Nolan Martin :
My name is Nolan Martin. Joining me as always is Aram Donigian. I’m super excited about our guests today. You want to introduce them?
Aram Donigian :
I sure will, Nolan. It is a tremendous pleasure to introduce our listeners to our former negotiation professor and a dear friend, mentor, and colleague Jeff Weiss. A fellow co-founder of the West Point Negotiation Project and author of the HBR Guide to Negotiating. Jeff Weiss is the Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Mass General Brigham, where he oversees the strategy, systems transformation, strategic partnerships, and diversified businesses functions.
Previously, Jeff served as the president of Lesley University, which followed Jeff’s nearly 30 years in consulting most of those years as a partner and co-founder of Vantage Partners. His work focused on helping organizations structure and manage strategic partnerships, negotiate complex agreements, implement strategy and manage change, drive innovation and engage in effective board governance.
Prior to Vantage, Jeff helped found a conflict management group, now part of Mercy Corps, a not for profit that works with government and community leaders around the world to resolve conflict and affect social change. These two organizations grew out of the Harvard negotiation project of which he was a member.
For over a decade, Jeff taught at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the United States Military Academy. He was a co-founder and co director of the West Point Negotiation Project and continues to lecture annually at the Army War College. Jeff was awarded West Point’s Apgar Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Army’s Commander’s Award for Civilian Service, and the Army’s Outstanding Civilian Service Medal.
Jeff holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Government from Dartmouth College and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School. Jeff, it is a sincere honor to welcome you to the NEGOTIATEx podcast.
Jeff Weiss :
Aram and Nolan, it’s an incredible privilege to be here tonight, to be with both of you. Nolan, who was a student so long ago and is now an expert practitioner in his own right.
And Aram, who is a dear friend and co-founder of the Negotiation Project, with me and many other wonderful people. And it is so wonderful to see what you all have done. Thrilled to be with you.
AD :
Thanks, Jeff. And obviously this project that we’re involved in with this podcast is a testimony to just your impact on both. So thanks for that. We often start these conversations by trying to understand one’s journey in the field of negotiation. What drew you into this line of work?
Jeff’s Personal Journey Inspired by Global Conflict [02:23]
JW :
Well, I grew up in the sixties and seventies, and those were clearly turbulent times, both within our country and around the world. And I guess as a young person, I saw two very different sides of managing differences, two very different sides of managing conflict. One is the incredible toll it takes when it’s poorly done. And one is the truly incredible things that can happen when people listen and sit side by side and get creative and care to leverage the differences that they have.
So that got me intrigued. I’m not sure I knew that explicitly at the time, but it certainly, I knew it implicitly at the time. And then I found myself, strangely enough, as a child watching a show called Dear Arabs, Dear Israelis, which really impacted me, only to find myself in a classroom, and this is dead honest with a person named Roger Fisher, who later became my partner and my, was my mentor, was my professor, was my friend who, as I knew that I was taking his class, but as it turned out had been the person who had created Dear Arabs and Israelis really to help people understand different perspectives on key issues at the time.
And Roger was someone who I think really scratched a significant itch, having spent his life helping people manage differences around the world in really complex situations and that drew me in and built a career from there with incredible gratitude to Roger and a whole bunch of people at the negotiation project at Harvard that I got to start out with.
NM :
I’d love to keep digging in here because I know Roger Fisher’s had such an impact on many people, especially in the field of negotiations. For those of you who don’t know, he wrote the very famous book of Getting to Yes. Do you have a favorite Roger story that exemplifies his mindset or approach to negotiations?
The Profound Lessons Of Roger Fisher in Negotiation & Conflict Resolution [04:00]
JW :
I think what’s interesting Nolan is Roger taught so much through stories. And so I’m going to share a Roger story, which was the first story I think I ever heard from Roger. And I must say, I probably think of it at least once a week, if not once a day. And then I want to share just a personal story, which isn’t so much of a story, more of my story with Roger.
So, the first story I remember Roger ever sharing, at least with us, in the classroom, and I heard many times over, and probably borrowed it a few times myself, attributed to Roger, Roger was in World War II. He had left Harvard, having graduated, and went off into the Army, and he was in air reconnaissance, and just as a complete aside, as I think you know, partly what got Roger into the field that he ended up being in, was having come back from the war, and having lost so many of his roommates, and just having said to himself, there’s got to be a better way of dealing with difference with conflict.
But in the midst of this, we get a wonderful story, which I think of frequently, which is Roger was part of a sort of four person team that would fly B17s. Roger did maps. There was a co-pilot, there was a pilot, and there was a young buck private engineer in the back, usually. They usually went up to fly when the weather was really bad and they’d go up and check the weather out and I’d say whether others should fly or not fly, but this happened to be a beautiful day.
They were checking out a newly constructed engine and they’re flying along in the middle of the mission and the pilot, who you can imagine being someone who goes out there in incredible weather, isn’t very excited. So he decides that he’s gonna create a little excitement and as the two of you probably know maybe better than anyone B17 had, not sure that too many B17s flying around these days, four engines. So he feathers he shuts off one of the engines and he gets a pretty good reaction but he doesn’t get a good enough reaction.
So he feathers two more engines. So he’s now got three engines off and one engine going, and he gets a really pretty good reaction then because the plane starts to move in a way that you probably don’t want a plane to move, but not good enough for this guy. He feathers the fourth engine. Now he gets a tremendously good reaction.
Everyone is grabbing onto their seat, looking for their chutes. When the pilot starts to laugh, then he of course goes to turn on the engine. the engines. He pushes a button, he pushes two buttons, he pushes, by Rogers telling, 10 or 12 buttons, nothing happens. At which point he and everyone else in the plane realize that you need a source of power to turn on an engine, which causes a bit of a problem.
At which point in time, as he realizes this and starts to go for his shoot, the co-pilot, strangely and interestingly, as opposed to grabbing his chute, bursts out laughing, looks at the pilot and says, Boy, oh boy, have you got a problem? Now that’s interesting. We’ll go back to why I think that story makes any difference if it’s not already clear to our listeners, but it is embedded with a whole bunch of assumptions that people have in negotiation when things go awry.
It’s the other party’s problem. It’s their constituents’ problem. It’s their boss’s problem, but it really isn’t. If we’re trying to sell something or we’re trying to supply something, or we’re trying to buy something, or we’re trying to solve a problem. It is a joint problem. Luckily for people know the end of the story. Roger clearly lived the young, but private did not think it was the pilot’s problem or the co pilot’s problem, but all of their problem. And remember that they had a built in generator in the back and cranked it up and saved the day.
So I probably read that story a hundred times. I probably have shared that story a hundred times and I share it, both because of a slight amount of amusement and both because it always helps me remember Roger, who is such a wonderful person, but mainly because it is so critical to what Roger taught us at the outset of any course that he taught and many courses I’ve taught since then, which is, you really need to start as you think about this complex task of negotiating, by being aware of your assumptions. Is my assumption about other people’s intent? Is my assumption about the problem that exists?
What are my assumptions about time? What are my assumptions about ground rules? What are my assumptions about whose problem it is if this falls apart and being aware of those assumptions and questioning those assumptions becomes the first critical lesson in negotiation. So Nolan that’s the story.
The other thing I would just share is, I will never forget the mornings where before class I would go up to Roger’s office. I was his assistant TA for a while and I would sit down in the chair and Roger would spin around in his chair and his desk was cluttered with many papers and some amazing photographs of world leaders that he had worked with. You read in the New York times and he’d often have a tear in his eye and he’d point to a story in the paper as he spun around and he said, we’re going to go work on this and he’d point to somewhere in the world, some complex conflict.
And lo and behold, within the next few weeks, usually, cause Roger had one of these as a student, a premier, a prime minister, a president or whatever, we’d be working on this. And so the other, Nolan, piece that I extracted from that is with courage and some good questions and some good process, a lot of what Roger taught us, you can actually do a lot of good and you can do some amazing things. And that was pretty special as a young person in law school to think, I didn’t need to have the knowledge, I didn’t need to have any sort of smarts or brilliance. I just needed to have some good tools and questions with other good colleagues that might help some other people who are struggling find a new answer
NM :
I love that the courage part I don’t really hear that often and it is courage when you sit there and you may have to ask a difficult question or you may have to challenge something where you know it’s difficult when it’s just you and someone else and you’re looking at someone in the eyes and have to go through something like that. And then I also share that as someone who has jumped out of a lot of planes. It is never fun to go up there when the weather is bad. So I could only imagine how he felt in that plane on those terrible nights, so.
JW :
I think that pilot got court-martialed later on for some other antics, but we’ll leave that for another podcast. Maybe the “court-martialed pilots” podcast.
AD :
I’ve actually been asked in class, Jeff, when I’ve shared that story. So obviously it’s going on to next generations, what happened to the pilot? You mentioned the awareness of assumptions, courage, good questions, management of the process. You are a lifetime practitioner. You’re a former professor. What are the most critical skills negotiators must learn to master?
Essential Skills for Master Negotiators [09:51]
JW :
There are half dozen to a dozen. Maybe no one wants to hear that there are a dozen, but it’s complex human interaction. It’s understood. So let’s start with what I think is actually the most important, and it’s not being the right order. It’s not being great debater. It’s not being a great crafter of solutions.
Those are all great things. I think first and foremost, really fine negotiators are very good at spotting and managing perceptions, listening carefully, building understanding. By understanding why someone else has a difference, why someone else has a different perception, where’s it coming from?
How can I make use of it? I don’t necessarily, as a great negotiator, I don’t mean me, but as great negotiators don’t necessarily have to agree with that other perception. Often we don’t, but we do need to understand it. We don’t understand it. Chances are, we will have a lot of difficulty getting to the substantive elements of negotiation.
Secondly, which goes right with it, is being in a place where you can develop and build trust. Without trust, which isn’t necessarily needed for all negotiating, because I’m sure we have listeners that are thinking I have a one shot transaction or a two shot transaction, how much time do I have to build trust?
We can get back to that. But for those who are in a corporate setting, in a military setting, in an industrial setting, in a healthcare setting, in a community setting often we’re negotiating with the same parties again and again or for long periods of time. So building trust is critically important.
Then we get into the substance. I think very good negotiators understand how to dig underneath stated demands, what we often call positions and pro and be consistent, continue to pro. So when someone says I want it on Tuesday, I hear that as a position, and if I can say I can only get it done on Thursday, I get a position.
We don’t have much to negotiate. Maybe we’re going to split difference on Wednesday, they’re not going to be too happy, I’m not going to be too happy. Really good negotiator is going to get underneath that, right? And we don’t have to make it Tuesday, we can make it a policy. We can make it legislation. We can make it a budget.
And the good negotiator starts to ask the why question, and the what’s the purpose of question, and is that being driven by these things question, what am I missing question. That helps someone to understand really what’s driving the other party, because at the end of the day, that’s what’s important to satisfy.
Our underlying objectives, their underlying objectives, if we’re going to get to agreement, not our opening stated demands, maybe we’re going to satisfy it even better. Like fourth, really good negotiators are creative. And they’re good at getting the other party to be creative. So we’ve got these various interests on the table, and a good negotiator has the ability to engage the other party in some brainstorming.
Let’s leave deciding, critiquing, assessing off the table for a bit. You need to try to get this, and this done. I need to try to get this, that, and the other done. What are some different possible ways we can get this accomplished and really separating that inventing process from deciding. Good negotiators are very good at being able to bring good standards to the table because they know that the other party and they themselves are going to have to defend themselves to constituents and critics.
And you’re not gonna be able to defend yourself to constituents critics very long if you say, Nolan’s a great guy, and for the sake of the relationship, he broke down in tears, I wanted to do him a favor, or I was not such a great guy, he ranted and raved, he banged the table, he made threats, so I gave in.
I don’t believe that about either one of you. It’s important to be able to bring objective standards. Ways to assess those options together. Look, there are myriad other things. I guess I would say the one other thing, which may be equally important to being able to do these kinds of things, managing perceptions, building relationships, probing for interests, getting creative, bringing good standards to the table is the ability to change the game.
And maybe we can talk more about that as we go, but I think very good negotiators are aware that there is not, as Roger used to say, negotiation’s not a path through the woods, it’s knowing the terrain, it’s being able to spot what the other party’s doing, are they making a threat, are they anchoring in, are they trying to hold the relationship hostage, and not reacting in kind, which maybe we can also talk about a little bit later, but really being able to have some various moves in their head for how to get the other party into a more constructive mode.
And there are lots and lots of them that can be done systematically. So lots of other things that are important. I think those are the half dozen that are probably most critical as I watch really good negotiators negotiate.
NM :
That leads me to what happens when there’s an imbalance of power or a perceived imbalance of power. So I’ve consulted with Fortune 500 companies where the supply chain would be like, oh, they have all the power because they’re a single source supplier. And then I’ve consulted with the supplier. That’s, oh, they’re the largest company. So they have all the power. How do you coach people to utilize the skills that you just shared in these kinds of situations?
Strategic Preparation: Elevating Negotiation Skills Beyond Basic Demands [14:19]
I think actually the best negotiators are those who are best prepared, and I think they’re prepared on the kind of things we just talked about. They’re not just prepared with, I have a position, I have something I’m going to offer, I have something I’m going to demand, and I have my walk away. Those are easy things to come up with. They’re not nearly as helpful as a whole variety of other things, like understanding one’s interest, imagining what the other party’s interests are, having bosses. Et cetera.
So first, if there is an imbalance in power, which is sometimes just a perceived imbalance of power, but it doesn’t matter. Perception becomes reality. It is incumbent upon the party going in to negotiate to get really well prepared. I want to have good questions. I want to really think through by doing my research and talking to colleagues and my counterpart and talking to others who’ve negotiated with them that may be within my own organization.
What do I think their underlying objectives are? So that maybe when they make a demand or they make a threat, I can bring it back to those underlying objectives. It’s just an example of one of the things to be fair. And second thing I think that becomes critically important is to negotiate with discipline, so not to get knocked off one’s game.
When one feels like the other party has more power, it is easy to get reactive. That is exactly the time not to get reactive. I want to be purposive. We can talk about that in a little bit too, if we want. Know my purpose. And I want to stick with the kind of things we’re talking about. When I heard the question originally, Nolan, when I, my pithy answer was triple down on the above, probe all the more, get all the more creative, bring good standards to the table, etc.
And the last thing, just to be realistic about the whole thing, is sometimes there is an imbalance of power. It doesn’t change the way I negotiate, but it may change the way I use one of, think of negotiation as, sort of having a small periodic table from chemistry of seven elements. And I talked about some in our last answer.
There’s another one that’s pretty important, which is my walk away. And in getting to yes years ago with the term Bill Ury and Roger Fisher and my dear friend and longtime partner Bruce Patton coined was BATNA, your best alternative, I’ll say it in the way that I think it should be said, to this negotiation, not to negotiating, because it might be another negotiation.
So if you feel like there is an imbalance of power, I want to be well prepared. I want to be disciplined. I want to triple down on what I just said before. And I absolutely want to try to make my walk away as strong as possible. And I’d say as well, I want to have good ways of testing, really how good their BATNA is because sometimes the imbalance of power is because they perceive their BATNA, they perceive their best walk away as a lot better than it is. And even the simple question of if we really couldn’t do this, how would you explain this to can be an unlocking move.
AD :You’re talking about power. I don’t know how you’ve done it, but you’ve worked in some of the most hierarchical industries out there. Military, higher education, healthcare. I’m sure we could talk some others too, but what do you see as the most pressing challenges facing negotiators in these and other industries in 2025?
The Missteps Of Modern Leadership In Negotiation [17:03]
JW :
So I think Aram and Nolan, It is what we see in these industries, we see every day, we see them in the paper, we see it on TV, and we see leaders in my mind mistakenly model what they think of as leadership, but really is just creating polarization. It’s I’m right, and you’re wrong. It’s my view is moral and smart, and yours is immoral and lacks intelligence. It’s I speak, you be quiet. It’s you better listen and understand my views, but I can dismiss your views. It’s I anchor in and scream louder. Just if the words seem hyperbolic, pick up the paper, turn on the news, look at what our legislators do.
Look at what frequently happens within let’s go back, Nolan to supplier situations. How many times do those turn into fighting matches? It’s your fault. It’s your fault. I’m going to tell you, I did a lot of supplier work in my consulting career and I have a lot of friends who are heads of procurement for very big companies who often told me in quiet moments, when I thought it really was their fault, maybe actually we contributed to it.
Maybe we never called them on the problem in the first place. Maybe we didn’t give them the right specs. Maybe we didn’t jump on a solution that we could have. So I think what I see in hierarchical organizations and non hierarchical organizations is this sense that I need to surround myself by like minded people and dismiss those who are not like me, right?
Who do I friend? I don’t know. I’ve never used Facebook. I’ll say that publicly, but I understand there’s a thing called Facebook. That’s pretty popular. And there’s nothing called friending. I think we probably friend people who are of like minds much of the time. And I think that happens as people try to manage difference these days.
I think it’s just getting worse and worse. And it creates a self sealing loop. So as soon as I say, look, I’m going to dismiss your view. Then you’re going to certainly dismiss my view. And then I’m going to say, Oh, I knew you didn’t care about my views. I’m really going to dismiss your view.
That’s what I see the largest problem, whether it’s union negotiations, whether it’s regulatory negotiations, whether it’s all the policy negotiations, we seem to have gotten to a stasis. It’s okay to, in my mind, not do our jobs because our jobs, whether it’s a job or a job we’re elected to do, which I guess is also a job, is to solve problems.
It’s not to agree to stupid things. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not to not understand a perspective or have a perspective, but it’s to take an approach. It looks pretty different than what I see each and every day, particularly in organizations that are encumbered by lots of hierarchy, lots of rules, lots of regulations, lots of past expectations, but I see it all around.
NM :
What about the other side of this? So you have over 30 years of negotiation experience with top companies. What are some of the things they can do to make negotiation a competitive advantage or corporate capability?
The Role Of Leadership In Shaping Negotiation Skills & Organizational Culture [19:46]
JW :
Yeah. So let’s separate two things and I’m going to reflect on, you know, the incredible privilege of spending three decades in the field.
And then the last decade doing some different things, but trying to use the same skills and having the privilege of helping lead a university and now an incredible healthcare system with amazing people. I think the first piece, Nolan, going back to what we were just talking about, has nothing to do with corporate capability.
I think it has to do with individuals and changing mindset and redefining roles and redefining what our responsibilities are. I think it really starts with, and therefore, in an organization, I hope, one would think, one would model the behaviors you’d want to see, and one would expect it of one’s people, and one would reward it.
So, what do I look for in great people on my teams, whether they’re working on diversified businesses, or they’re working on strategy implementation, or they’re building a new cancer center, or they’re working with a partner. I’m looking for folks who can understand other perspectives, who can understand others’ problems, who absolutely understand the objectives that we have as an organization or in a department or in a clinic, who can bring people together to sit side by side and solve problems.
I’m not looking for people to vilify others. I’m not looking for people to throw up their hands and say, oh my God, look at all the challenges in healthcare. That’s not what I’m looking for. We don’t need that. We’ve got plenty of that in society. So the first piece starts with individuals.
Let’s go to the question Nolan, you asked. And by the way, I really do think that starts at the top. I think it’s incumbent upon executives, it’s incumbent upon people who are making law. It’s incumbent upon community leaders to model that kind of behavior. If we’re going to get out of this, I think really bad trap we’ve built for ourselves.
I’m not casting a spurt on any particular party. It’s a dynamic. All right, let’s go into what you asked. So first I think there’s a skill element. I think, unfortunately, I had the pleasure of spending a lot of my life doing two things. Unfortunately, they’re things that people think they are really good at and learned when they were about, let’s say anywhere from one minute old to four years old. One is negotiating. So of course we learned about negotiating. We cried and we got milk or we cried louder and then maybe we got the milk or we cried longer and we got the milk that’s negotiating and a lot of people still negotiate that way, even in their forties, fifties, sixties, et cetera.
And the other is I had the privilege of not being a tremendously good baseball player, but I was a pretty decent coach and I coached for a long time. And everyone, of course, thinks that even though most people don’t even know how to grip a ball, they know how to play baseball. All right, so I get to do these two things where everyone thinks, I know how to do that, everyone knows how to do those things.
The reality is, and I saw the same with my high school players over time, as with negotiators, there are a lot of skills that are just missing. So I think it’s incumbent upon organizations to train people. How do you get prepared for negotiating? How do you negotiate effectively? How do you coach those people? How do you, that’s one piece.
Second piece is it’s incumbent in those organizations and leaders, as I said before, to model those skills. And I don’t just mean doing them in negotiations that people watch or they may apprentice to. When you give instructions, you can give an instruction hey, could you go get X?
When you review, you can say, hey, Nolan, why didn’t we ask for more? Those are okay questions, but they beget a sort of action, right? That action is, I’m going to push more, I’m going to be more positional, etc. That’s pretty different than a leader saying, do we really understand our objectives here? Do we understand their objectives? Who are their critics? Who are their constituents? What’s our walk away? How do we make it better? You just left a negotiation. Where did it break down? How did it break down? By the way, what’d you learn? Do we have the right parties at the table? I’m just, I’m taking questions from different, right?
That’s different. You send a different message. I think as well, it’s treating negotiation not as the only way to get better results is to have really good people who are, good in their feet. I think it’s building it as a discipline in the organization. We worked for years with organizations that build great databases of creative solutions.
They built great databases for their top suppliers or their top customers. What are the typical objectives behind different key terms? So that there was an ability to be creative by using the objectives rather than the key terms. We work with organizations that had lots and lots of data on good industry standards to apply to different terms and conditions. It’s just examples.
Look, Aram was doing this when we were working together, had the privilege of working together in the military, right? Trying to help leaders think about key engagements in a different way. And it wasn’t just, hey, let’s find three really smart people who can go talk to, the villagers, the tribal leaders, it was, we’re going to all get prepared the same way. We’re going to all debrief the same way. We’re going to think through this through a disciplined structure that everyone knows. And I think most significantly beyond, obviously, I think the best way to instill new ways of doing things in the organization after training and modeling, which is telling good stories.
So people know what you’re actually talking about on a behavioral level is to set an expectation. We would not send people out to random manufacturing line or do quality or do six Sigma and say, Hey, go do it. How are you doing? It worked well. You could do better. Couldn’t you do better? That’d be crazy, right?
There are books written on all these things. Negotiation’s a discipline. It’s not something we do by the seat of our pants. It’s fun to do it by the seat of our pants, but it’s a discipline. It has steps, it has tools, it has methods, it has data, it has good choices to make and bad choices to make. Really good organizations that enable their people, teach it, reinforce it, create systems and processes around it, just like they do for how you would manage your supply chain. Your product development, your manufacturing, your quality, your success.
NM :
It’s powerful when a entire organization is speaking the same language and you can definitely tell when everyone’s bought in verse just one team’s bought in.
AD :
Yeah, that’s really true. Nolan, the discipline piece is, I think, going back now, however many years it’s been since I was in your course, Jeff, I think I took the course expecting all these spectacular tricks and tactics and table stuff, right?
And there’s some of that. I think when you talk about spotting and changing the game, if you want to talk that, but so much of this was discipline around preparation and then even review and very intentional review and learning. And every time I teach stakeholder mapping and talk to folks about how to build a stakeholder map, I say, I spent two weeks in Afghanistan doing nothing but stakeholder mapping.
Okay. So you want about, you’re talking about your eyes being like ready to fall out of your head or something that set us up for 12 months of negotiations, that sort of deliberate work.
The Importance Of Preparation & Perspective In Negotiation [26:06]
JW :
Yeah. Juxtapose Aram, you can do this better than I know. And you can as well, obviously, juxtapose against negotiations that occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq that were done by the seat of their pants. So I distinctly remember, you know, being on a video conference with some folks in Afghanistan on a very cold night there, and it was pretty cold night at West Point too, thinking through a really critical, I’ll leave the facts aside, negotiation for being able to maneuver through certain territories and hearing from very respected colleagues, one of whom actually had been top of us at West Point.
These were critical negotiations that we prepared for the maneuvers for 20 days. We prepared for the negotiations for three hours. And then he then told the story of. We had 25 people at this meeting. It’s now our third meeting, and every one of the meetings has gotten nowhere, as opposed to you spending two weeks doing stakeholder mapping, which for our audience being clear about who the constituents and critics are, how they relate to one another, who’s involved in what way, what are their objectives.
And then spent 12 months making use of it in a pretty productive way. Yeah, it’s not magic. By the way, the table tricks, I thought I taught you a long time ago how to pull the, whatever you call it you put on the table. What’s that called? It’s not a bedspread. It’s a tablecloth. How to pull the tablecloth and not have, that’s a tablecloth.
If folks are looking for tricks, look, there are a zillion books that have good tricks in them. And they may be helpful. They may not be. Frankly, we have a way of thinking through how to change the game that I don’t think you need to read all the books. It’s just a systematic way to be able to change the game, but I don’t, I’d shift it.
I’d shift to if one’s looking for tactical things to do, and one took nothing else away from this conversation, I’d say, change the question you’re asking, right? Once in a tactical stop asking, I’m not talking to the two of you, because I assume you stopped asking a long time ago, as I tried to do, although we all stopped asking, what do you want?
What do you want? I want everything, or I want my position. If you ask, what do you want? You will get a position back. If you change that question to what are your objectives? What are your needs? What are your concerns? Why do you want that now? You’ve got grist for a fundamentally different kind of negotiation. There are a bunch of those. Maybe we’ll talk about them later on.
AD :
Yeah. And Jeff, as you’re saying that you’re reminding me and all the tools, my favorite tool that I teach is the favorite tool that you taught me, right? And then I’ve used was the Currently Perceived Choice tool, which just feels like it really fits into this place of getting into the other party’s shoes and understanding how they see the choice before them.
And then there’s work to do on how they’re seeing that choice. Did I get that at all close to being correct? Do I need to go back to class with you?
JW :
Well, since you’re teaching the class, I think you don’t need to go back to the class. I think you got it. Great. Look, it is another, it’s an example of a couple of things we’ve talked about.
One, I started with when Nolan asked what are the most important things negotiators do? They manage perceptions, right? So if I don’t understand the other side’s perspective when they’re saying no, really hard to change there. I can keep pushing and driving and giving them good arguments. Generally, that’s not going to get very far.
It’s certainly not going to get very far until I understand how they see Thank you. The choice in front of them, why it makes sense to them to say no. That’s what the CPC is about. And the CPC also changes the question as opposed to what will convince them that you’re right, which is not a bad question to ask.
It’s just not nearly as powerful as why do they believe it’s in their interest to say no once I understand that and I get some things to work with to potentially change the choice you got it just right and you know it’s my favorite tool too.
AD :
I thought you were going to say stand on a chair talk slower and louder that’s how we get them to understand where we’re coming from.
JW :
If they’re sitting on a chair they’re standing on the chair as well
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.
