"Never Split the Difference"?-?Summary of chapter?1
Hello and welcome to my next book summary series.
This will be a special one as we go through a masterclass book about negotiation: “Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” by the former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator Chris Voss.
I have learned from Chris on Jocko’s, Jordan’s?, and Huberman’s podcasts plenty about negotiating better in the interactions we have every day?—?salary reviews, promotions, relationships, parenthood, to name a few. However, reading through the book is going straight to the consolidated source of knowledge!
A story to get us?started
Chris starts chapter 1 by recounting his outsmarting of the top Harvard negotiation academics.
At the time, Chris was enrolled on a negotiation course at Harvard and the director of the school’s Negotiation Research project, Robert Mnookin, heard of it. He invited Chris to his office for a chat. They were joined by another international negotiation specialist with field experience, Gabriella Blum.
They put a tape recorder on top of the table, smiled at Chris and the following message played
We’ve got your son, Voss. Give us one million dollars or he dies.
Mnookin smiled and declared “I’m the kidnapper. What are you going to do?”. He pressed further but, after a long, slow stare and a smile, Chris replied with
How am I supposed to do that?
Mnookin paused, with a look of amused pity in it. He then replied with
So you’re okay with me killing your son, Mr Voss?
Chris smartly retorted with
I’m sorry, Robert, how do I know he’s even alive? I really am sorry, but how can I get you any money right now, much less one million dollars, if I don’t even know he’s alive?
Note how Chris mixed an apology and the other party’s first name to push warmth into the exchange. This flustered Mnookin even. The retort could seem foolish at first sight, but this was the FBI’s most potent negotiation tool: an open-ended question.
This ultimately shifted the frame of the exchange: Mnookin now had to resolve the logistical issues on how to get the money. He had to resolve Chris’ problems instead of demanding the money.
Blum stepped in as Chris’s open-questions persisted against Mnookin. The same strategy persisted. And continued to persist once Mnookin rejoined the exchange. The pair grew frustrated and had difficulty to think. After all, they couldn’t intimidate a guy whose son’s life was on the line.
Mnookin and Blum ultimately gave up and acknowledged the FBI had a few tricks to teach the academia.
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Not a fluke, rather battle-tested
That exchange with the top Harvard negotiation experts was not a fluke. It was achieved from years of experience in the field, negotiating thousands of lives with criminals.
These techniques are the product of experiential learning by the FBI agents. But going into Harvard was a choice made by Chris on purpose. He wanted to expand his horizons further and learn how to articulate his knowledge better. The FBI’s techniques worked on criminals, but Chris wondered if they could also work with normal humans.
Chris goes on to recount more stories from his time at Harvard, this time from classes. He recounts a specific class where students were grouped in pairs and had to negotiate the price of a product. Chris consistently got the cheapest prices when dealing with different partners throughout the class.
What was the “trick”? You guessed it, open-ended questions. Once again, it was not a fluke, rather a consistent tool for the negotiator’s tool belt.
Thing is, you will need deep emotional strength and tactical psychological insights to respond to these open-ended questions. In other words, when you get these questions asked to you, you go from making demands to negotiating with yourself.
Negotiation with?emotions
What all this experience on the field highlighted to the FBI was that humans are emotional.
After many successful negotiations, but also some terribly unfortunate instances where things went sideways, the FBI understood: training for negotiations should not emphasise bargaining and problem solving, but instead psychological skills. Emotions and emotional intelligence at the center of this skill set.
There is the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. Listening demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand the other side.
In practice, you can think of these as skills to calm people down, establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the communication of needs, and persuade the other side of our empathy.
Life is negotiation
The whole point of this book is for Chris to articulate his vast negotiation knowledge to us normal humans.
After all, life is negotiation. Interactions at work, relationships problems, parenthood, all these are instances of negotiation.
At its core, negotiation serves two purposes:
Think of negotiation as communication with results?—?your career, your reputation, your love life, your kids well being.
A preview of what’s to?come
Chapter 1 finishes with a short preview of what is to be covered on each chapter. I will leave this information here as well so you can pick and choose the specific summaries as you see fit to your purposes and goals.