Review of Chris Voss’ famous negotiation book: ‘Never Split the Difference. Negotiating as if your life depended on it’
Review of Chris Voss’ famous negotiation book: Never Split the Difference. Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
It’s hard to emphasize the level of importance Chris Voss’ book had on me. After two and a half years working as a Project Management consultant for the largest private real estate development project on the West Coast, I developed a strong gut feeling of what negotiation strategy might work for me in my situation, and what language might trigger push-back or backfire through constant on-going negotiation cycles. I had a set of automatic reactions which helped me survive through difficult situations. Unfortunately, the strategies I developed were largely dependent on failure analysis.
The reason why we should not only negotiate based on past experience, but also continue exploring different negotiation strategies are: 1) There is never enough data in a personal past experience pool to define a universal or semi-universal rule. Maybe the same strategy won’t work as effective in a different industry with a dissimilar group of players, or under a changed economic background. 2) It’s easy to track short term effects of one action based on life experience, but hard to relate long term results with strategies we choose. 3) The negotiation strategy we apply might be one good method, but might not be the best method. Maybe there are more efficient ways that can reach similar or better results.
Never Split the Difference is not a theory-heavy academic book. Instead, it’s a book full of action items that you can follow in day-to-day conflict resolution. There are other negotiation books on the market with distinctive system theory, for example Influence — The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Claldini and Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury. Each book has a specific emphasis and might contain conflicting views, but all deliver thoughtful insights and will surely bring depth of thought as part of your background knowledge pool. I plan to review those two books separately at a later time.
In this review session, I will focus on Chris Voss’ Never Split the Difference. As a former FBI hostage negotiator, Voss believes that negotiation is all about getting what you want from–and with–other people. Instead of problem solving skills, what we need are psychological skills and emotional intelligence to calm down, establish rapport, gain trust, display empathy, and thus gather information and influence behaviors of our counterparts while maintaining a great relationship.
The negotiating techniques introduced by Voss include: 1) Gather information through active listening skills like mirroring, silences, and voice changes. 2) Tactical Empathy through emotion labeling and accusation auditing. 3) Establish rapport by summarizing your counterpart’s worldview. 4) Trigger a “no” response to give your counterpart the illusion of control in order to start the negotiation process. 5) Anchor expectations to set limits for the discussion. 6) Use calibrated questions to get your counterparts to bid against themselves. 7) Use calibrated questions, summaries, and labels to get your counterpart to reaffirm their agreement at least three times to guarantee execution. 8) Recognize different negotiation styles and associated behavior patterns. 9) Display anger and assertion strategically. 10) Old school Ackerman bargain system. 11) Discover knowledge which is outside our regular expectations and therefore cannot be predicted.
Voss uses cases of real successes and failures to further support and demonstrate every strategy he introduces. As a reader, I feel excitement, anxiety, stress, anger, fear, confusion, and frustration, feelings that will most likely emerge during a real negotiation process. While going through each chapter, I learn how to treat emotions as solutions instead of obstacles during the negotiation process.
Voss’ stories astonish me with the mind-shaking theories behind them. On the other hand, hostage negotiation cases are very extreme examples in which winning is the only acceptable solution. While in day to day conflict resolution, it might not be the best option to negotiate with the same mind set. Though naïve, personally, I believe mutually beneficial relationships will be more beneficial for a group in a long term interaction than single-sided winner-take-all strategies in a business setting. I truly believe my counterparts’ equal success will promote a healthier long term business relationship and create greater benefit for all the parties involved. Voss provides solutions on “how to win it all,” but my question is “whether we should win it all or not.”
Special regards to the editor of this review: USC alumnus and long term friend, GIS specialist Michael Kasimoff
