Nolan Martin :
Hello and welcome to the NEGOTIATEx Podcast. My name’s Nolan Martin. Joining me as always, Aram Donigian. Aram, you wanna kick it off for today?
Aram Donigian :
I will. Thanks, Nolan. It’s always a pleasure to have repeat offenders because that’s an indicator we’ve been doing this for a little bit. So that’s nice. And today it’s my pleasure to welcome back to the NEGOTIATEx Podcast, Dr. Joshua Weiss, co-founder of Harvard’s Global Negotiation Initiative, senior fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project, and director of the Master of Science Degree in Leadership and negotiation at Bay Path University.
A highly sought after speaker and trainer, Josh has published on leadership, negotiation, mediation, and systematic approaches to dealing with conflict. He joined us back in October of 22 to discuss his book: The Book of Real-World Negotiations – Successful Strategies From Business, Government, and Daily Life.
I highly recommend that you go back and give those episodes, which happened to be episodes 49 A and B a listen, if you haven’t already, and certainly pick up his book. I love using his book and referring to his book in my class at Tuck. Today we’re discussing a new book entitled, Getting Back to the Table: 5 Steps to Reviving Stalled Negotiations.
Josh, thanks so much for writing another book and giving us a good reason, not that we really needed one for having you back on the program.
Joshua Weiss :
Thanks so much guys. I appreciate you having me back and yeah, it’s a pleasure. It’s always fun to write and see ultimately what people think of what you’re trying to share. So, yeah, and great to be back with you guys.
AD :
So before we get into your book, what’s going on in your world specifically, and I guess in addition to the book where else have you been focusing your energy since we last spoke?
JW :
Wow. Yeah, there’s a lot going on. Usually January, February, a little slower for me, but things are really ramping up. I got quite a bit of international travel, doing a keynote at a negotiation conference in Lithuania. And another trip to Turkey. And probably a couple other places some of which are connected to the book and some translation writes kind of stuff and speaking engagements. And then teaching at Bay Path in the program.
A lot of consulting. So yeah, firing on all cylinders. These months are, and in the fall are typically just chockfull of all kinds of interesting stuff and fun challenges. And then trying to work on some international conflict related stuff. Specifically around the sort of redevelopment of Gaza, et cetera related to all those things also. So, essentially getting myself into lots.
AD :
Yeah. There’s and there’s no end of of opportunity for work these days for sure. Certainly. Yeah. Certainly Sounds like you’re keeping yourself busy.
NM :
Absolutely. Josh, we’re always interested in who or what influences how people approach negotiation. You dedicated this recent book to your father, Dr. Earl Weiss. I. And I was hoping you might be able to share just a bit about his influence on your thinking.
Joshua Reflects On His Father’s Legacy: A Life Shaped By Adversity, Purpose & Hard-Won Reconnection [03:01]
JW :
In many ways my dad lived what I would consider a bit of a life of resilience. He started out, grew up, his family had immigrated here but he grew up here and you know the deck was stacked against him in many ways. He didn’t do well in high school. Almost failed outta high school actually. But then met with folks at Northeastern and asked ’em to give him a chance. And they did. And he ended up turning things around and then he found medicine and medicine became his raison d’être
He was really passionate about being a doctor. He was a respiratory specialist, so he did a lot of early work on asthma which helped a lot of people and saved a lot of people’s lives. But then he ran into more health issues and had to retire when he was 60.
And I think just watching him find his way through life and every time some kind of a block was put in front of him, he found a way to exercise his creativity and his persistence and resilience and his passion for being a lifelong learner really came through to me and my kids. And is the kind of thing that inspires you to when you feel like, I can’t really do this, or I can’t pick myself up.
I look at the things that he struggled with and he was challenged with and it was pretty impressive how he got over that. And I will also say that we had a somewhat typical father-son relationship where there was some tension over the years. And I think a lot of his frustrations for his situation came out on me and, but we stuck with it.
And toward the end of his life, our relationship improved dramatically. And I’m really thankful for that. And I think, to connect things to the book. There were a lot of failures along the way but we ultimately came back around to a place where I think we both appreciated each other, et cetera.
So yeah, it felt very appropriate given the subject matter.
AD :
Yeah, it sounds like it that that term resilience I know is gonna come up a little bit more. And certainly, how we exercise creativity, how we stay true to our passions, how we remain lifelong learners. All these things seem to come through very clearly in your book, so I can see why you dedicated it to him.
Alright. Your last book focused on what makes for successful negotiations, and it has lots of lovely illustrations. And I can’t recommend your previous book enough. This new book is about failure, and I gotta ask you why did you decide to write a book about negotiation failure, and what does it even mean to get back to the table?
Filling The Silence Around Setbacks In Negotiation & Learning To Embrace What Goes Wrong [05:47]
JW :
You know, the funny thing is, and the very clear answer to your question is because there wasn’t one. I started to look around and I, the book that you mentioned back in 2020. You know, somebody came up to me and said, listen, I really love your book. It’s great. It’s really interesting.
It’s really, the cases are terrific, whatever, but why’d you write about success? And I thought, okay, what? And I said, tell me more. And she said there’s no question in my mind that we learn much more from failure. So what about that and why not perhaps think about that?
So it started me down a little bit of a road where I started to look around and started to say what’s out there on this subject? And the more that I looked the more, the less that I found really. There were a few articles and a few things, but I remember as well. So that was one piece of it.
And the second piece that was very poignant for me was that I was talking to one of my students. And they said what are you working on now? And I said, I’m at the beginning stages of this book. And I said I’m working on this book around failure and what do you do with it?
Like when it happens? And she said, oh, thank God. And I said why do you say that? And she said, because everything we read in this program is about these amazing successes. And when we don’t succeed all the time, we’re beginning to feel like we’re not good negotiators. And is that right? And I’m like, no, absolutely not.
That’s exactly not right that anytime you’re dealing with a difficult, challenging problem, which is what negotiation often is all about, you’re gonna fail. Like it’s part of the negotiation landscape. And that’s really when I was like, okay, we’re doing a disservice to people who were teaching about this if we’re not more candid about the reality of negotiation.
And so I would say those two things spurred me. And as I said, I would talk to people and interview people for the book and things. And one of the interesting things was they would say, when I would say, what’s your process for dealing with your significant setbacks or your failures in negotiation?
And they would say, I definitely go through it. I try to think a little bit, but come to think of it like I don’t really have a clear sketched out process and I said, have you seen one? And they said no. So that’s what I set out to do was to say okay, let’s see if we can normalize this a bit.
Kind of, embrace it, not because we set out to fail, but because it’s part of the deal and it’s gonna happen. And then the question is, what do we do with it? And how do we really learn from it? And one of the things that I noticed as I was getting more and more into this book, there were two things I noticed.
One was that, and I used the analogy in the book early on about Goldilocks and the three bears and the two reactions that I saw most common when I would talk to people about their failures were, one, the porridge was too hot, right? I’m gonna blame others, I’m gonna rationalize behavior, I’m gonna, focus on the things that were outside of my control. And then, talk about that as the reason why this didn’t work.
That doesn’t really help you because you’re not really learning from that, right? Blame doesn’t serve a purpose in negotiation or in this kind of an analysis. It serves a purpose of protecting your reputation, which we, that’s not gonna help us.
The too cold bowl of porridge, if you will, is that people would experience a tremendous amount of anxiety. And find their failure really debilitating to the point where when they would go back to the negotiation table, they would be bringing that baggage with them. They would find the process really uncomfortable and be really nervous, and then they would give away more than they should and all that kind of stuff, right?
So you have these two polar opposites and the just right bowl of porridges. Take it in, learn from it, and become a better negotiator. It’s not easy, like I’m not suggesting it is, but that to me is the process that we all need to go through to actually make sure that our failures are not wasted.
There’s a great quote that a colleague of mine told me from Nick Saban, the football coach who said basically, you never wanna waste a good failure. And I was like, wow, that’s really interesting. And yet really true that there’s so much our failures teach us, but. For most of us, we’re not learning and we’re not listening.
And when I would sit down with people, at lunch during my trainings or after the fact, or when I was consulting with groups, I realized that people thought that they were learning, but they really weren’t. They weren’t digging in a way that actually got them some meaningful lessons because their sort of negotiation heuristics were getting in the way of their mental made good negotiation approaches was also getting in the way.
There’s a lot of biases and other kinds of things that are going on in our minds that are pulling us away from really learning.
AD :
That’s a fantastic answer. I think Nolan, for us, we think about the old AR process from Army days. You know, to focus as much on the failures to learn from as much as the success is not easy to do, right? We have to remind people to know thin skins. We’re truly trying to grow and learn. Not easy.
NM :
How does this get put into practice? Because we always we say this we expect organizations to learn from their mistakes, but then how do, how’s a good leader implement this with their team?
Leadership, Vulnerability & The Power Of Learning From What Goes Wrong [11:26]
JW :
Yeah. One of the most important tips that I can offer a leader is you need to make it okay to fail. Now, let’s again, not misinterpret what that means. It doesn’t mean we’re all setting out to fail.
That’s not the point. But the point is that we know failure is gonna happen. We know there are times we’re not gonna achieve our objectives. What you don’t want is people sitting on that, people saying, I’m not going to talk about this. I’m not going to share the reality. I’m gonna bury it only to find out later that this was a lot worse than whatever. So I think any good leader has to be able to turn around and say to their folks, look guys and gals, like we are gonna fail. Let’s bring it, let’s embrace it in the sense that this is gonna help us to grow as an organization.
So I think that’s the first thing. And the second thing is, this is why I put a framework in the book. So for me, frameworks are the way that you begin to learn something new. You don’t hold onto them forever. Like for me, with getting Ts, for example, in the seven elements, like I’ve windowed that down to three or four that I find incredibly helpful and that form sort of my mental model of negotiation, right?
That’s what I was trying to do with these steps is to say, look, most of you don’t have a process. Here’s a process that I’m pretty sure if you go through, it’s pretty difficult not to learn from this in a productive way. Aram, you mentioned the notion of it’s not easy. Some of the early steps in the book are really about turning the mirror on yourself, and it’s hard, especially when you’re not used to failing and you’re also worried about your reputation.
We’re all worried about our reputations, like that’s how people are, right? We’re, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s also important to be honest with yourself. I think being a bit vulnerable and being, honest with yourself about your approaches to negotiation, what you do well and don’t do well are all part of the process.
Like at the end of the book, I talk about the notion of Kintsugi, which is the Japanese art of of embracing imperfection, right? And so when they have a broken vase or something, instead of trying to glue it back together so you don’t see the breaks, they use precious metals to emphasize the breaks so that it becomes more beautiful in the end.
And in some ways, that’s part of what I’m saying to people is, you know what, like you don’t have to hide this. We all know we fail. And for me, it was actually a bit of a blessing, and I mentioned this in the book, that growing up as a kid, like I failed a lot. So I was like, okay, I’m learning to pick myself back up here.
And I would say, honestly, that much of my life and where I am now is because I’ve learned about that and I’m not, there’s so many people I’ve met who are unwilling to take risks, and to me that’s what life is you take calculated risks, you jump into things that maybe you’re not always so certain about.
But that’s where you learn the most and where you actually, things become the most fulfilling. So that’s the essence of it, and I think how you use it, the book is designed really to be that kind of a tangible, sort of step-by-step kind of way to work yourself through things with some worksheets and things like that.
AD :
Josh, before we get into the model, I want to get into your five step process. You discuss reasons we negotiate responses we have when negotiations fail, the need for resilience. You describe several categories of negotiation failures. I’m just curious, for a listener who is saying.
Why do I need resilience? How do you build that, especially in negotiation? Why do I need to categorize failures? And maybe I’m blind to what gets in the way. What would you say to that individual?
The Failures We Don’t See: How Awareness & Bias Shape What We Miss—And What We Learn [15:16]
JW :
Yeah. I would say exactly to your last point. Maybe I’m blind, just to what gets in the way. Like anything, awareness is the first and most important step, right? If I’m trained to look for something, then I know there’s a certain kind of failure in front of me that I won’t. Fall into that trap because I know to look for it. Whereas people in general, if they don’t know to look for these things, then they can easily sort of walk right into it.
So the first part of it, and the reason that I try to categorize failure more deeply is to help people to pay attention and say, huh, I wonder if I’m running into the slip through your fingers failure where there’s a deal on the table. It seems to make sense, and yet something’s getting in the way here as part of this.
So I think that, and that’s why I start there, not only with failure, but also the magnitude. But then to me too, the whole notion of why are we not learning is really important. And it comes down to the biases that we have that cloud our judgment. It’s interesting.
We teach a class in that master’s program that you mentioned on the psychology of leadership and negotiation because I firmly believe that so much of what we do at the negotiating table is between our ears and people are unaware that there are these biases that are impacting them, that are pushing them to make decisions without even recognizing that’s what’s going on.
AD :
So say a little bit more about the concept of resilience. ’cause it feels like, yeah, this idea of resilience building it is a counter to the biases that I naturally hold. Is that a correct framing or would you reframe that?
Resilience In Negotiation: Moving Beyond Myths, Setbacks & Surface-Level Solutions [16:50]
JW :
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a counter the biases, but I would say that what it does is it says, look let’s for the moment recognize that failure’s gonna happen. So what are you gonna do with it? Let’s go back to our three bowls of porridge.
Are you gonna protect yourself always and not learn anything? Are you going to let it crush you and not learn anything? Or are you going to say, okay there’s gotta be something I can take away from this and later in the book I talk about this idea of unlearning. And I think it’s really important because there are a lot of, as you guys know, there are a lot of myths about negotiation that are out there, and very few people stop to say, is this belief that I hold about negotiation really helping me, or is it might be getting in the way?
I think when we do those kinds of things, we begin to build in this level of resilience and the ability to pick yourself back up. When things don’t go well and say, okay I’m definitely disappointed by this, but now let me make sure I understand what happened. And is there a way to get back to the table?
I think if we look around in the world, we see this happening a lot where negotiations will fall apart. And the question is, can they come back around? Can you find a way back? When you’ve had a significant setback. That to me is that process of not letting it debilitate you and things like that is really what resilience is about.
It’s saying, you know, at Harvard there are a lot of people who have the mantra that we haven’t found a solution yet. And that’s what resilience is all about to me: it’s staying with a problem. It’s staying with a challenge until you found a different way forward. There are a lot of people who say, oh, we tried to negotiate, I’m like what’d you do? And they’re like they made an offer. We didn’t like it. We made an offer. They didn’t like it. And that was the end.
I’m like, you didn’t negotiate, you didn’t, you barely scratched the surface. What was going on here? So I think resilience and if look at the accounts of negotiators throughout history and whatever, that’s what is that level of sort of sticktoitiveness if I can put it that way.
AD :
I love it. Now, it reminds me of the Winston Churchill quote, “Success is not final failure is not fatal. It’s that courage to continue that counts.” And that’s certainly applies. Okay. Hey, listen, we’ve been beating around the bush. Can you give us an overview of your five step process for getting back to the table and then spend a little time explaining in some depth the first step?
A Framework For Processing Failure, Unlearning Myths & Returning To The Table Stronger [19:20]
JW :
Yeah. So the first step, honestly, and this is gonna sound probably a little bit strange to your audience, is to accept the failure. Because what happens is when we don’t accept the failure and we’re pushing it away, right? It’s the analogy in the book that I use is it’s a little bit like a block sink, like nothing else can get through. No water’s gonna go down the drain when something’s blocked and when your emotions. You’re not giving them voice, you’re not coping with the fact that you didn’t get where you want to go.
The rest of the process is blocked. So I use a little bit of a methodology from Elizabeth Kubler Ross and related to grieving and the idea of experiencing grief when you don’t get what you want in negotiation and there are a lot of negotiations, that where I don’t think that’s crazy to imagine, people who really want a particular salary or a particular job or whatever it might be, people are very passionate about these things, and so you have to manage the grief piece of that as the first step and process that.
And then once you’ve done that and the one thing that I absolutely learned in doing this is people don’t want to do that. They don’t want to go there. It’s too uncomfortable, but when they don’t go there. They can only get so far in their analysis because they’re pushing aside the emotional component of this.
And as you guys know, like that’s part of this, when we negotiate about things, we care about, emotions play a role and they will. So there’s a process there of facing the coldhearted facts and saying, this sucks, didn’t go where I wanted it to go, but what do I do now? Yeah. So that’s step one, is sort of unclog that piece and let yourself feel frustrated and feel disappointed.
Step two is really to analyze the forest and the trees. So go back to those seven kinds of ways of failure. What, which one does yours fit into and why? And how bad was it, right? The other piece of that is people always want to know how bad is this failure? We may talk about this a bit later, but the negotiation with Trump and Zelensky is a good example of a pretty significant setback. And the question was, can they get back to the table? And that’s a little bit up in the air still, but, we’ll, maybe we’ll talk more about that. But part of it is to analyze the forest. Okay. So the big picture of what happened here.
But then in most of our negotiations, we can also look at critical moments or moves and turns, specific interchanges that kind of pushed something down a road that you didn’t want to go. And you could probably pinpoint where that is and why that happened. The third step is that when you do that kind of an analysis, you then start looking at what did I learn?
And one of the interesting things about the learning process is most people are actually learning the wrong lesson. So too often, when we do well in a negotiation, we use a certain approach, right? Most of us have an approach that we rely on. The problem is that approach is not always applicable and people try to, if I am negotiating with Aram about something and it goes well, right? And we reached an agreement.
I’m all like, okay, great. And then, six months later I’m gonna sit down with Nolan and it’s in a multi-party negotiation. And Nolan has a really different approach to negotiation and a negotiation styles point of view. The power dimension with me and Aram was, I had more power in this one. Nolan does. Like there are lots of dynamics that can be different. And you have to be very discerning to make sure that when you’re doing your transfer of lessons, you’re comparing apples to apples and not apples to watermelons.
And what I find most of the time is people are actually transferring the wrong lessons. They’re not really being discerning. They’re saying I did it well here. This is how I learned to negotiate, so I’m gonna do it there. And this happens interestingly at two levels. One is behavior, right? So we have our tactics and strategy, whatever, the other is your mindset and how you learned to negotiate.
And that’s at a subconscious level. I introduced, and I don’t wanna get too egghead on you guys, but I introduced a notion of transference that happens in psychodynamic theory and therapy and things like that where people transfer previous experiences at a subconscious level to other realms where they don’t really have any kind of applicability, yet we think they do. So like for example, if you had a negotiation with somebody, right? I remember I’ll give you an example. So years ago a friend of mine was like, hey, could you talk to one of my colleagues? He’s trying to become a partner in the firm and he’s struggling to negotiate with one of the partners.
Like he’s, there were four partners and he had talked to three. They had, worked out what his role would be, but. The last one, he was getting stuck. And I said, sure. Okay. So I started talking to the guy and I can tell there’s something blocking him, but I don’t know what it is. I said, listen, you’ve been able to sort this through with three of the four partners.
Like what is it about this other person? And I kept probing ’cause he wasn’t giving me what I knew. I knew there was something else there. Finally, he said, okay, here’s the challenge that I face. So my first boss was really tough. He was a really rough negotiator and this guy that I’m having to deal with, acts, talks, same mannerisms, everything just like my first boss.
And so I’m bringing that sort of trauma or that whatever you want to call it, into the negotiation process. And it’s getting in the way of me being able to assert for myself and do all these things, right? That’s what I’m talking about when transference and at a deeper level, right? That was 15 years before and yet it was still impacting is negotiation approach. The fourth step is the idea of actively unlearning your weaknesses.
So generally speaking, and not always, but much of the time when we fail or when we experience a serious unlearning, your weaknesses. So generally speaking and it happens. And sometimes it goes back to the weaknesses that we have.
And what I’m trying to get at is I want people to examine their, the pillars that guide them in negotiation. What is your philosophy about negotiation? How do you know it and why? And is it still serving you well? And one of the examples that I use is the notion of compromise. Okay? So like I’ve written and talked quite a bit about this, I’m not a fan of compromise. I think it’s a lazy way to negotiate. I think people rush to compromise way too fast.
AD :
Yeah.
JW :
And so what I’m advocating just as an example is, think about why you believe that, right? Because you read it in the newspaper or people are always talking about what are we gonna give up to get where you want to go?
And I want you to think about the possibility of replacing that with creative problem solving, hold off. You can always compromise at the end or whatever it might be, but is that really serving your purposes? When I was writing this in my previous book, you know this, I met a woman and she said to me, the best negotiations are when both sides leave the table a little bit unhappy.
And I said if that’s what you’re aiming for, it’s a race to the bottom, right? You’re never looking at how do we maximize value, whatever, right? These are ingrained notions in our minds. Are leading us astray. So what are those for you, and what could you replace it with that might be better? Peter Drucker, the management guru, said, if you wanna learn something new, you have to actively unlearn something old.
And that’s what I’m getting at, right? Get rid of the junk that’s in there that you think is about, good negotiating. And then the last piece is maybe a little less clear, but it’s getting back to the table smarter and stronger. And it’s a coalescence of all of this.
But it’s also, as I did this and I would talk to people about why they failed and what are the dynamics and negotiation that they find the hardest. One of the things that kept coming up over and over again and I’ve seen it over and over again in my own work as well, is uncertainty and adaptability.
And I was fortunate to learn about a book called Uncertain by a woman named Maggie Jackson, who takes the whole notion of uncertainty and kind of flips it and says, actually. Our minds are most capable of coming up with creative and innovative solutions when we are in the uncertainty phase, when the, when we’re sitting with uncertainty.
But most people hate it. Most people are like, tell me yes, tell me no, tell me something. And what I’m trying to do there is say, uncertainty isn’t gonna go away. It’s a really important part of negotiation as is adaptability. If you don’t feel like you are good at thinking on your feet and adapting.
Okay. You have to work on that. That is a non-negotiable. Like you have to improve on this. So how are we gonna do that? So I tackle a couple of these places where, because confidence in negotiation ebbs and flows, right? Like we all know that there, when we are in a realm where when we’re negotiating, we feel comfortable, we’re fine, right?
But when it drifts into another realm, we start to lose our confidence when we don’t know a whole lot about that realm or whatever. So what I’m trying to help people to do there is to coalesce everything, think about those things, and then think if I’m gonna get back to the table if I can, right?
Because getting what, getting back to the table means two things here. One is in this particular negotiation, is there a pathway back? And how hard is it gonna be? Some, the magnitude one on the scale is a minor setback or something. Not a problem. Two a little harder. Three, you’re on the verge of collapse here, but it’s possible.
And four is an outright failure. So, the first way you get back to the table is steps. One is magnitude one, two, and three. If you end up in magnitude four where you’ve got just an all out failure and the negotiation is not going to happen again in the near future or whatever, or maybe ever. Then getting back to the table is more of a longer term. What did I really learn from this so that I can grow and be better?
NM :
Hey everyone, Nolan here. I have to jump in and end today’s podcast for part A of the show. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast if you haven’t already. And join us next week for Part B of this awesome interview.
