Neurotiation: a necessary evolution on how to negotiate

In the early 2000s, I held an executive position that required high negotiation skills. I was responsible for negotiating large projects for the organization. To prepare myself for this challenge, and get the results I wanted, I decided to review all the tactics and techniques I had learned in negotiation training throughout my career, including those of the Harvard method, and select those that were most effective. After all, I should not, nor could, negotiate only based on my intuition.

To confirm the techniques effectiveness and select the most promising, I considered the results observed in negotiations of my students, in MBA courses of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) across Brazil, as well as in my real case negotiations.

After a few years, I chose seven key tactics, which included Harvard [4] method techniques.

Six of these techniques are more focused on helping the negotiator prepare properly and structure the negotiation, aiming to achieve good results for themselves and, ideally, to the other side as well. The six techniques uses more the rational part of our brain, with rational, conscious arguments, involving numbers, deadlines, limits, criteria, alternatives, standards, etc. The seventh technique is the only most focused on persuasion and influence, concerning with the use of power, information and time in negotiations.

Since then, I have widened the research sample a lot (from hundred to thousands of people) and consolidated my methodology with seven (7) key techniques.

However, I still didn't feel satisfied. I believed that more assertive and blunt tactics were lacking, to increase my power of persuasion and influence. The feeling was that I got good, but not excellent results.

Over the past 20 years, the advancement of technology has provided great evolution in neuroscience and in the knowledge about how the human brain works [1]. The numerous (in progress) discoveries opened the doors for the improvement of various activities, such as marketing, sales, leadership, learning, decision making, communication, economy, management, among others.

This encouraged me to seek, from these discoveries, most persuasive tactics that I wanted so much. I did this during my studies and research (doctorate) in Florida, exploring how we, humans, make decisions and the applications of neuroscience and neuromarketing in negotiations and sales [3].

The result of this effort was the expansion of my methodology to cover another key technique (the eighth), which sensitizes and acts on the unconscious part of the brain, which covers emotions and instincts.

I call these tactics and techniques, which act on the unconscious part of the brain, with emotional and instinctive arguments, NeuroTactics?.

In field research on the effectiveness of the methodology I propose, with 8 key techniques [3], held from 2013 to this day, during real negotiations, corporate training and MBA classes (at FGV and IAG Business School), I was able to confirm an increase in more than 23% by those who used conscious (rational) and unconscious (emotional and instinctive) arguments, both for closing agreements and to achieve the established objectives [3].

In conclusion, the traditional way of negotiating has changed. It expanded the use of “structural” - more rational - techniques to also include other techniques and tactics more focused on the unconscious part of the brain, through emotional and instinctive arguments [2] [3]. Therefore, to expand persuasion and influence power, and have more chances of overcoming objections, closing agreements and achieving the desired results, the recommendation is that the negotiator advances and learns Neuronegotiation - or simply “Neurotiation?” - to incorporate NeuroTactics? to his way of negotiating [3].

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REFERENCES:

1 – KAHNEMAN, Daniel. Thinking fast and slow. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013.

2 – MORIN, Christophe e?RENVOISE, Patrick. The Persuasion Code. 2018.

3 – RODRIGUES-LIMA, Newton. Negocia??o de alto impacto com técnicas de Neuromarketing: Neurocia??o. Rio de Janeiro, Editora Brasport. 2017.

4 – URY, Willian, et al. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving in. Penguin Books. 2011.?