Who do you think has more control in a negotiation,
the person doing the talking or the person doing the listening?
And how important is control, anyway, versus the upper hand
and creating the outcome that's best for you?
In this chapter, we'll talk about the secret
to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation
is to give the other side the illusion of control.
How do you do that, and how is it
best for you in creating the best possible outcome?
Calibrated question is what we used
to refer to as an open ended question,
and it's calibrated for a fact.
And we calibrate it to make the other side feel in charge.
The secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation
is giving the other side the illusion of control.
And we're going to calibrate our questions mostly
with the words what and how because people
love to be asked what to do.
People love to be asked how to do something.
Why, as a question, triggers defensiveness universally.
Why makes you feel accused.
There's been some speculation that the reason why
triggers a universal defensive reaction
is that every human being when they were two years old--
no matter how many people were around them,
no matter where they grew up on the planet,
no matter what culture they were in, when they were two,
they knocked something off a table, and they broke it.
And the nearest adult pointed at them
and said, why did you do that?
And we had it drilled into our minds
from about age two on that, when somebody
said why to us, they were accusing us
of doing something wrong.
This is an interesting aspect, because in business today,
we're constantly told to find out their why.
Get their why.
And so when we ask them why do they want something,
it interferes with our relationship.
It interferes with rapport, creates defensiveness.
So how do we drive at some of the same information?
We change our whys to whats.
Instead of why do you need delivery
in three weeks on the product--
they're going to be worried about what's
wrong with the fact that I need delivery.
Change your why to a what, and you say,
what makes it necessary to get it delivered in three weeks?
It takes the sting of accusation off of it.
It takes the defensiveness out of it,
and it gets us back to a nice calibrated what question.
People like to be asked what so they can answer what.
They feel in charge.
They feel in control.
We've got to say it with deference,
but, again, we're giving the other side
the illusion of control, and it's principally through the
how and what questions.
Forced empathy is when you force the other side
to have empathy with you, and the idea behind empathy-- we're
trying to trigger reciprocity.
We're looking to demonstrate empathy
because it's good for us, but we want empathy in return.
And reciprocity may not always kick in.
So we may have to say something at some point in time that
forces the other side to take a hard look at our situation
before they move forward.
And our classic phrase to force empathy into a situation
is simply to say to somebody, how am I supposed to do that?
We're coaching a woman once who'd
done a tremendous amount of business for a company.
They kept promising her follow-on business
as a result of it, and she was very afraid of being
denied the follow-on business.
So they owed her a lot of money, and they weren't paying,
and they kept sending her work.
I told her to say, how am I supposed to do that?
Next time they send you an order for more work.
And she said, oh my god, I can't say that.
I can't say that.
They'll tell me I have to do it, and then
I'll really be in trouble.
And I said, don't worry about that.
The point is it's going to have an impact on them.
I actually needed to do an intervention with her
to sort of talk her down off the ledge
over even asking the question.
So when they finally called her and asked her for more work,
she said, how am I supposed to do that?
And a person on the other side of the table
said, you're right.
You can't.
I know we haven't been paying you.
We've actually had some real internal problems,
and the person that's responsible for paying you
has changed.
I will get in touch with that person.
They'll reach out to you, and we'll
settle up the bill before we move forward on anything else.
Now, part of the problem on the other side
was they were embarrassed that they were unorganized,
and they changed around, and they
were a mess on the other side.
And they were dealing with their own problems at the same time,
so they were kind of ignoring how much difficulty that they
were putting this woman in.
Well, forced empathy-- you make the other side
take into account what you're really going through,
and you also make them think about, how
is this going to move forward?
And it's not going to move forward well
if you keep cheating the other side.
The question, how am I supposed to do that,
is designed to shape the other side's thinking,
shape it around empathy, shape it around thinking about us,
trigger slow in-depth thinking.
And in many cases, you probably want
to combine your how and what questions to basically ask up
to three questions.
They're just worded differently.
And it might be, how am I supposed to do that?
What's going to happen if I do that?
How do I overcome the challenges that I have here?
Those are all basically asking exactly the same question
in a different fashion.
If you ask that question three different ways, then a person
you're talking to will think about it from three
different angles, and they'll give it more thought,
and they'll give you a better answer.
And they will appreciate the fact
that you helped them think it through.
Reciprocity is a natural human dynamic
that exists in us because we're humans,
and some people are very guarded about it.
So we have to be careful about how we trigger it.
If we ask, we tend to owe.
People are often worried about asking us
because they don't want to owe.
So it's a common dynamic that people are more or less
sensitive to at all times.
You don't want to trigger reciprocity inadvertently.
If I say to you, what's your name?
That's an ask.
I've begun to trigger.
If I ask, I should be willing to give an exchange,
and if I'm not willing to give an exchange,
or if I'm not ready to give an exchange at this point in time,
I don't want to trigger the reciprocity dynamic.
Proof of life was one of those issues.
How do we know that there's a deal to be had here?
How do I know you have the hostage?
We struggled with that for a really long time
when I worked kidnappings where we didn't ask proof of life,
because we knew the hostage was alive,
and we didn't want to trigger reciprocity.
And there was an instance where I was
in the middle of a kidnapping.
It ended badly.
Hostages were killed by friendly fire
after the fact in a botched rescue attempt.
I was bothered for a long time by what had happened
that I didn't understand.
A couple of months afterwards, I'm
listening to a kidnapping of a drug dealer's
girlfriend in Pittsburgh.
And who do you go to when somebody in your family
has been kidnapped, even if you're a drug dealer?
You go to the FBI.
Drug deal went to the local FBI.
I'm listening to the tapes of the drug dealer
riding around in his car with the FBI hostage negotiator,
and he's just negotiating on his own.
And so he didn't know that his girlfriend was alive,
and spontaneously, in the middle of the negotiation, on his own,
he said to the other drug dealer, hey dog,
how do I know she's all right?
And it was this long silence on the other end of the line,
and then the kidnapper said, I'll put her on the phone.
He said that was a tone of voice that indicated the power
dynamic had completely shifted.
He went from feeling like he was in charge
to spontaneously collaborating.
His tone of voice changed, and I knew that now the victim--
boyfriend had the upper hand just from a simple
how question.
And he got the kidnapper to volunteer to put
the hostage on the phone.
That's got to be it.
That was just a legitimate how question.
Left the other side feeling completely in charge,
but changed the power dynamic completely in the given moment.
And the person who lost the upper hand in the negotiation
had no idea they'd lost the upper hand.
You put the creator of the problem--
you put the burden of solving that problem on them.
And since they don't feel burdened by it,
they feel in control.
It was their idea.
They're going to spontaneously do what you want,
and you never actually asked for it.
You're not looking for proof of life,
but you're really looking for proof of legitimacy, proof
that you're in a good faith as opposed
to a bad faith negotiation.
And what are the natural questions?
How are we going to move forward if we make this deal?
How do I know that you're not just
looking for free consulting?
How have you worked with people like me in the past?
How have you made this deal in the past?
There are a lot of legitimate questions
that, if you were sitting around with your colleagues
in a bar at night discussing the deal of the day,
one of your colleagues might say, look,
how do you know these guys aren't playing you for a fool?
How do you know this is a legitimate negotiation?
How do you know they have the budget?
You can ask them at the table because they're
legitimate questions.
That's why we never had a problem with any terrorist,
any sociopath, any kidnapper anywhere in the world when
we said, how do we know our hostage is alive?
They had to admit to themselves it's a legitimate question,
and they would at least think about it.
It would at least stop and shape their thinking.
So we use this today in our business negotiations
to ask, how do we know that the people that
are going to be affected by the deal on your side
are good with this?
How do we make sure that people that
have to live with this deal like the way it's constructed?
We start to get the deal breakers
on the other side involved so that they're
no longer deal breakers.
They're deal collaborators.