What All of Us Can Learn from Hostage Negotiations

Along with an online opportunity to test your own negotiation skills

I've never had to negotiate with a kidnapper to get the release of a friend or family member. (Thank goodness!) But here’s a story—a true one—from my book, The Art of Negotiation: Improvising Agreement in a Chaotic World. It's about Daniel, a former student of mine, who did this brilliantly when his brother was grabbed. And he did it in ways that offer important lessons in far more conventional circumstances.

I’ll tell the story in detail below, but first a free offer. You can test your own skills—and get feedback, too—by doing an online exercise in which you’ll negotiate with a ChatGPT bot, who will play the role of a ruthless kidnapper. I’m deeply grateful to my tech mentors, Aryo Patel and Kevin Jiang, for giving us access to their Simulation Labs platform. Here is the link: ?https://simulationlabs.ai/hostage .

?It's fine if you activate the exercise right now. Or if you have10 minutes or so, check out Daniel’s remarkable story below. I’m sure it will help you deal with the bot-kidnapper. And it likely can help you in negotiations that are soon coming up soon for you.

Either way, good luck!?

Mike

Introducing Daniel

Daniel Yin was back on campus for the second module of an HBS executive program for people who run their own companies. He and his brother Steven had founded a high-end publishing firm that puts out gorgeous coffee table art and travel books in another part of the world. For reasons you’ll soon understand, I’ve disguised names here, been vague about the country in which they do business, and converted the currency to US dollars. The rest is true.?

Daniel and I met for lunch along with a few of his program classmates. After we exchanged pleasantries, he broke in and said, “First off, I want to thank you, Professor. The negotiation classes you taught proved very helpful to me recently.” Everyone likes a compliment, so I smiled, expecting for him to tell me about a recent acquisition or resolution of some copyright claim.?

I was startled, however, when he continued. “What I learned was crucial when my brother Steven was kidnapped. I had to negotiate his release. For a whole month, we didn’t know if we’d see him alive again.”?

It never occurred to me that one of my students would use negotiation concepts he learned in my course in such circumstances. But Daniel was convinced that the frameworks we had used in analyzing business transactions applied to his kidnapping case too.?

Daniel spoke, for example, about the importance of presence of mind. “I had to have the mental discipline to see everything that was happening from a neutral point of view.” He also thought hard about BATNAs, “not just for us but for the kidnapper too.” The family had no walkaway alternative. It had to negotiate. But Daniel realized that his counterpart had to negotiate as well. “He makes a profit only if he makes a deal.”?

Daniel also took great care in formulating his offers to influence the kidnapper’s perception of deal space. He considered the roles and interests of all the parties, including the police—not all of whom he trusted. Daniel’s analysis was impressive, as was his poise in a time of great stress. But Daniel didn’t mention how well he handled critical moments in the negotiation. That skill may have been the most important factor in his success.?

Setting the stage?

Kidnapping for money has become common in Daniel’s country. The professionals who do it are shrewd. They know how to play on people’s emotions. After snatching someone, they wait several days before making contact. They want to amp up fear to a point where a family will pay anything to get the victim back safely.?

Daniel nevertheless used the time to his own advantage. First, he received a crash course in ransom negotiation from the police. They told him that it’s not like the movies. In his country, kidnappers don’t state a demand, nor do they impose a deadline. Instead, when they do call, they insist that the family put the first number on the table. Right at the outset, Daniel would face a crucial decision: How much to offer for his brother’s return? There would be no second chance.?

Daniel reviewed his accounts and figured that he could come up with $1 million, maybe somewhat more in a week or two. The fact that Steven was a full partner in the business limited on how much Daniel could borrow on his own. He’d pay whatever it took to guarantee his brother’s safe release. If that meant financial ruin for the extended Yin family, they would find a way to survive.?

The telephone finally rang just before seven on a Sunday evening.“ I have a message from Steven Yin,” said the voice on the other end of the line.?

“Who is this?” Daniel asked.?

“Your brother is all right,” said the caller. “He wants you to know how much he appreciated the gold cuff links you gave him for his birthday last week. What else? Oh, the generous toast that you made, about him being both your brother and your best friend—that meant the world to him.”?

There had been crank calls earlier, but this one was legitimate. Only the immediate family had been at Steven’s birthday dinner. And the cuff links were antiques that Daniel had purchased on a recent business trip. Yet in spite of having had the three days to prepare, Daniel was speechless.?

“Tell Steven that we are doing as well as we can,” he finally said. “Tell him we are praying for him.”?

Daniel glanced over at a policeman sitting at the dining room table and listening to the conversation through headphones. A tape recorder had clicked on the instant the phone had rung. He gestured for Daniel to continue.?

“What do you want us to do?”?

“I’ll make this quick. I’ve already invested a lot in preserving the safety of your brother. I paid people well to treat him with respect; to be careful. I thought you should know that before telling me: What you are going to pay?”?

Daniel loved his brother and was sitting on a lot of cash. What should he do??

Strategy and tactics?

“We can pay you fifty thousand dollars right now,” Daniel told the kidnapper.?

“That’s ridiculous,” was the response. “You’ll have to do much better than that.” The telephone line went dead.?

Daniel had a good explanation for his lowball number. He had anticipated that his first offer would be a critical move, one that would shape his overall strategy. He thought hard about the long-term consequences of his answer. While preparing for the negotiation, he realized that his first offer, no matter how lavish, would not secure Steven’s release. The kidnapper would reject it, confident that he could get more.?

With that in mind, Daniel reconsidered his objectives. “My paramount goal at that point was to simply keep the conversation going,” he explained. The $50,000 figure probably was less than the kidnapper expected, yet it was a starting point—that’s what Daniel meant by adding the words “right now.”?

One of his program classmates asked, “Weren’t you taking a big risk with your brother’s life?” Daniel didn’t think so. In fact, he worried more about the risk of making a high offer. If he had started with $500,000, the kidnapper might have assumed that the family could pay ten times that. In laying out his first number, Daniel was already thinking about the end game.?

Daniel and the police listened to the tape of the first call over and over again. “This is good,” said the head detective. “We know this guy. He’s done at least eight kidnappings this year.”?

Daniel stifled the impulse to ask why, after so many times, the police still hadn’t made an arrest. Instead, he merely asked, “It’s good?”?

“Oh yes,” said the detective. “He’s very professional. He knows what he’s doing. Now, if it were some amateur, someone who doesn’t know how to play the game, it would be very different.” To Daniel, the situation was by no means a game, yet he was thinking like a chess player himself. There would be further moves, he told himself, trying to draw some comfort from the kidnapper’s closing words. This was the beginning of the bargaining, not the end.?

The second phone call came the next evening. “You have a prosperous business, Mr. Yin,” the kidnapper said. “Don’t insult me with any more low offers. You can easily pay many times what you said.”?

“Sir,” replied Daniel. “You know what is happening in the economy. Things are bad, our credit line is gone. It’s not our fault. It’s happening to everyone.”

“Well, sell your big Mercedes, then,” said the kidnapper. Daniel thought he heard a trace of exasperation. “It’s not mine to sell,” Daniel answered. “The bank is about to repossess it.”?

“Make me another offer,” the caller said over the crackle of the car phone.?

“I can find sixty thousand dollars,” said Daniel. “Maybe sixty-five.”?

“That’s not enough,” said the kidnapper, hanging up.?

Once Daniel had committed to his strategy, he didn’t falter. He focused on influencing the kidnapper’s perceptions. “I wanted to keep him interested but at the same time really anchor his expectations,” Daniel said. “I was very careful to be consistent, increasing my offers only a little at a time.”?

The negotiations dragged on for three weeks. In each of the daily calls, Daniel would pose a personal question that only his brother could answer. Next time, the kidnapper would need to have the appropriate answer to prove that Steven was still alive. It was an arduous process. Something needed to be done to bring it to a close. By day twenty-five, Daniel had offered $78,000, and still the kidnapper insisted on more. “Call me back tomorrow,” said Daniel. “I may have another option.” This time he was the one to hang up.?

When Daniel got the call next evening, he claimed that he had contacted a loan shark, an underworld figure who could provide another $20,000. “That gets us into the nineties,” the kidnapper said. “That’s better, but it’s still not enough.”?

“You don’t understand,” said Daniel. “I haven’t borrowed the money from him yet. The moment that I do, we owe interest of one percent per day.”?

“That’s your problem,” said the kidnapper. “Actually, it’s a problem for both of us,” Daniel said. “If I’ve got to pay interest, it will come out of any money I borrow. So if we keep negotiating, the loan shark is going to cut into the amount that you get. There’s no way around it.?

“Let me think about it,” said the caller.?

“Of course,” said Daniel, “but the commitment he gave me is good only until noon tomorrow. I either have to take the money then, or he’ll lend it to other people.”?

The kidnapper hung up but called back in five minutes with a counteroffer. “Make the amount an even one hundred thousand, and we have a deal,” he said.?

“I can do that,” said Daniel after a deliberate pause.?

Closing?

Daniel got instructions on making the transfer for his brother. The money would be in cash, of course, small bills. The police promised not to interfere. They also assured Daniel that if the family paid the ransom, the kidnapper would keep his word. “Don’t worry about that,” said the detective. “He knows that if he doesn’t deliver, we’ll tell anyone dealing with him in the future not to pay.”?

Thirty minutes after Daniel passed a duffle bag to a stranger, a gray van drove past the Yins’ downtown office, and Steven was pushed out on the street, blindfolded. The public was told that he had managed to escape. The authorities didn’t want to encourage more kidnappings.?

The whole negotiation took almost a month, but Daniel felt that time was on his side. He increased his offers, though only a little each time. There was enough on the table to protect Steven from harm, but not enough for the kidnapper to keep this game with the Yins going. Maybe he could find someone else to grab whose family wouldn’t be so patient and disciplined.?

That’s not how Daniel felt privately, of course. “It was so stressful, so emotional,” he says. “I had to dedicate myself to being very focused about strategy.” The kidnapper initially controlled the pace of the negotiations and communication, but Daniel’s bold action was what brought the process to a successful close. He knew he couldn’t make a take-it or-leave-it offer. There was too much at stake. So he concocted the loan shark story as a way to dangle an attractive offer, but only for a short time.?

“I wanted to create a deadline,” he said, “but one that would just be arbitrary, because he could call my bluff.”?

It wasn’t a card that he could have easily played again if it didn’t work this time. The mythical loan brought the package to a little less than $100,000. Without it, they were still in the high seventies. Psychologically, it could be hard for the kidnapper to take a big step backward.?

As Daniel expected, the kidnapper came back for a small sweetener to make it a six-figure deal. If satisfying the kidnapper’s ego was necessary, that was okay with Daniel. Many moments in this negotiation were important, but two especially. The first was imposed on Daniel when the kidnapper insisted that he make the first offer. But at the close, it was Daniel who forced the issue and restored Steven to the family.?

“Emotionally, I wanted to resolve this right away,” he told us, “but rationally, I knew that if I tried to rush things, panicking would only make things worse.”

Take-aways?

Few of us will face the choices that Daniel confronted, but his experience illustrates principles that apply to critical moments in negotiation across the board:?

1. Use Tactical Moves to Execute Strategy. Daniel’s low first offer established a slow but steady path to agreement.?

2. Be Decisive in the Face of Risk. All of Daniel’s alternatives entailed risk. He believed that the prospect of getting some money would keep the kidnapper from acting rashly.?

3. Focus on Your Ultimate Objective, Not Necessarily the Immediate Consequences of your Actions. Daniel knew that his first offer would not be accepted.

?4. Be Consistent. Once Daniel committed to this approach, he had to stay with it. If he had doubled his offer midway in the talks, the kidnapper might have held out for even more.?

5. Be Prepared to Force Agreement, but Take Care to Time Your Moves Well. Daniel’s patient bargaining set up his closing gambit.?

A reminder

If you haven’t negotiated with the bot kidnapper yet, here is the link for the exercise.