Negotiation and Communication: What an Expert Hostage Negotiator can Teach Us

How can a hostage negotiator’s tips help you improve your interactions with colleagues, friends, and even family?

I’ve been away from Steemit for too long! Busy with life and work, but all is well. Today I want to share really interesting and practically useful ideas about negotiation and communication more broadly, ideas that I only wish I’d come across sooner.

Never Split the Difference

Chris Voss has some great tips in his book, Never Split the Difference, which I recently enjoyed very much as an audiobook. He was the lead hostage negotiator for the FBI, and now he works at his consulting company, Black Swan Group. Below I’ll present what I think are some of the highlights from the book.

I found out about him and his book from this great interview on The Tom Woods Show, “What you can learn from a hostage negotiator”. It’s worth a listen just for the interesting stories that he has about his negotiations. His tips, for improving communication and getting better results in your negotiations, make it well worth a listen. He has nicely combined years of practical experience with academic theories and research findings.

Compromise is a lazy and wasteful approach.

This important point, which may seem counter-intuitive to many people, is just one valuable tip. He outlines effective techniques for having engaging conversations with your counterpart and building trust, to encourage the sharing of information. Then, using that information and trust, you can often arrange a much better deal, for both parties, than any simplistic compromise could ever achieve. He makes the case that these techniques work well even if your counterpart is a hostage-taking terrorist, and he has interesting stories about how well they have worked. Most humans have an innate desire for socially constructive behaviour. Building trust goes a long way.

Rationality is not enough, because humans are emotional.

Humans are not completely rational. Although game theory may work well for describing the overall probability of outcomes, particularly in less personal interactions such as markets, game theory alone is far from a sufficient tool for getting what you want in negotiation with an actual human being. This is because, as the experimental psychologist Daniel Kahneman noted some time ago, humans are not purely rational. We humans base many, probably most, of our decisions more on emotions.

Summary of Negotiation Tactics

• Listen intently, and try not to hear only what you already believe or want to believe.
• Intentionally lead with questions designed to allow your counterpart to say “No.”
• Use “Accusation Audits” to state explicitly your counterpart’s likely misgivings.
• Mirror: repeat the last 3 words (or key words) that your counterpart said, then wait.
• Label and summarize your counterpart’s position: “Its seems that…”
• Ask How? and What? questions, and sometimes –very carefully—Why? questions.
• "Don't lie to anyone you don't plan to kill."

Strategy as well as Tactics

Chris goes further, of course, into more advanced strategies for negotiating. I found them interesting, but I suppose those with practical experience negotiating might appreciate them more than I could.

I have found the insights into how human beings interact really helpful for understanding my interactions with co-workers. After just beginning to try these techniques in conversations with my wife and co-workers during the past two weeks, I’ve already found them quite helpful.

Here’s a video of another good interview with Chris Voss discussing these approaches to negotiation.

Anyway, that's my short book review.

S. Lan Smith

Kamakura, Japan

June 04, 2017