How To Negotiate Like An FBI Agent | Chris Voss | Modern Wisdom Podcast 237

the guy on the other side is a sociopathic killer he literally says that that's right when we go into full summer i don't know how long it took to do the full summary but it took a while it seemed excruciating on our terrorist sociopath on the other side says that's right immediately the ransom demand went away we went from 10 million to zero when the phone hung up no monetary demand was ever raised again through the course of the kidnapping kidnapping last couple more months the hostage walks away he gets the opportunity they're lacking in security he just walks away we're flying back to the u.s he's gone bad guys got nothing i'm back in the philippines about three weeks later connect back up with the negotiator that i was coaching he says you're not going to believe he called me on the phone the terrorist what'd he say he said have you been promoted i was going to kill the american you're really good at what you do they should promote you negotiating today we're gonna learn how to hopefully have productive negotiations let's define our terms first what should be our desired outcome from a negotiation why are we negotiating uh well really your desired outcome should be a better relationship i mean um by definition i can explain intellectually intellectually while it's impossible to know what the best outcome of the negotiation could be you're holding information back there holding information back information being held back by both sides is important therefore not only is your information flawed it's flawed in important ways so the more people get focused on an outcome the more they have blinders on the more they are likely to miss a better deal so if you're focused on a better relationship that's going to sort of permeate the interaction and increase the chances that the other side is going to show you theirs and you'll get a better deal and then plus they're going to enjoy the process and the chances that they're going to want to do it again are much higher being familiar with your work it seems like an adversarial relationship during a negotiation is something that you try and steer clear of as much as possible yeah because it's just it's just going to um how much i could get it's gonna harm my ability to get it again like an adversary relationship is gonna sting the other side they're gonna remember that it's gonna discourage them from wanting to continue to negotiate with me that's not good for me long term there was goldman sachs executive a long time ago gus levy his phrase was greedy yes but long term greedy that's a good way to put it i suppose as well with the networking effect now that everyone knows everyone it's much easier to have free flow of information you can't the charlatans and the psychopaths and the con men can't hide as much anymore yeah it's gonna get out um it it got out before anyway it's but now it's just getting out faster it gets out at hyper speed now what do you think most people believe about negotiating which is wrong or ineffective you know that you got to beat the other side i mean we're even really careful how we phrase it like we never talk about the the person across the table is the adversary we refer to them as a counterpart you have to say is the situation and if you're negotiating with someone you're both faced with different aspects of the same problem which by definition is you're both going to be better off if you collaborate now most people you know they and most negotiations categorize as win lose beat the other side and that just that just hurts people long term it just does who is the worst sort of person to negotiate with then and how can we get them involved in the dialogue yeah well it kind of it's it's not the worst person i mean it's typically what you run into is occasional tight mismatches create problems then there's basically the world splits up evenly into thirds fight flight make friends these are the caveman responses to survival this is wired into us it's baked into us there's there's no way around it and um you know the world we've we've pulled really the world and we've seen that the world splits up evenly into thirds i mean we've taught for a while we were teaching negotiation to executives from the chinese development bank and you know it's a it's a great culture to have a stereotype about whether they're very guarded or whatever your stereotype might be about them and we're working with these people internally and we're seeing all three times so what does that mean um type mismatch for example if you're very thoughtful and you like time to think which means silence well if you're really conscious of the relationship and the dynamic you see silence as a way that people trigger anger so there's an obvious disconnect here one person's loving the silence because they want to think and the other person is going like oh my god oh my god oh my god the other person's mad yeah yeah it and it is a comedy sometimes so being being aware of type mismatch at a given moment is really really the issue and if it splits into thirds you don't have a lot to keep track of um if you're running into problems it's probably a tightness match how can we easily detect the type of the person who is across the table from us yeah well you know um two of them are really easy the assertive is gonna be obvious they're gonna be blunt they're gonna be loud they're going to be forceful they're going to act like time is money you know um not taking a political perspective on it any in any way shape or form donald trump is a classic example of the assertive negotiator blunt harsh aggressive time is money time is of the essence you know his leadership style and he doesn't have time for the us congress to make up its mining issues in executive order times money um that's that style uh the analytical they're gonna seem cold and distant um that's because they're up in their head thinking analyzing stuff and they're not in fact cold and distant but again that's how they're going to seem because they're thinking things through so those two types are going to be fairly obvious they're going to be the analytical type is going to be quite comfortable with silence they're going to go silent for long periods of time on now the one that is a little tricky is what the accommodator the relationship focused really they're interaction focused even more than the relationship they don't really understand the difference but they want the interaction to be positive now many analysts become uh they look like accommodators my my daughter-in-law is chief of marketing of my company brilliant girl she looks like an accommodator she is bubbly she's happy she laughs she's one of the most pleasant people on earth to deal with she's an analyst deep down in her bones extremely analytical she's just smart enough to have seen that people are more likely to comply with her if she's bubbly and and smiling and happy so a lot of people are convinced that she's an accommodator she's not she's an analyst and an analyst is an assassin i mean she's a dangerous negotiator but you're gonna love dealing with her so that that's the only type that you get fooled by because the other two types catch on if they eventually speed that they catch on various but they catch on that the relationship focused person makes a lot of deals and people want to deal with them over and over again now they're a little annoyed by this because they're not impressed by the deals but they do see that they make a lot of deals and that's why my daughter-in-law is a great example she's like all right so i'll make more deals if i'm pleasant i'll be pleasant and it's justified the means man i i'm i'm very i i agree i'm very very interested in the way that negotiations work and especially people's confidence within negotiating i think the way that we it's interesting right because sometimes um someone's interaction style is a projection of their kind of inner emotions and for other people you mentioned uh the marketing your daughter-in-law um who is essentially sort of almost playing a little bit of a role so she's able to adapt the person who she is during the interactions to get a better outcome doesn't mean completely compromising but perhaps you know glazing over some bits and enhancing other bits and so on and so forth um how can someone who maybe doesn't feel like they have a massive amount of confidence normally day-to-day either in themselves and or in negotiations what can they do to make themselves feel a bit more assertive and in charge when they sit down yeah you know um i'm gonna quote one of my favorite actors denzel washington for a movie called man on fire and and and in one way another thing that washington has played me in several movies you know he doesn't call he doesn't write i don't get invited over to the house uh but uh and man on fire he's training a little girl that he's guarding to be a better swimmer and she says i'm not any good he says there's no such thing as good or bad there's only trained and untrained only trained and untrained so you don't feel confident you just haven't got your practice in um same thought daniel coyle wrote a great book called the talent code codes uh coyle's contention is that everything is learned now i'm not sure that everything is learned but he's got enough data that backs up the fact that the vast majority the ridiculously overwhelming skills of people that are really good learned it they weren't born with it again you can become confident with practice you can learn it we advise small stakes negotiations for high stakes results you know practice a calm demeanor when you order coffee it's practice practice a calm demeanor when you're talking to your your lift or your uber driver i mean we got no shortage of practice one one young lady i'm i'm coaching in some negotiations now cousin covert and the economic switch she's moved back into her parents house which means her mother is there giving her our time every day and she said my mother punches my buttons and i said perfect it's practice practice being calm with your mom if you can't do it in the moment the interactions or prepare for them constantly you sit you know you sit down in in the basement the fully furnished basement and you know when you go upstairs your mother's going to punch your buttons and you just see yourself getting mad so just re-run it in your head and see your yourself if not staying calm see yourself being silent it's practice how you envision your performance it's what great athletes do you know michael jordan lebron james they see themselves hitting the game-winning shot over and over and over they practice it on on the court you know they're out there by themselves but they imagine being surrounded by fans screaming for them to miss they imagine being in a hostile environment this is our practice you could you that's way great athletes become great you could do it yourself in negotiation the term that you've kept on using there is calm does confidence come from being calm um you know you could do it either way you know you could practice a convoys and you know and that that's an interesting point because if you just practice you know what we refer to as the late night fm dj voice there's a neuroscience response behind that if you hear my voice when i use that voice there's a neurochemical change in your brain triggered by your mirror neurons which is an automatic response it's not a choice and you'll start to calm the brain down now the great thing about that voice is when you use it you hear it too which means you can force a system override if you're upset and you just start talking out loud in a calm voice your voice is going to hit your mirror neurons and you can force yourself to calm down the same way that you would trigger the reaction in the other person so once you discover some of the system overrides you can use them on yourself recently had fiona murden on who's cognitive psychologist a new book it's called mirror thinking which is exclusively about the mirror system it might be an interesting read for yourself or you can listen to on the episode she's fascinating fascinating woman teaching a lot of leaders in business and uh yet some of the examples that she came up with from the mirror system are outrageous there was a one girl in i want to say yugoslavia or somewhere who had parents a young infant parents that were drinking a lot and not caring for her and they left her out in the cold one night and she got taken in by a pack of wild dogs between the age of three and eight and at eight years old she was finally sort of seen by someone who then took her back into child protective services but by this time she was walking on all fours she was drinking from a tap by licking she was unable to speak she was unable to write she was unable to do any of this stuff because she had been around animals that had done that so the ability for us to completely transcend what we would naturally probably consider our nature bipedal talking using hands you know like the mirror system is so pervasive and so powerful that it can turn a child essentially into a you know a kind of a mirror of a canine interesting yeah yeah it's crazy right the way the neurochemistry of the brain when these things start to kick in unbelievable um one of the things i'm fascinated by is your strategy for mirroring can you take us through that and explain why it's effective yeah and and very much along the lines of what we're just talking about you know there's the mirroring the body language and then the the hostage negotiator's mirror puts it slightly different spin on it and it's it starts with repeating the one the last one to three words you know three ish could be as many no more than five uh but one to three is the general rule of what somebody has just said it causes this great thought connection in your counterparts thinking they they go on they reword it's actually a much better thing than to say what did you mean by that you know because most people when you say to them what did you mean by that um they're gonna repeat it the exact same words only louder kind of like an american so but with the mirror people have a tendency to reword there's something in the message that clicks with the other person which tells them okay i heard your words and i still don't understand can you give us an example um yeah my son and i it's one of the negotiations in a book we're going back and forth we're prepping for uh some training and i asked him if we got the notebooks ready now the the the notebooks uh that i have in mind you know they kind of they kind of look like this you know they're just you know a notebook or that's the notebook that he has in mind now what i have in mind are three ring binders but i'm calling them notebooks so i say do you have the notebooks ready now he senses there's a disconnect in our thinking so in order to try to clear it up he says to me what do you mean by notebooks and i go no box [Laughter] and he says yeah but what do you mean by notebooks and no bugs and finally he just mirrors me he goes notebooks and i go yeah three ring binders so whatever reason there's there's something in the way the hostage negotiator's mirror hits a brain that gets people to reword and continue even when they're closely guarding what they're saying and the first time i ever did it you know um i practiced it so it's a great default tool to go to when you're at a loss for words and i'm in a bank robbery with hostages talk to the bank robber we got his van outside and i i said you know we we found this van outside and he says he says we only have one vehicle and i said you only have one vehicle he said yeah we don't have we don't have one vehicle you don't have one vehicle so will you you chase my driver away i said we chase your driver away he goes yeah when he saw the police he cut and run now what he just did was admit that there was an accomplice that we didn't know about which also meant he's giving us a witness against him because this is a guy who could tell on in no way shape or form is it in his interest to tell me about the getaway driver that got away but i start marrying him and this guy was a very control freak negotiator he was probably he embodied all of the characteristics of a really dangerous business negotiator he pretended like he was powerless he acted like we were the problem that he was cooperative he did all these things that actually kept him completely in control while looking powerless which meant his words were ridiculously well selected and so to get him to start sharing information he had no intention of sharing is a great example of how how mirrors gets information out of people i love that is that linked to our addiction to correction that you talk about is it a similar pathway that works with that yeah it's an interesting question i think it probably is it has to be there has to be something similar to it because the compulsion to talk is just precisely the word i was thinking that precisely robin drake who you may be familiar with with i heard him on years and years and years ago and i remember he was the first person before i read your book uh he taught me about that that compulsion to correct and i think his example was um how he would get someone to give him their birthday and he was like uh i bet that you're you're born in september aren't you no no november oh yeah yeah it must be the 16th no no the 17th and you're like and you can feel it's it's like a visceral response that you want when you know when someone says a thing good-naturedly not accusing not saying like i bet that you can't lift this weight more just you know a natural conversation of something that's a little bit off this compulsion to want to correct them is a powerful unstoppable yeah it's an interesting point a lot a lot of people and you're triggering some other thoughts to come to mind a lot of people outside of negotiation they they tumble over the power of the compulsion to correct and they're using a lot of different ways and nobody ever notices that's the other thing too like when somebody corrects you they never notice that they've given you a bunch of information they they their guard never comes up which means you know they're not going to backtrack on you it's um that's cool it's really cool really really cool can you talk about how to say no more productively but there has to be a point that you reach during a negotiation where like you you have to give a negative answer you have to say that that's too far or that's something that we can't do how can we say no more productively yeah and and and there are a lot of negotiators that actually out there that are going to continue to to pound on you until you say no not once but twice i mean i've run across no shortage of hard bargaining negotiators and their rule of thumb is they're not going to let up until you've said no twice so how do you how do you say no productively is is is a question you know our our first way of saying no is how am i supposed to do that i mean it triggers so much in the other side it's it's it's the opening story in the book never split the difference and um you know really good really bad about that being the opening story people get it right away i mean i got no shortage of people who come up and say wow how am i supposed to do that i've closed so many deals at my terms oh and that's all i ever said but the problem is that's the only thing they ever learned so they could be doing so much better but they the first time they say how am i supposed to do that i mean it's it alters everything in the moment because what the other side hears when you say that is i'd love to comply but you're giving me an impossible task and so let's figure out a more productive way to proceed and that's why typically the other side you know if they don't feel attacked uh they feel collaborative it triggers it triggers collaboration my son also refers to this phrase as forced empathy it makes them take a look at you involuntarily they don't they don't do it on purpose but they step back and they take they say wow all right so let me let me rethink everything even if they come back at you with if you want the deal you have you have to the point isn't the answer the point is the thought process you put them through and so that's why that's that's our first way to say no now you can you can become a little bit more firm each time i mean basically we you know i teach people four ways to say no how am i supposed to do that i'm sorry that just doesn't work for me i'm sorry i can't do that and no each one is a little more firm and the other side feels no coming but they don't get punched in the face with it yeah is that of all of the phrases that you have in the book do you think that's the most powerful one that someone could sort of take today and plug into their negotiating yeah it's probably the most powerful the most applicable phrase the easiest to learn and it just it's fun to watch it it's fun to watch i bet it is can you explain what labeling is labeling um is has to be simple and it's elegant labeling is self-defining labeling an emotion or dynamic in the moment um doing it as a verbal observation it seems it sounds it looks it feels now you've got to use those exact words we'll run into no shortage of people that'll say yeah yeah no i already know how to do that and i do it all the time and i say well what i'm hearing is well those aren't the same words that i just used and it's completely different um so the label has got to be concise it's a verbal observation what it does is it puts people into a thoughtful mode it provokes their thoughts and then it people have a tendency to give you complete direct um downstream download of their thought pattern they're less guarded i could say to you what do you think and you'll stop and think and you'll fully go through your brain what you should say and then you may or may not give me the answer or i could say seems like you're thinking about something and the chances of you starting to blurt out what's on your mind immediately are much higher and there's a massive difference in the response you want to guard it answered you want an unvarnished answer the label gets you an unvarnished answer it seems to me that a lot of the tactics that we're using here during the conversation is to get people out of the semantic games and the linguistic games and and kind of take them from the this level the very superficial visceral level and kind of take them upstairs into their brain without insulating them like am i in any way sort of correct here trying to conceptualize that yeah i know you're on a right track you you want to find out what's in their head and you don't want the guard to go up um you're triggering collaboration is what you're doing you know uh i was at a gathering some people once and one of uh a young lady came up to me and she said your book is how to make the other side collaborate with you whether they like it or not now collaboration's a good word you know and she she nailed it right i'm not looking for people to cooperate you know that's when i'm victimizing you i'm looking for you to collaborate with me so that we can make something better together now if you don't want to collaborate with me you know that's a defensive move on your part you've been stung in the past you've been you've been cheated in the past you've been betrayed in the past those are nine out of 10 of the people that don't want to collaborate now one in 10 is trying to cheat me and that's why they don't want to collaborate but the the the cutthroat negotiators have an outsized reputation not that many people really want to cut you through it they may act like it but it's principally defensive in nature they're just trying to protect themselves there are some people out there that that are trying to cut your throat they're a minority but everybody's scared of them when if you if you trusted everybody just by percentages seventy percent of the people seventy seventy five percent of the people that you encounter you'll be okay trusting them blindly the problem is we don't notice that because the people that betrayed us that sting so bad that that experience fogs everything else and obscures our actual view of realities one of the reasons why i love the phrase fortune favors the bold because the universe really is on our side if you're fearless 70 70 of the time it's gonna work out that's a great batting average you know las vegas which is where i happen to live they're building casinos on 51 success rate imagine what you could do with 70. we're wired evolutionarily to avoid that multiplied by zero right you know like it's the anxiety effect of just fearing the tiger in a i'm gonna guess tigers don't live in caves a bear in a cave or whatever some something bad is in a cave right avoiding that avoiding the snake behind the bush avoiding the whatever um it has led us it's very very it's you know it's right back here it's right at the top of your spine where it meets the back of your back of your cranium and um it's hard to get rid of so that makes sense and you're correct as well um forget the successes remember the losses very much is the way that a lot of people lead their lives there's some strong neuropsychological uh research that shows we're not even pleasure seeking we're simply pain avoiding like as humans we don't ever it's all versions of pleasure are simply different gradations of a lack of pain and when that's the case pain is as you said remembered so much more forcefully this sort of leads me nicely into something that i really love that i've taken from your work which is about implementation and agreement like yes is nothing without how can you explain what that means yeah well even if people mean to agree with you a lot of people just don't think it's wrong so like you and i couldn't tend to have a great great agreement i just haven't thought i'm going to implement it and as soon as you start asking me how you put me in an implementation phase and you know uh as they say hope it's not a strategy we can't hope this is going to work out we actually got to think it through so that's the first issue with genuine people second issue is this whole yes thing there's three kinds of yeses commitment confirmation and counterfeit now there's this nonsense out there called the yes momentum or momentum selling and that is if i get you to say yes enough times to the little things you got to say yes to the big one they refer to each yes as either a micro agreement or a tie down just tying down each micro agreement means they have to say yes now everybody has been stung by this two or three times so it prob you know worked on me when i was 21 and a sales person called me to tell me about this discount coupon book that only cost me five dollars and i get fifteen thousand dollars in benefit i'm like yeah yeah i want that you know everybody's been suckered into this you know there's uh you know i'm hearing things about the timeshare profession these days you know people buying timeshares do you want to live in a five-star resort for free would you like to have a great vacation home that paid for itself that you could visit whenever you want yeah and then people find themselves in a massive amount of debt and every time they call to try to get out of it they find themselves more at that like you're going to get stung by the yes momentum until you learn to be suspicious of everybody trying to get you to say yes people are yes back the same way children battered children are battered by adults every time an adult raises their hand they think they're going to get hit so you might not be trying to lure somebody into a deal with yes but somebody else already did and you're like the adult who's trying to give a child a legitimate hug they're still gonna duck so the more you try to get people into yes the worse your problems are gonna be and as soon as you shift into how you're out of this yes problem entirely and you're about how do we make a great deal how do we move forward how do we profit then your deals sail through in a in a much faster much smoother way i guess that links back to what we said at the very beginning as well about not just battering the other side because if someone's agreement is based on implementation are more likely to have thought through what they are agreeing to and less likely to uh over agree uh i guess as in agree to something that they didn't mean to or that later on they're going to regret i often use this um example so i work in the nightlife industry and i've stood on the front door of a thousand different nightclubs and watched a million drunk people go into them uh and a lot of the time you'll have an event let's say it's a really popular date maybe halloween or new year's eve something like that and someone comes up and it's it's ram to the rafters there's very very few spaces left over and this person's desperate to get in all of their friends are in there all of their all their friends have got a table or it's a group of guys that are local but didn't manage to get tickets or whatever and this it's a final table and they're absolutely desperate to get in and the temptation is to say when uh demand outstrips supply what do you do you like throw the price through the roof so you char you say you can come in but it's going to be some astronomical figure right like some like 10 10 x what it would be 20 x what it would be and they might pay it so they might have agreed to the price but they might not be happy about having paid that price so that's a real key insight that i got from your work which is not to assume that just because someone has agreed to the deal that it means that they are happy about the deal uh good point yeah exactly because you're gonna you're gonna run into problems on down the line and when as soon as they get a chance to try to get you back they're going to get get you back with interest you know they're not going to try to get even they're going to try to get way past ethan when they get your back and so then that you know that's bad that's bad long term it's a great way to put yourself in a position where you got lots of people who want to pay back very much right um so going on from the club promotion situation a lot of the time i will be stood next to the doorman so we work on the front door you'll have seen it the guys with the clipboards and making sure that everything runs right there's no catastrophes and a lot of the time someone that's drunk who's inside of the venue will be uh in varying degrees of delicately brought outside they may have had a little bit too much to drink they may have been involved in an altercation they may have just done something that has warranted them their night their night is now over and they've been brought outside by the door staff and then they tend to come back to the guys who are stood on the front or the front doorman and there just yapping away why is that why have i been thrown out this is unfair all my mates are inside blah blah that is a situation i must encounter every night once a night at least sometimes multiple times per night sometimes it compounds and one of the mates gets thrown out then another friend that they were maybe even play fighting with also gets thrown out and then it's like a like a compounding effect where they both have a go how can we de-escalate a heated to negotiate and negotiation let's forget the fact that they're drunk because i'm guessing that adds a layer of complexity that even you can't uh get can't get us around um but what can i what can i tell the door stuff i work with these guys all the night i don't want them i have to spend their time getting abused by by people who are a little bit unhappy what can they do to try and de-escalate this well um first of all the tone of voice is critical late night fm dj voice you know the calming soothing voice whatever advantage that gives you take it i mean many times you each individual tactic might just be a small advantage but the cumulative effect is what you're looking for you're looking to score up some points so the calming soothing voices start with even with drunks that's at best not going to aggravate the situation you know commanding voice is an aggravating voice it doesn't help people think so first of all the late night fm dj boys secondly you know repeat back to them what they're saying a lot of times people just want to have their say if if all i got to go have to do to get you to go away is to let you feel like you've had your say then if i repeat it back it's clear your point has gotten through to me now the really the the tricky part is is when they want to articulate negative stuff about you or your establishment or you know that they again they say they've been treated unfairly this isn't fair you can look at somebody and say you feel you've been treated unfairly and that's not agreeing it but then people they need if they need if satisfying the need to be heard is enough and now you've scored some more points you may conclude the deal there late night fm dj boys make sure they know they've been hurt particularly with the negative stuff about you the the the most effective way to deactivate negativity is to simply call it out now sometimes you got to call it out more than once but there's brain science that backs this up it's the most effective stuff you don't want them continuing to be mad and go away and stew on and come back even matter you know you want to deactivate the negativity with the best way possible so so let them feel like they're hurt you're going to solve enough of your problems just with those two things that if there's anything that requires any sort of an escalation at least you didn't need to escalate unnecessarily yeah i like that a lot are you very very correct as well about people just needing to be heard i think you can in an ideal world the people who were rejected by the door staff who are inside would go that's my night over i'll i'll head home in that must happen one time in 50 maybe or one time one time in 30. it's very rare vast majority of the time when the people all of us who are stood at the front see someone being brought upstairs you'll see the promoters who are usually dressed in like skinny jeans and like cool shoes or whatever we'll just part a like moses sort of moving the red sea we'll just give the door staff a little bit more room because we know that he's going to turn around and come back and start shouting at one of them more often than not but we have to work with the world the way it is not the way that we would have it be and in that situation it it's going to happen and i feel for the door staff with this this is one of the things i feel quite strongly about within the nightlife industry that they part of their job is to be a verbal punching bag um because this person has to do it they are compelled to say this thing to vent this anger to do whatever the zeigarnik effect for the people who know what that is this open loop closed loop system that we have there's an open loop i haven't had my say i don't feel like i've closed the door to hell that is currently open in my mind about the injustice that's just been caused downstairs i need to do my thing and even if it's just for the person who requires being heard that might be it that might but even that person even the most sedate person in the world let us say you know one in 31 in 50 decides to just walk away um even the ones like i say that are the most collaborative that are the most today out of those ones they still want to turn around and say that they've been hard done by and of them some of them decide to walk away once they feel like they've been heard but that that open loop is is a hell of a drug yes yeah it is and it's and the crazy thing about the negativity of it in many cases until people get the opportunity to feel heard uh they feel even more self-righteous about having to express it there's usually a lot of self-righteousness in in in that anger loop i would agree um the converse of what we said earlier on the most powerful phrases that we've got in negotiating are there some that people overuse or like some um like a law uh artifact grandfathered in old school tricks of the trade that people think work during negotiating but are just they just need to be thrown out or this stuff that you see people using a lot which just totally need to be stopped yeah well i i really the phrase win-win bothers me principally in the way that it's applied not the theory behind it but someone someone who uses hey you know let's do a win-win deal they tell me that right off the bat look i know you're trying to pick my pocket and i just know you are um if it comes out of your mouth in in the first in the opening moments because they sucker a lot of people with that you know win-win oh yeah cool yeah excellent so p you know people get taken by that or somebody who comes in who's openly uh you know they exude they want the collaboration well they you know they're they're they're a sucker for that person you know that that two and ten maybe that's that's looking to just take them to the cleaners so i'm i'm always leery about the utterance of the phrase win-win and then you know are you trying to shortcut the situation like you don't know what a win is because you don't know what i'm holding back i don't know what you're holding back so any one way that the other you're not trying to get the best collaboration out of this deal if you're using those words the thing that i really love about your particular approach to communication style in general is that it doesn't require you to really remember very much obviously you have to learn the skills and such forth but the intricacy anyone knows if you've ever told a little bit of a like a little white lie and then the next week someone comes and asks you about the previous white lie and then you you got to hold this like meta conscience in your mind and start to construct all of the different ways that that lie would interlink with the other lie and it's you know cliche it tumbles snowballs into the big gray lie that overtakes your life but by focusing on not even as you've said they're not even playing the character of someone who has to be overtly about the win-win i am here this is a collaborative opportunity but i still have things that i want i have things that i want because that is true you have things that you want because that is also true let us add our two truths together and see where we can find a middle ground yeah yeah or and i'm cautious that i'm let's look for overlapping ground you know versus middle ground because middle ground that phrase starts getting dangerously close to compromise and compromise is impossible for human beings because in 2002 danny kahneman won the nobel prize in behavioral economics for prospect theory the short-hand version of that has lost things twice as much as an equivalent gain so we distort loss in our head we distort our gives so let's say i want 15 you want five and we want to meet in the middle at 10. well for both of us that loss of 5 feels like a loss of 10 if you if you go with conor man's 2x rule and conor is actually given some interviews where he indicates that it's much more than 2x that he and amos taversky said 2x just to limit the amount of argument i think i heard him say it's closer to 5 to 7x which means you can never feel okay in an equivalent nature to what you've given in on until you've gotten the other person back for double what you gave up so compromise always becomes a downward spiral always which is why it's to be avoided which is why you want to get into a conversation where instead of compromise you're talking about collaboration where we come up with new opportunities that neither one of us envisioned or new possibilities that takes us at a loss entirely and therefore we're not trying to pay each other back i like that what are your opinions on trump as a communicator if you were coaching him what would you say that he does well and what would you say that he needs to improve on see i'm a natural born assertive very much you know trump and i are both from the same caveman tribe the assertive and what the problem with assertives are that since we leave people feeling bruised the people that are willing to deal with this become fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer you know you're you're you're fishing out the reservoir you know you're you're you're hunting out the game and a cruel classic example of what happens in every one of these is where where is what is the status currently of the u.s north korea negotiations i'm not sure you're gonna have to tell me that's exactly the point nobody knows that's what happens to the assertive negotiator negotiations just start to slowly fade they don't get concluded the other side learns that when you when they interact with you that if they don't surrender that you attack ah that's interesting and there's there's i if if i want to talk i'm gonna if i don't surrender i'm gonna get attacked and so what you become conditioned to do is to stop talking entirely which means deals go away and if you look at the history of everyone that president trump has interacted with since he's been president he showed up he starts calling names again they start arguing north korea doesn't surrender they want they just they want to have a dialogue before they surrender he just wants surrender now where's the negotiation nobody knows every single person that i ask where are we on north korea everybody goes that's the response i'm glad that wasn't a trick question i mean i'd be i'd be happy to nobody says we're in a great place like if you're a donald trump supporter you will not answer that question saying what a great place nobody says that yeah i think i i i can really get a sense of what you mean obviously donald trump isn't directly negotiating with me but he is uh secondarily negotiating with everyone right he wants when he is giving his speech he is up on stage he is debating joe biden he is having a collaborative discussion where he wants people to come onto his side of the table he needs to put himself across in a good way and um i really do get that sense a little bit that four years ago the novelty of someone who was gonna drain the swamp and kind of didn't play by the rules and was brash and forthcoming and like kind of like like alpha masculine in in a kind of a assertive hollywood style president sort of way you know like if denzel if denzel was doing it there's like the touches of that i think almost charisma but after four years of never seeing um the collaboration come through the tarnish has been taken off the the shine a little bit and it just feels it feels a lot more brash than it did previously does that make sense yeah and there are a lot of people that are going like yeah well i'm not a big fan of government anyway you know and and every few years in american politics an american businessman holds their hand up and a massive amount of the country goes like yeah we need a businessman in charge and what was it the 1990s ross perot put his hand up and instantly a huge portion of america was like yeah we're tired of the inefficiencies of government we're willing to give a business man a shot you know everybody's disenchanted with government and some of his approach when he wasn't running the government was yeah you could do work but he can't say that anymore no you are very right i mean we keep on seeing this mike bloomberg you know like i'll put my hand up i'll have it i'll i'll throw my hat in the ring so to speak there is um i kind of get it right because i think people who maybe don't do politics and don't do business presume that someone who has spent a lot of time in a boardroom has some transferable skills maybe that they can kind of put across onto the other side and i can utilize my business acumen in a way that allows me and i don't know like there's certainly part like this middle east thing that trump's done is very very impressive and has kind of been pushed under the rug a little bit i think i don't think it's been given quite the media attention that it deserved um but by the same token i i'm not convinced i i it's not for me to say that a career politician is the best person to become president but similarly i don't think that this shows us that someone who's coming from a business background happens to have some sort of competitive advantage when it comes to communicating or diplomacy or anything else i think that that ship's sailed a little bit now well i i can tell you from personal experience you know having spent 27 years in in a public sector you know the public sector sees a private sector and in a public sector we go like yeah i could i could do that i could do that over there and vice versa private sector looks at the public sector the government says yeah i could do that it has taken me every bit of 10 years and we are still figuring out how to operate effectively in a private sector and principally because the majority of my team were never in a public sector but you you look over there and you say i could see how i could do better and in the in the jet and moving from the public sector to the private sector there's no shortage of military generals there were superstars in the military that started consulting companies that fell flat on their face because they're they're two very different animals they look a lot alike you know maybe maybe a zebra looks like a horse but a zebra is not a horse and until you've got enough experience in either of the arenas you know you're not going to realize how new you are to it when you get in private sector people say i run the government on a better business uh you know it needs to be more efficient some of what i was willing to see what donald trump was going to do is because i want to know how much is an inherent problem in government and how much is an inefficiency that just needs to be gotten rid of you know we've had that experiment a lot more a lot more of it is inherent i think it's a i think it is inbuilt it's part of the source code you know it's it's bootstrapped into um the inevitability of any structure that is just so big and such a leviathan um we have in the uk we have the nhs the national health service and i have a number of doctor friends many of whom will be listening and they constantly talk they still run on windows 95 they're still faxing stuff like they have to fax things around and like mail post there's no app there's no ipads that you can walk around oh so what's this patience thing it's printed medical records it is such a humongous beast that to try and enact any sort of change is essentially now untenable you can't get change to occur and this is something that should be considered when talking any country the grandiosity of potentially having nationalized healthcare is that when you if you're talking like truly truly truly nationalized in a country like yours of 330 million people you are um attaching everyone to the same flagpole every single person and if it starts to blow quite a strong wind all the flags are [ __ ] like they are all all over the place they're getting tangled up together and then you've got to try and untie them it is it's a real challenge so i think that's that's a side of the the nhs that i think people don't see because it still functions at least from the outside looking in you go in you get your health care you kind of leave but the knife edge that it operates on like the closeness that almost every patient is to their records being lost or their appointment being cancelled or whatever it is it constantly feels like everyone's kind of like road runner you know just moving their legs as quickly as possible in a desperate attempt to try and keep up with the pace of what needs to be done i think that's probably a consideration for for a lot of countries that are considering nationalized healthcare wow yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense that's a that's a view the people that are espousing national healthcare uh don't want you to see no not at all so final question chris you've been through a lot of very very high pressure situations i wondered if there was one that comes to mind that you could tell us a story about and then also if that would be a good way to illustrate how you can deal with pressure there will be people who have a a job interview have the final negotiating negotiation to keep their job or to apply for a promotion or to get the business deal or the merger or whatever it might be would that be able to illustrate how they can perhaps cope with pleasure pressure in a high stakes situation yeah you know really uh the ability to uh articulate the other side's point of view in a way that they say that's right is is the single biggest game changer you know their point of view when you express it they'll say that's right that's that's it exactly you've got it exactly that that's a game-changing move now there's no negotiation approach that works a thousand percent of the time yeah i was i was coach i coached a guy through a negotiation just a couple days ago and we weren't getting the person where we want them to be and i said well look i gotta tell you as a hostage negotiator we were successful 93 of the time that also meant that seven percent of the time we had to shoot the guy and our you know our success rate's 93 right and because this guy's trying to negotiate as a vendor whether or not he's going to give a refund of guys demanding refund he doesn't deserve and he wants to be nice about it he doesn't he doesn't want to tell the guy to just you know f off and i said this may be a guy you gotta shoot you know this is a guy no matter what you can't be nice to because we were summarizing and expressing the other guy's point of view and i s and i said to him early on i smell this guy is not going to come across he's he's not going to come out of his position we can apply this but i don't think he's coming out so express the other side's point of view now there's two really good things about that a significant number of deals are going to make themselves in your favor once you get it that's right out of the other side the other thing is too is we found it levels you out everybody that takes the time to thoughtfully be able to try to express the other side's perspective that levels them out it takes them out of anger which then is also very good for you because angers are poison you know it's a poison you want to give the person you want to poison but you're the one that's actually taking a voice and it just pollutes your system and it's it's bad for you physically insurance your life span there ain't nothing good about anger so trying to express the other side's perspective in a way where they say that's right we'll level you out as well now we had a negotiation kidnapping negotiation in the philippines the other side's got outrageous demands i coach my guy after about two or three months into this look let's just get that's right out of this our bad guy because we were stalemated and been stalemated for a while so express his point of view tell him that you know the philippines have been ravaged for 500 years by colonial pounds and the ransom that you're asking for this hostage it's not a ransom it's for war damage it's for economic harm over 500 years and repeat back all the other utter nonsense the ridiculousness of his justification because people always over justified they always throw in every you know they you know your aunt millie wore the wrong socks you know they're thinking of ridiculous stuff right so just feed it back don't argue with any of it just feed it back to him we're gonna get her that's right out of him the guy on the other side is a sociopathic murder and rape and killer he literally says that that's right when we go into full summer i don't know how long it took to do the full summary but it took a while it seemed excruciating on our end terrorist sociopath on the other side says that's right immediately the ransom demand went away we went from 10 million to zero when the phone hung up no monetary demand was ever raised again through the course of the kidnapping kidnapping last couple more months the hostage walks away he gets the opportunity they're lacking in security he just walks away we're flying back to the us he's gone bad guys got nothing i'm back in the philippines about three weeks later connect back up with the negotiator that was coaching he says you're not going to believe him call me on the phone the terrorist what do you say he said have you been promoted i was going to kill the american you're really good at what you do they should promote you which was a sign of respect which is also him saying i'd deal with you again he was calling to tell him that he'd deal with him again that they were okay now not every negotiation gonna turn out that well but wherever summarizing the other side leaves you is guaranteed to be better than when before your summary and where that place gonna be i can't guarantee i can only guarantee that you will always be better off if you take the time to summarize the other side's perspective if only that it leveled you out and that's why it's worth doing chris i love that what an amazing story today's been just phenomenal so much for everyone to take away if people want to check out some more obviously never split the difference will be linked on amazon in the show notes below where else should they go you know come to the website um blackswanltd.com b-l-a-c-k-s-w-a-n-l-t-d dot com we've got a massive amount of free material we got a a weekly newsletter that comes out on negotiation tips and advice it's concise which is even the most it's it's complementary which means there's no cost but better than that it's concise and actionable plus the newsletter happens to be the gateway to all the other avenues on the website so go to the website newsletters listed as a blog in the upper right hand corner sign up you get the book and the newsletter a lot of people start changing their lives with those two tools amazing man thank you today's been today's been absolutely phenomenal it's been 18 months that we've been trying to schedule this in and it was absolutely worth the wait mate so i really appreciate you having some of your time today thanks for your persistence i have enjoyed the conversation [Music] you

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 16,816

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, Joe rogan, True Geordie, chris williamson, Chris voss, negotiation, never split the difference, how to be confident, how to negotiate, fbi, hostage, hostage negotiation, chris voss interview, google, ted talk, tedtalk, black swan, negotiation training, how to argue, confidence tips, be a better communicator, nlp, persuasion, how to persuade, chris voss masterclass, body language

Id: -Bu923q6BFY

Length: 63min 4sec (3784 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020