The origin of the black swan concept
was from 16th century Europe, when all they
had were white swans.
And somebody along the line thought of, well,
what would happen if there was a black swan?
Well, it's impossible, you know?
That would change everything.
That would change the complexion of everything.
And then not long after that, they discovered black swans
in Australia.
They discovered that black swans actually exist,
and suddenly the impossible was possible.
And it was a game-changing concept.
And this has been resonated throughout the years
and been picked up in other books
that the black swan is something that nobody expected would
happen, but in hindsight, changed everything
as soon as it was revealed.
So this is what great negotiation is about,
discovering the black swan, discovering
the piece of information that nobody expected that would
change all the outcomes.
It's central to everything that we do.
And that's why I named my company The Black Swan Group.
If you're negotiating for a salary,
you might not know the behind the scenes of the company,
that the person that you're going to work for
is going to leave in a year, or they're
going to retire in a year.
You don't know what opportunities
are coming in conjunction with that job
that the company's already forecasted and budgeted out.
You don't know who's planning on moving on.
You don't know all the things that
are going on behind the scenes.
All you know is they've offered you
this job within these parameters.
But they already know, have a very good idea of the dynamics
that they hope to change in the company over the next year.
Finding out those dynamics behind the scenes
could either make it a wonderful place for you
to work or a horrible place, and it
has nothing to do with the job description at the moment.
The things that they know that you don't know
are the black swans.
Also, what they don't know about you is,
you may really be committed to that company when they're just
looking for someone that wants to be there for a year or two.
They have strategic needs that they haven't imagined
that they can share with you because they don't understand
that you're the person that can fill
those specific strategic needs.
They have no idea what you really want out of life.
What you really want out of life may be exactly what
they need in that company.
Since they haven't met you, they don't know that yet.
This is an example of a black swan
that you bring to the negotiation
that they have no way of knowing in advance.
So the idea is to start the communication,
and for me to start getting the information flowing from you so
that I can find out what those black swans are and I
can change the outcome.
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Since I don't know what you're hiding
and you don't know what I'm hiding,
there's stuff in that overlap that we really
don't know is there at all.
You know, a long time ago, Donald Rumsfeld
talked about the unknown unknowns.
The real black swans are where the unknowns overlap,
and there's some crazy stuff in there.
You can't tell yourself, ah, I understand the situation.
I understand all about it.
You can't tell yourself that.
That's to close your mind in advance.
And there isn't anybody anywhere that says
a closed mind is an advantage.
So open your mind and be curious.
Be interested.
Wonder about it.
Don't be afraid of being surprised.
Actually hope to provoke surprises.
You should take the attitude that if I'm not surprised,
I'm not doing my job because it's not
possible to know everything.
And as soon as you start opening yourself up
to the possibilities, you start to open yourself
up to better outcomes and better relationships,
and long-term relationships where the other side is
actually surprised at how good the deal was
and how happy they were with it, and how
engaged they felt in the process,
and consequently, how much they look forward
to dealing with you again.
All these things begin to combine
to make you a more successful negotiator.
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The Dwight the Tractor Man case is a great example
of how the discovery of a black swan
leads to a breakthrough in the case.
Washington, DC, St. Patrick's Day, just before
the beginning of the second Iraq war.
DC's kind of a touchy place at the time.
You know, we're probably about a year-ish off of the DC sniper,
the two people that were shooting and murdering
people over the DC metro area.
So there's no shortage of reasons for people
to be jumpy all over the place.
You know, a poor tobacco farmer drives a tractor
onto the National Mall, you know,
the park that's referred to as a mall that
runs from basically the capital to the Lincoln Memorial
in the middle of Washington, DC.
Drives it into the middle of a big pond that a lot of people
don't even know it's there because it's
off to the side of the reflecting pool,
and claims he's got four bombs and he's
scattered four bombs around the DC metro area.
It's a great way to get people's attention when everybody's
so jittery about terrorism and war
and snipers and everything else.
And we engage with Dwight Watson, who we find out
after the fact, his family's tobacco farm
has been destroyed by the tobacco
settlement and the restrictions on tobacco being farmed
and how they're being sold.
And it has just utterly destroyed
his family's business.
He's protested on the National Mall
several years in a row with a legal permit and nobody cared.
You know, nobody cares.
So he finally decides, I gotta get somebody to attention.
The best way to do it is to show up there and claim
I got some bombs.
The more we talk to Dwight, the more
we find out about what he's after,
and really what he resonates with.
And he talked openly a lot about his family farm.
He talked openly a lot about his time in the military.
But there was, you know, any sense of duty.
But there was much deeper spirituality to him.
I mean, his religion was really important to him.
But we only heard that in bits and pieces.
We begin to talk to him, and we realize that he
wants to get the word out.
He wants to have made his point, and he doesn't really
know how to get out of this.
Probably about 36 hours in, he starts
talking to us about well, when I was with the 82nd Airborne,
if we parachuted behind enemy lines,
we'd have to stay behind enemy lines for at least 72 hours,
and then we could withdraw with dignity.
He kind of throws an idea out at us
that he could stay there for 72 hours
and then he could withdraw.
The only problem with this is he's shown
to be a fairly volatile person.
He still claims to have four bombs.
We don't know that he doesn't.
We don't know that in a fit of rage,
he might not set them off.
We get to the point about 36 hours
in where the decision has been made
that if he makes a move to the Jeep that's
on the back of the trailer that's in the pond with him,
that's got to be where the bombs are.
If he goes to the Jeep, there's an authorization
to take him out with what's called an open air assault,
which is a sniper shot.
In law enforcement terms, an open air assault
is a sniper shooting somebody between the eyes.
Nobody wants to do this.
Even if we're authorized to do this,
nobody wants to do this, especially
with some poor guy whose family farm got crushed.
So how do we get him out of there
without him making a stupid move that
causes his own death because he didn't know any better?
That's the dilemma we're faced at about 36 to 48 hours in.
We got to get him out of there before he gets himself killed.
We began that negotiation knowing that, you know,
let's find out what's driving somebody first.
Let's worry less about what they want and worry
more about what's making them want it, you know?
I'm intentionally avoiding the word
why here because we're very careful about the word why.
So what's driving this guy?
The last crucial discovery we made about the why was that one
of our negotiators who was listening in-- because we have
a team that listens in--
one of our negotiators heard him say something,
realized that his religion was really
the dominating factor in his thinking.
The 82nd Airborne was OK.
That mattered some, but his religion
resonated with him a lot more.
And about 48 hours in, we said to him, Dwight,
you're gonna come out tomorrow morning, right?
And he said, no.
No, I'm not.
Day after tomorrow.
He wanted his 72 hours.
One of our negotiators had heard his religion,
and she had suggested that we say to him that tomorrow
is the dawn of the third day, which
is a reference to Christianity and Jesus.
It gives them the opportunity to change the 72 hours to three
days, to actually 48 hours, for him to be Christlike,
to appeal to something that's a much larger issue to him.
So the negotiator gets coached up, and she says, but Dwight,
tomorrow's the dawn of the third day.
There's a long silence on the other end of the line.
And he says, I'll come out tomorrow.
And we had him out that following morning.
So in this case, the black swan was Dwight's religion,
something we had no idea about going into the case.
We're never going to tease that out
unless we engage in conversation with him
and we pick it up in bits and pieces along the way.
And then at the one crucial moment
when we need him to change his mind,
we need for him to violate the other rules
and come out sooner, come out a full day sooner
and characterize it in a way that he can accept,
that was the black swan in the Dwight Watson case.