confronted them, they can save face by pretending it was all a mistake or a misunderstanding.
One way to test your suspicions is to ask the other side questions to which you already know the answers. You can learn a lot from observing how they shade their responses.
There are actually two “negotiations” going on. One is the negotiation about substance: the terms and conditions, dollars and cents. The second is the negotiation about the rules of the game. How is the negotiation to be conducted?
You need to reframe a retreat from their position as an advance toward a better solution.
Instead of starting from where you are, which is everyone’s natural instinct, you need to start from where the other person is in order to guide him toward an eventual agreement.
Negotiation is not just a technical problem-solving exercise but a political process in which the different parties must participate and craft an agreement together. The process is just as important as the product.
It is easier to get your boss to change her position if you say “Building on your idea, what if we…?” Or “I got this idea from something you said at the meeting the other day….” Or “As a follow-up to our discussion this morning, it occurred to me that…” Show the other side how your proposal stems from or relates to one of their ideas.
The process of working together with an opponent can be long and arduous, but the rewards can be great. Remember the Chinese proverb: “Tell me, I may listen. Teach me, I may remember. Involve me, I will do it.”
You have to jettison three common assumptions: that the other side is irrational and can’t be satisfied; that all they basically want is money; and that you can’t meet their needs without undermining yours.
The most common way to expand the pie is to make a low-cost, high-benefit trade. Identify items you could give the other side that are of high benefit to them but low cost to you. In return, seek items that are of high benefit to you but low cost to them.
Another way to expand the pie is to use an “if-then” formula.
“What do you say we make my fee ten thousand dollars as a base, but if your sales increase twenty percent over the next six months, then you agree to add a ten-thousand-dollar bonus?” Your client readily agrees, because the increased sales would make it easy to justify paying you the bonus.
Your job is to make the process easy. Go slow in order to go fast. Think of yourself as a guide helping a client afraid of heights climb a steep mountain. Break the journey into small stages, pace your client, stop to rest when necessary, and look back periodically at how far you have come.
To break the ice at the start of a tense negotiation, begin, as Thayer did, with the issue that is easiest for you to agree on. By moving progressively from the easier to the more difficult issues, you can get the other side into the habit of saying yes and show them that agreement is possible.
If the other side resists a step-by-step approach, make clear that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.
The three most common reality-testing questions are:
- “What do you think will happen if we don’t agree?”
- “What do you think I will do?”
- “What do you expect me to do if you’re absent again?” or “What would you do if your employee was absent and you couldn’t get the project done?”
Your goal is not to win over them, but to win them over.