How to Negotiate in Bad Faith
Working in parallel, moving the goal posts and avoiding the point
Negotiation is difficult. Practicing it requires skill, patience and experience and like many things in life, it can be done well, or it can be hindered by practitioners who might say they want compromise and not mean it. How do you tell which is which? When is a negotiation on the level and when is it negotiating in bad faith? What are the warning signals that one or both sides might be wasting the other’s time? Here are a few thoughts.
Working in parallel
One reason that negotiations don’t seem to get anywhere is that the parties are discussing two different but related issues. We can see this now with the US Senate and the Covid relief plan proposed by the president. It might not seem like it, but the sides are so far apart that there is no place in the middle. One side wants to buy a bunch of products and services to address the pandemic and related problems while the other wants to talk about price.
The problem is that until you know the size of the purchase, you can’t know how much it costs and only then can you haggle. Given that one side makes a proposal and the other needs to make a counter proposal the negotiations will go slowly if at all because the counter proposal doesn’t meet the…
