Beyond Reason
Page 1
Praise for Beyond Reason
Winner of the Outstanding Book Award for Excellence in Conflict Resolution from the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution
“Masters of diplomacy, Fisher and Shapiro, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, build on Fisher’s bestseller (he coauthored Getting to YES) with this instructive, clearly written book that addresses the emotions and relationships inevitably involved in negotiation.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This is one of those unusual works that is so carefully constructed and written that you may find yourself praising its common sense and nodding easily in concurrence. . . . It is a book to reflect upon and that belongs on every negotiator’s reference shelf.”
—The Negotiator Magazine
“An extraordinarily clear account of the complex effects of human emotions in social exchange that should raise the level of civility and effectiveness in all our interactions, whether we are negotiating or dining with a friend.”
—Jerome Kagan, Harvard University
“An indispensable ‘real world’ guide for anyone. Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro have brilliantly detailed a methodical system for moving emotions in a constructive direction. The NYPD Hostage Negotiation Team faces some of the most high-stakes decisions every day. We regularly apply the skills of Beyond Reason to create the straightforward dialogue that resolves the vast majority of our hostage negotiations.”
—Lt. Jack J. Cambria, commanding officer, NYPD Hostage Negotiation Team
“In this valuable, clearly written book, the authors say good negotiations—in business as well as in personal or family situations—hinge on respect for others, but also respect for your own feelings.”
—USA Today
“As the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, I have to apply law to the world’s most serious crimes. A real challenge is how to deal with people’s emotions and to maximize the constructive impact of our work. Beyond Reason provides essential tools to understand how to develop solutions to even the most serious problem.”
—Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor, International Criminal Court
“The perfect follow-up to Getting to YES . . . The book is both profound and easy-to-read, based on a wide range of research and firsthand experience in negotiation. There is no interaction setting—public, professional or personal, local or international—where its recommendations will not be applicable.”
—Elise Boulding, Dartmouth College
“Beyond Reason is exactly what we need now: a lucid, systematic approach to dealing with emotions, infused with a practical wisdom that will help you understand, enrich, and improve all your negotiations—and all your relations with fellow human beings.”
—Leonard L. Riskin, director, Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, University of Missouri-Columbia
“The resurgence of interest in emotions has broadened the impact of research on brain and behavior. Beyond Reason takes this to a new level, showing how emotions can positively and negatively affect the way managers and other negotiators approach their goals.”
—Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain and Synaptic Self
“Beyond Reason truly takes Getting to YES to the next level, integrating emotional sophistication into the canonical approach. . . . Where the first book taught us to create value in the face of the emotional rollercoaster that is any negotiation, the new book [Beyond Reason] teaches us how to change the roller-coaster—if not into a Sunday drive, then at least into a more predictable commute.”
—Negotiation Journal
PENGUIN BOOKS
BEYOND REASON
Roger Fisher teaches negotiation at Harvard Law School, where he is Williston Professor of Law Emeritus and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. He has spent the past forty years studying, writing, and teaching about negotiation. He developed the concept of interest-based negotiation and has consulted on differences ranging from business disputes to international conflicts. He advised the Iranian and United States governments in their negotiations for the release of the American diplomats being held hostage in Tehran. He helped to design the process used by President Carter in the successful Camp David negotiations between President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel. In South Africa, he trained the white cabinet and the African National Congress Negotiating Committee prior to the constitutional talks that led to the end of apartheid. He advised three of the five Central American countries on a regional peace plan in advance of the Esquipulas II Treaty, and he worked with the president of Ecuador on a negotiation process that helped to end a longstanding border dispute between Ecuador and Peru. He continues his active interest in working on issues of this kind.
Daniel Shapiro, Ph.D., associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, is on the faculty at Harvard Law School and in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital. He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and specializes in the psychology of negotiation. He directs the International Negotiation Initiative, a Harvard-based project that develops psychologically focused strategies to reduce ethnopolitical violence. He has been on the faculty at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and teaches negotiation to corporate executives and diplomats. He has extensive international experience, including training Serbian members of parliament, Mideast negotiators, Macedonian politicians, and senior U.S. officials. During the Bosnian war, he conducted conflict management training in Croatia and Serbia. Through funding from the Soros Foundation, he developed a conflict management program that now reaches nearly one million people across twenty-five countries.
• Visit our Web site at www.beyond-reason.net for news and reviews; a free chart to help you prepare for your negotiations; practical ways to learn more; and resources to help you teach Beyond Reason’s ideas to students, clients, or others.
• To contact the authors with questions, comments, and inquiries about lectures or consultation, please e-mail us at rogeranddan@beyond-reason.net.
• To learn more about the Harvard Negotiation Project, visit www.pon.Harvard.edu/hnp.
Beyond
Reason
Using Emotions
as You Negotiate
Roger Fisher
and
Daniel Shapiro
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright © Roger Fisher and Daniel L. Shapiro, 2005
&nbs
p; All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Fisher, Roger.
Beyond reason : using emotions as you negotiate / Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-21887-7
1. Negotiation. 2. Emotions. I. Shapiro, Daniel. II. Title.
BF637.N4F55 2005
302.3—dc22 2005042274
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Version_3
To Carrie and Mia
WITH MUCH LOVE
(and other positive emotions)
Contents
Introduction
I. THE BIG PICTURE
1. Emotions Are Powerful, Always Present, and Hard to Handle
2. Address the Concern, Not the Emotion
II. TAKE THE INITIATIVE
3. Express Appreciation
Find Merit in What Others Think, Feel, or Do—and Show It
4. Build Affiliation
Turn an Adversary into a Colleague
5. Respect Autonomy
Expand Yours (and Don’t Impinge upon Theirs)
6. Acknowledge Status
Recognize High Standing Wherever Deserved
7. Choose a Fulfilling Role
and Select the Activities Within It
III. SOME ADDITIONAL ADVICE
8. On Strong Negative Emotions
They Happen. Be Ready.
9. On Being Prepared
Prepare on Process, Substance, and Emotion
10. On Using These Ideas in the “Real World”
A Personal Account by Jamil Mahuad, Former President of Ecuador
IV. CONCLUSION
V. END MATTER
Seven Elements of Negotiation
Glossary
Works Consulted
Acknowledgments
Analytical Table of Contents
Introduction
We cannot stop having emotions
any more than we can stop having thoughts.
The challenge is learning to stimulate helpful emotions
in those with whom we negotiate—and in ourselves.
You negotiate every day, whether about where to go for dinner, how much to pay for a secondhand bicycle, or when to terminate an employee. And you have emotions all the time. These may be positive emotions like joy or contentment, or negative emotions like anger, frustration, and guilt.
When you negotiate with others, how should you deal with these emotions—both theirs and yours? As hard as you might try to ignore emotions, they won’t go away. They can be distracting, painful, or the cause of a failed agreement. They can divert your attention from an important issue that ought to be resolved now. And yet as you negotiate formally or informally, you have too much to think about to study every emotion that you and others may be feeling and to decide what to do about it. It is hard to manage the very emotions that affect you.
Beyond Reason offers a way to deal with this problem. You will learn a strategy to generate positive emotions and to deal with negative ones. No longer will you be at the mercy of your own emotions or those of others. Your negotiations will be more comfortable and more effective. This strategy is powerful enough to use in your toughest negotiations—whether with a difficult colleague, a hard bargainer, or your spouse.
Because Beyond Reason is about emotions, we (Roger and Dan) have added a personal dimension to our writing. We have included a number of examples drawn from our personal lives as well as from our involvement for many years in the field of negotiation. We each have developed negotiation theory and have trained people from all walks of life, from Mideast negotiators to marital couples, business executives to university students.
This book is a product of our personal learning and research. It builds upon Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, which is coauthored by Roger and has become a foundation for the widely used process of interest-based negotiation. This process suggests that negotiators obtain the best results by understanding each other’s interests and working together to produce an agreement that will meet those interests as best they can. (See Seven Elements of Negotiation on page 207 for details.) Many have commented that though the advice in Getting to YES is powerful, it does not spend much time addressing the question of how to handle the emotions and relationship issues in our toughest negotiations. This is our attempt to dig into those questions.
This book would not have happened were it not for the late professor Jerome D. Frank, who introduced the two of us. His intuition suggested to him that there might be synergy between “a negotiator interested in psychology” and “a psychologist interested in negotiation.” He was right, and we are indebted.
We have worked together for the past five years on this book. It has taken far longer than either of us would have predicted, in part because we have so enjoyed spending time talking together and learning from each other. We now understand far more about emotions in negotiation than the sum total of our combined knowledge a few years back.
In this book, we share some of the excitement of these ideas with you, the reader.
I
The Big Picture
CHAPTER 1
Emotions Are Powerful,
Always Present, and
Hard to Handle
A prospective customer threatens to back out of an agreement just before the final document is signed. The dealer who sold you a brand new car says that engine problems are not covered under warranty. Your eleven-year-old announces there is simply no way she is going to wear a coat to school on this frigid February morning.
At moments like these, when your blood pressure is rising or anxiety is creeping in, rational advice about how to negotiate seems irrelevant. As constructive and reasonable as you might like to be, you may find yourself saying things like:
“Don’t do this to me. If you walk away from this agreement, I’m out of a job.”
“What kind of sleazy operation is this? Fix the engine or we’ll see you in court.”
“Young lady, you’re wearing a coat whether you like it or not. Put it on!”
Or perhaps you do not express your emotions in the moment, but let them eat away at you for the rest of the day. If your boss asks you to work all weekend to finish something she didn’t get to, do you say okay, but spend the weekend fuming while you consider quitting? Whether you speak up or not, your emotions may take over. You may act in ways that jeopardize reaching agreement, that damage a relationship, or that cost you a lot.
Negotiation involves both your head and your gut—both reason and emotion. In this book, we offer advice to deal with emotions. Negotiation is more than rational argument. Human beings are not computers. In addition to your substantive interests, you are a part of the negotiation. Your emotions are there, and they will be involved. So, too, will the emotions of others.
WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
Psychologists Fehr and Russell note that “everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition. Then, it seems, no one knows.” As we use the term, an emotion is a felt experience. You feel an emotion; you don’t just think it. When someone
says or does something that is personally significant to you, your emotions respond, usually along with associated thoughts, physiological changes, and a desire to do something. If a junior colleague tells you to take notes in a meeting, you might feel angry and think, “Who is he to tell me what to do?” Your physiology changes as your blood pressure rises, and you feel a desire to insult him.
Emotions can be positive or negative. A positive emotion feels personally uplifting. Whether pride, hope, or relief, a positive emotion feels good. In a negotiation, a positive emotion toward the other person is likely to build rapport, a relationship marked by goodwill, understanding, and a feeling of being “in sync.” In contrast, anger, frustration, and other negative emotions feel personally distressing, and they are less likely to build rapport.*
This book focuses on how you can use positive emotions to help reach a wise agreement. In this chapter, we describe major obstacles you might face as you deal with emotions—both yours and those of others. Subsequent chapters give you a practical framework to overcome these obstacles. The framework does not require you to reveal your deepest emotions or to manipulate others. Instead, it provides you with practical ideas to deal with emotions. You can begin to use the framework immediately.
EMOTIONS CAN BE OBSTACLES TO NEGOTIATION
None of us is spared the reality of emotions. They can ruin any possibility of a wise agreement. They can turn an amicable relationship into a long-lasting feud where everybody gets hurt. And they can sour hopes for a fair settlement. What makes emotions so troubling?
They can divert attention from substantive matters. If you or the other person gets upset, each of you will have to deal with the hassle of emotions. Should you storm out of the room? Apologize? Sit quietly and fume? Your attention shifts from reaching a satisfying agreement to protecting yourself or attacking the other.