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.