The Jazz of Negotiation

Improvising Agreement in a Chaotic World

Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis says, “The real power of jazz—and the innovation of jazz—is that a group of people can come together and create art, improvised art, and can negotiate their agendas with each other. And that negotiation is the art.”?

Jazz is negotiation? Absolutely. The late Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy who ended the bloody conflict in the former Yugoslavia and later sought to forge stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan, turned that insight upside down. Negotiation is like jazz. It is improvisation on a theme,” he said. “You know where you want to go, but you don’t know how to get there. It’s not linear.”?

In a jazz combo, players with different skills and tastes—and competing egos—must negotiate over what and how to play. The marvel is that a quartet of musicians, complete strangers, can jam together to create something new and exciting, all without an apparent plan or tight control over whatever happens next. “The bass," his says, "you never know what they’re going to do."?

Getting in sync is imperative, whatever the genre or whether the musicians are old friends or rivals. Marsalis explains that it’s “like what the UN does. They sit down, and they try to work things out.” The Roots have remained on the hip-hop scene for decades in spite of the fact that two founders—drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and bassist Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter—often don’t get along. When an interviewer asked for the secret of the group’s long success, Trotter answered, “Two tour buses.”?

Jazz and hip-hop musicians don’t just cope with conflict and uncertainty. They thrive on it by working with whatever the other players give them, whether those notes are flat or sharp. Once a quartet finds its groove, Marsalis says, “The four of us can now have a dialogue. We can have a conversation. We can speak to each other in the language of music.”?

That’s just as true when you’re negotiating. After all, conducting a negotiation isn’t like leading a symphony orchestra. You can’t hand out sheet music to the other parties, tap your baton, and expect them to follow your lead. Others at the table will have their own preferred styles and tempos. They may want to be the star soloist and treat you, at best, as an accompanist.?

In both negotiation and jazz, this process of learning, adapting, and influencing takes place moment to moment in listening and responding. You reflect, affirm, rebut, reshape, and respond to whatever your counterparts put forth. And as in jazz, it’s impossible to anticipate every twist and turn. Like it or not, you have to improvise right from the start. If you’re threatened unexpectedly, you have to stand up for yourself without escalating tensions. Or if your counterpart surprises you with a generous offer, you need to accept in such a way that he or she doesn’t suffer remorse and pull it back.?

As such moments flash by, you are negotiating on multiple levels. Substantively, you respond to specific demands and offers by saying yes, no, or maybe. On another level, you are also defining the relationship as easy or strained, open or closed, cooperative or competitive. On still another plane, you are setting the tempo and tone of the negotiation process. And you must do all of this on the fly.?

An MBA student was in his final round of interviews at a consulting firm. He had a lot of social polish and glowing references. In earlier rounds, he had demonstrated his technical skills and his knowledge of business generally. The final meeting with the senior partners seemed like a formality; it was just a matter of tweaking the terms of an official offer. Then the head of the firm asked genially, “When was the last time you had to think on your feet?” The question caught the candidate off guard, and he paused. “Well,” he said stroking his chin. “Let me think.”

It was an awkward moment for everybody. Right now as you’re reading this, the right answer may have come to you immediately: “Oh, about a half second ago.” It’s easy to be agile when nothing is on the line, of course. It’s a different matter for most people when the personal stakes are high.?

Some negotiators seem to have a natural gift for improvising. The rest of us might wish that negotiation came with a pause button that would let us freeze the action, ponder what the other side meant, and weigh what to say next. Even better would be a replay function, so that we could backtrack and try another response if our initial approach fell flat. Sorry, but there are no such gizmos in the real world. And there aren’t do-overs, either. Instead, we’ve got to extemporize.?

You can stretch yourself by borrowing practices from other domains where improvisation is explicitly practiced and taught. Jazz is one such rich resource. You can draw valuable lessons also from theater, psychotherapy, and, military doctrine. Musicians, actors, therapists, and soldiers engage in very different enterprises. At the heart of it, though, their agility rests on similar principles.

Improvisation isn’t merely a technique. It requires a special mind-set:? a blend of unflinching realism about the situation you’re in, coupled with a positive belief that you’ll muddle through nonetheless. Instead, improvisers survive and even prosper because they do three things especially well:

• They pay close heed. They have powers of attention that go way beyond "active listening."
• They know when and how to influence and adapt to the different people with whom they interact. Jazz musicians call this "soloing and comping."
• They are proactive and sometimes provocative. They take considered risks in order to drive the action forward.