The door opened and another Harvard professor walked in. It was Gabriella Blum, a specialist in international negotiations, armed conflict, and counterterrorism, who’d spent eight years as a negotiator for the Israeli National Security Council and the Israel Defense Forces. The tough- as-nails IDF.
On cue, Mnookin’s secretary arrived and put a tape recorder on the table. Mnookin and Blum smiled at me.
I’d been tricked.
“We’ve got your son, Voss. Give us one million dollars or he dies,” Mnookin said, smiling. “I’m the kidnapper. What are you going to do?”
I experienced a flash of panic, but that was to be expected.
“C’mon. Get me the money or I cut your son’s throat right now,” Mnookin said. Testy.
I gave him a long, slow stare.
Then I smiled.
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Mnookin paused. His expression had a touch of amused
pity in it, like a dog when the cat it’s been chasing turns around and tries to chase it back. It was as if we were playing different games, with different rules.
Mnookin:
“So you’re okay with me killing your son, Mr. Voss?”
“I’m sorry, Robert, how do I know he’s even alive?” I said, using an apology and his first name, seeding more warmth into the interaction in order to complicate his gambit to bulldoze me. “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?”
It was quite a sight to see such a brilliant man flustered
by what must have seemed unsophisticated foolishness. On the contrary, though, my move was anything but foolish. I was employing what had become one of the FBI’s most potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.
Tbc...
On cue, Mnookin’s secretary arrived and put a tape recorder on the table. Mnookin and Blum smiled at me.
I’d been tricked.
“We’ve got your son, Voss. Give us one million dollars or he dies,” Mnookin said, smiling. “I’m the kidnapper. What are you going to do?”
I experienced a flash of panic, but that was to be expected.
“C’mon. Get me the money or I cut your son’s throat right now,” Mnookin said. Testy.
I gave him a long, slow stare.
Then I smiled.
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Mnookin paused. His expression had a touch of amused
pity in it, like a dog when the cat it’s been chasing turns around and tries to chase it back. It was as if we were playing different games, with different rules.
Mnookin:
“So you’re okay with me killing your son, Mr. Voss?”
“I’m sorry, Robert, how do I know he’s even alive?” I said, using an apology and his first name, seeding more warmth into the interaction in order to complicate his gambit to bulldoze me. “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?”
It was quite a sight to see such a brilliant man flustered
by what must have seemed unsophisticated foolishness. On the contrary, though, my move was anything but foolish. I was employing what had become one of the FBI’s most potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.
Tbc...
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The core assumption was that the emotional brain—that animalistic, unreliable, and irrational beast—could be overcome through a more rational, joint problem-solving mindset.
Their system was easy to follow and seductive, with four basic tenets.
One, separate the person—the emotion—from the problem;
two, don’t get wrapped up in the other side’s position (what they’re asking for) but instead focus on their interests (why they’re asking for it) so that you can find what they really want;
three, work cooperatively to generate win- win options; and, four, establish mutually agreed-upon standards for evaluating those possible solutions.
It was a brilliant, rational, and profound synthesis of the most advanced game theory and legal thinking of the day. For years after that book came out, everybody—including the FBI and the NYPD—focused on a problem-solving approach to bargaining interactions. It just seemed so modern and smart
Their system was easy to follow and seductive, with four basic tenets.
One, separate the person—the emotion—from the problem;
two, don’t get wrapped up in the other side’s position (what they’re asking for) but instead focus on their interests (why they’re asking for it) so that you can find what they really want;
three, work cooperatively to generate win- win options; and, four, establish mutually agreed-upon standards for evaluating those possible solutions.
It was a brilliant, rational, and profound synthesis of the most advanced game theory and legal thinking of the day. For years after that book came out, everybody—including the FBI and the NYPD—focused on a problem-solving approach to bargaining interactions. It just seemed so modern and smart
But think about that: How can you separate people from the problem when their emotionsare the problem?
Especially when they are scared people with guns.
Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window.
That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them.
They are able to precisely label emotions, those of others and especially their own. And once they label the emotions they talk about them without getting wound up.
For them, emotion is a tool.
Emotions aren’t the obstacles, they are the means.
The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic. It duplicates that of a psychotherapist with a patient.
The psychotherapist pokes and prods to understand his patient’s problems, and then turns the responses back onto the patient to get him to go deeper and change his behavior.
That’s exactly what good negotiators do.
Getting to this level of emotional intelligence demands opening up your senses, talking less, and listening more.
You can learn almost everything you need—and a lot more than other people would like you to know—simply by watching and listening, keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your mouth shut.
Especially when they are scared people with guns.
Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window.
That’s why, instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them.
They are able to precisely label emotions, those of others and especially their own. And once they label the emotions they talk about them without getting wound up.
For them, emotion is a tool.
Emotions aren’t the obstacles, they are the means.
The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic. It duplicates that of a psychotherapist with a patient.
The psychotherapist pokes and prods to understand his patient’s problems, and then turns the responses back onto the patient to get him to go deeper and change his behavior.
That’s exactly what good negotiators do.
Getting to this level of emotional intelligence demands opening up your senses, talking less, and listening more.
You can learn almost everything you need—and a lot more than other people would like you to know—simply by watching and listening, keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open, and your mouth shut.
OLD-SCHOOL NEGOTIATION
Hostage taking—and therefore hostage negotiating—has existed since the dawn of recorded time.
The Old Testament spins plenty of tales of Israelites and their enemies taking each other’s citizens hostage as spoils of war.
The Romans, for their part, used to force the princes of vassal states to send their sons to Rome for their education, to ensure the continued loyalty of the princes.
But until the Nixon administration, hostage negotiating as a process was limited to sending in troops and trying to shoot the hostages free.
In law enforcement, our approach was pretty much to talk until we figured out how to take them out with a gun. Brute force.
Then a series of hostage disasters forced us to change.
In 1971, thirty-nine hostages were killed when the police tried to resolve the Attica prison riots in upstate New York with guns. Then at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by their Palestinian captors after a botched rescue attempt by the German police.
But the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971.
The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three- day period in 1970.
It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas.
By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot.
But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI.
Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel.
But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option.
In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed.
In the landmark Downs v.
United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well- being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.”
The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.”
The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations.
Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed.
A new era of negotiation had begun.
Hostage taking—and therefore hostage negotiating—has existed since the dawn of recorded time.
The Old Testament spins plenty of tales of Israelites and their enemies taking each other’s citizens hostage as spoils of war.
The Romans, for their part, used to force the princes of vassal states to send their sons to Rome for their education, to ensure the continued loyalty of the princes.
But until the Nixon administration, hostage negotiating as a process was limited to sending in troops and trying to shoot the hostages free.
In law enforcement, our approach was pretty much to talk until we figured out how to take them out with a gun. Brute force.
Then a series of hostage disasters forced us to change.
In 1971, thirty-nine hostages were killed when the police tried to resolve the Attica prison riots in upstate New York with guns. Then at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by their Palestinian captors after a botched rescue attempt by the German police.
But the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971.
The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three- day period in 1970.
It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas.
By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot.
But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI.
Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel.
But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option.
In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed.
In the landmark Downs v.
United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well- being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.”
The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.”
The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations.
Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed.
A new era of negotiation had begun.
CHAPTER 6
BEND THEIR REALITY
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
One Monday morning in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, a
call came in to the FBI office from the nephew of a prominent Haitian political figure. He spoke so fast he had to repeat his story three times before I understood. But finally I got the basics: kidnappers had snatched his aunt from her car, and their ransom demand was $150,000.
“Give us the money,” the kidnappers told him, “or your aunt is going to die.”
In the lawless, chaotic wake of the 2004 rebellion that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti surpassed Colombia as the kidnap capital of the Americas. In fact, with between eight and ten people abducted every day in the Caribbean nation of eight million, Haiti earned the dubious honor of having the highest kidnapping rate in the world.
During this onslaught of abductions and death threats, I was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. And I had never seen anything like it. Reports of abductions— increasingly bold, daylight attacks right in Port-au-Prince— seemed to roll into the office hourly: fourteen students abducted on their school bus; American missionary Phillip Snyder shot in an ambush and seized along with a Haitian boy he was taking to Michigan for eye surgery; prominent Haitian politicians and businessmen bundled from their homes in broad daylight. No one was spared.
Most of the abductions went down the same way: ski- mask-clad kidnappers surrounded a house or a car, forced entry with a gun, and snatched a vulnerable victim—usually a woman, child, or elderly person.
Early on, there was the possibility that the kidnappings were driven by politically aligned gangs seeking to destabilize Haiti’s new government. This proved to be wrong. Haitian criminals are famous for employing brutal means for political ends, but when it came to kidnappings, it was almost always all business.
Later on, I’ll get to how we pieced together the clues to discover who the perpetrators were and what they really wanted—invaluable information when it came to negotiating with and destabilizing these gangs. But first I want to discuss the crystallizing feature of high-stakes, life-and- death negotiating: that is, how little of it is on the surface. When that Monday ransom call came in to the politician’s nephew, the guy was so petrified he could only think of doing one thing: paying the thugs. His reaction makes sense: when you get a call from brutal criminals who say they’ll kill your aunt unless you pay them immediately, it seems impossible to find leverage in the situation.
So you pay the ransom and they release your relative, right?
Wrong. There’s always leverage. Negotiation is never a linear formula: add X to Y to get Z. We all have irrational blind spots, hidden needs, and undeveloped notions.
Once you understand that subterranean world of unspoken needs and thoughts, you’ll discover a universe of variables that can be leveraged to change your counterpart’s needs and expectations. From using some people’s fear of deadlines and the mysterious power of odd numbers, to our misunderstood relationship to fairness, there are always ways to bend our counterpart’s reality so it conforms to whatwe ultimately want to give them, not to what they initially think they deserve.
BEND THEIR REALITY
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
One Monday morning in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, a
call came in to the FBI office from the nephew of a prominent Haitian political figure. He spoke so fast he had to repeat his story three times before I understood. But finally I got the basics: kidnappers had snatched his aunt from her car, and their ransom demand was $150,000.
“Give us the money,” the kidnappers told him, “or your aunt is going to die.”
In the lawless, chaotic wake of the 2004 rebellion that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti surpassed Colombia as the kidnap capital of the Americas. In fact, with between eight and ten people abducted every day in the Caribbean nation of eight million, Haiti earned the dubious honor of having the highest kidnapping rate in the world.
During this onslaught of abductions and death threats, I was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. And I had never seen anything like it. Reports of abductions— increasingly bold, daylight attacks right in Port-au-Prince— seemed to roll into the office hourly: fourteen students abducted on their school bus; American missionary Phillip Snyder shot in an ambush and seized along with a Haitian boy he was taking to Michigan for eye surgery; prominent Haitian politicians and businessmen bundled from their homes in broad daylight. No one was spared.
Most of the abductions went down the same way: ski- mask-clad kidnappers surrounded a house or a car, forced entry with a gun, and snatched a vulnerable victim—usually a woman, child, or elderly person.
Early on, there was the possibility that the kidnappings were driven by politically aligned gangs seeking to destabilize Haiti’s new government. This proved to be wrong. Haitian criminals are famous for employing brutal means for political ends, but when it came to kidnappings, it was almost always all business.
Later on, I’ll get to how we pieced together the clues to discover who the perpetrators were and what they really wanted—invaluable information when it came to negotiating with and destabilizing these gangs. But first I want to discuss the crystallizing feature of high-stakes, life-and- death negotiating: that is, how little of it is on the surface. When that Monday ransom call came in to the politician’s nephew, the guy was so petrified he could only think of doing one thing: paying the thugs. His reaction makes sense: when you get a call from brutal criminals who say they’ll kill your aunt unless you pay them immediately, it seems impossible to find leverage in the situation.
So you pay the ransom and they release your relative, right?
Wrong. There’s always leverage. Negotiation is never a linear formula: add X to Y to get Z. We all have irrational blind spots, hidden needs, and undeveloped notions.
Once you understand that subterranean world of unspoken needs and thoughts, you’ll discover a universe of variables that can be leveraged to change your counterpart’s needs and expectations. From using some people’s fear of deadlines and the mysterious power of odd numbers, to our misunderstood relationship to fairness, there are always ways to bend our counterpart’s reality so it conforms to whatwe ultimately want to give them, not to what they initially think they deserve.
From EX-FBI Agent Chris Voss:
■ Break the habit of attempting to get people to say “yes.” Being pushed for “yes” makes people defensive. Our love of hearing “yes” makes us blind to the defensiveness we ourselves feel when someone is pushing us to say it.
■ “No” is not a failure. We have learned that “No” is the anti-“Yes” and therefore a word to be avoided at all costs. But it really often just means “Wait” or “I’m not comfortable with that.” Learn how to hear it calmly. It is not the end of the negotiation, but the beginning.
■ “Yes” is the final goal of a negotiation, but don’t aim for it at the start. Asking someone for “Yes” too quickly in a conversation—“Do you like to drink water, Mr. Smith?”—gets his guard up and paints you as an untrustworthy salesman.
■ Saying “No” makes the speaker feel safe, secure, and in control, so trigger it. By saying what they don’t want, your counterpart defines their space and gains the confidence and comfort to listen to you. That’s why “Is now a bad time to talk?” is always better than “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
■ Sometimes the only way to get your counterpart to listen and engage with you is by forcing them into a “No.” That means intentionally mislabeling one of their emotions or desires or asking a ridiculous question—like, “It seems like you want this project to fail”—that can only be answered negatively.
■ Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.
■ If a potential business partner is ignoring you, contact them with a clear and concise “No”- oriented question that suggests that you are ready to walk away. “Have you given up on this project?” works wonders.
■ Break the habit of attempting to get people to say “yes.” Being pushed for “yes” makes people defensive. Our love of hearing “yes” makes us blind to the defensiveness we ourselves feel when someone is pushing us to say it.
■ “No” is not a failure. We have learned that “No” is the anti-“Yes” and therefore a word to be avoided at all costs. But it really often just means “Wait” or “I’m not comfortable with that.” Learn how to hear it calmly. It is not the end of the negotiation, but the beginning.
■ “Yes” is the final goal of a negotiation, but don’t aim for it at the start. Asking someone for “Yes” too quickly in a conversation—“Do you like to drink water, Mr. Smith?”—gets his guard up and paints you as an untrustworthy salesman.
■ Saying “No” makes the speaker feel safe, secure, and in control, so trigger it. By saying what they don’t want, your counterpart defines their space and gains the confidence and comfort to listen to you. That’s why “Is now a bad time to talk?” is always better than “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
■ Sometimes the only way to get your counterpart to listen and engage with you is by forcing them into a “No.” That means intentionally mislabeling one of their emotions or desires or asking a ridiculous question—like, “It seems like you want this project to fail”—that can only be answered negatively.
■ Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It’s about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don’t beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open paths to your goals. It’s not about you.
■ If a potential business partner is ignoring you, contact them with a clear and concise “No”- oriented question that suggests that you are ready to walk away. “Have you given up on this project?” works wonders.