Beyond Reason

by Roger Fisher

  Where, on reflection, you should qualify your self-praise, do so. Be honest with yourself. It costs you nothing. In fact, you can take pride in your willingness to make a candid appraisal of yourself. This is true whether the result is enthusiastic endorsement of your thinking or honest recognition that, at this point, your ideas are best considered tentative and deserving of rigorous rethinking. The more honestly you appreciate the ideas of another negotiator—both their possible flaws and their merits—and with equal rigor examine your own ideas for their merits and possible weaknesses, the better equipped you and others will be to reach a workable agreement.

  It may well be that you have little or no interest in building a long-term relationship with the other negotiator. Of course, one consequence of expressing appreciation of another is that you might change your mind about that. In any event, a better understanding of both the other negotiator and yourself will make it easier for each of you to work together in a way that will result in an agreement.

  SUMMARY

  Appreciation is a core concern. Everyone has a desire to feel understood, valued, and heard. If people feel honestly appreciated, they are more likely to work together and less likely to act hostile.

  You can appreciate by:

  • understanding a person’s point of view;

  • finding merit in what the person thinks, feels, or does;

  • communicating your understanding through words or actions.

  You may not agree with the other person’s point of view. That is fine. But, you can understand it and acknowledge whatever merit you can find.

  The chapter on appreciation comes first in this book because we all become emotionally rewarded when we are appreciated just for who we are and what we do. It is also important for us that others appreciate the emotional concern we have for affiliation, autonomy, status, and role. In the following chapters, we share our advice on dealing with these remaining four core concerns.

  CHAPTER 4

  Build Affiliation

  Turn an Adversary into a Colleague

  When training a group of negotiators, we often start with the Arm Exercise. In a group with whom we were working one day, there were thirty participants, all with a background in international trade negotiations. We paired them up, one on one, and instructed them to sit down across from their partner, more or less facing each other, with their right elbows on the table. We told them to grab their partner’s right hand with their own right hand and not to let go. Each person would get one point every time the back of the other’s right hand touched the table. The goal of each was to get as many points for himself or herself as possible during the exercise. Participants were told that they were to be totally indifferent to how many points their partner got . . . and to keep their eyes closed.

  “Get ready . . . GO!”

  For two minutes, the pairs struggled as each member tried by physical strength to force the back of the other’s right hand down to the table. With a lot of effort and against the physical opposition of each partner, almost no one got more than a point or two.

  There was a single exception. One participant remembered, almost immediately, that his goal was to get as many points as he could for himself—and that he was wholly indifferent to how many points his partner got. Instead of pushing on his partner’s hand, he pulled it down to the table, gave his surprised partner a quick and easy point, took a quick point for himself, and then gave his partner another point. Without talking to each other, the two partners, with their elbows on the table, then swung their clasped hands harmoniously back and forth as rapidly as they could, collecting a large number of points for each of them.

  We stopped the exercise and had participants report to the group how many points each had obtained. No participant in the group had received more than three points, except for the pair who had cooperated, each of whom had obtained more than twenty.

  In our post-exercise review it became apparent that, despite our using the word partner and despite our clear instruction that they were to be indifferent to how many points their partner obtained, virtually all participants made the assumption that they and the one with whom they were doing the exercise were adversaries. That adversarial assumption dominated their thinking and prevented them from getting as many points as they could have.

  The assumption that the one with whom you are negotiating is an adversary dominates a great many negotiations. And that assumption typically prevents everyone from doing as well as they might.

  THE POWER OF AFFILIATION

  When negotiating, we are dealing with actual or possible differences with someone else. We want to deal with those differences in a way that leaves us feeling satisfied and that wastes as little time and as few resources as possible. This process is best accomplished when we work together. Using our combined brainpower and understanding, we are well situated to create a mutually satisfying outcome.

  A big part of working together involves affiliation. The word affiliation comes from the Latin verb, affiliate, meaning “to adopt or receive into a family.” As a core concern, affiliation describes our sense of connectedness with another person or group. It is the emotional space between us and them. If we feel affiliated with a person or group, we experience little emotional distance. We feel “close.”

  When we feel affiliated with one another, working together is easier. We view another not as a stranger, but rather as part of the “family.” As a result, each of us tends to care for the other, protect the other’s interests, and look out for their good. There is less resistance to fresh ideas and more openness to the prospect of changing our mind. Loyalty to one another often keeps us honest, obligates us to search for an agreement of mutual benefit, and makes it likely that we will honor an agreement.

  Affiliation involves an honest connection. It only happens when someone has a true concern for our well-being, not only for our money. Con artists and telemarketers may try to build affiliation to get our money. But the moment we sense that they do not care about us, we are likely to hang up the phone.

  TOO OFTEN, WE OVERLOOK OPPORTUNITIES TO BUILD AFFILIATION

  Despite the power of affiliation, we often neglect to build it. Sometimes, we fail to recognize structural connections we share with others—the roles that place us in a common group. We and our negotiating counterpart may both be coin collectors, which might bond us together; but if we never discover our common role, we obtain no emotional benefit. We may also disregard our own power to establish new roles that link us together as colleagues, fellow negotiators, or joint problem solvers.

  Whatever the structure of a relationship, we often fail to strengthen our personal connections—the emotional ties that bring us closer to a specific person. Brothers and sisters who live in different communities may drift apart and rarely communicate. Yet, strangers who happen to sit next to one another on a long airline flight may, within hours, be exchanging personal stories that they have not shared with good friends. In a negotiation, the power of a personal connection can bridge the gap between “our side” and theirs.

  Enhancing your affiliations is within your reach. In this chapter, we show you how. We begin by suggesting ways to improve your structural connection with others. Next, we offer ideas on how to build your personal connections. We close by advising you on how to protect yourself from having others use affiliation to exploit you.

  IMPROVING YOUR STRUCTURAL CONNECTION

  If you and another person share a structural connection, you both are members of a common group. You may be siblings, workers at the same organization, or fans of the same music. Belonging to the same group often confers an automatic degree of affiliation.

  There are practical ways to strengthen your structural connections with another negotiator. You can find links that already exist or build new links as colleagues.

  Find Links with Others

  As you find a structural connec
tion with another, your disagreement no longer becomes the sole tie that keeps you working together. Other connections help bind you together, motivate joint work, and act as a safety net in the event that discussion gets tense.

  Before you negotiate, investigate possible links between you and the other. You might discover structural connections by asking questions of colleagues who know the other, by requesting the other’s curriculum vitae, or by searching for information about the other on the internet.

  As you meet with the other person, you might initiate a sincere discussion about some of the links that connect you, such as:

  • your age (“On days like this, retirement looks tempting.”)

  • your rank (“Does your boss keep you working all weekend like ours?”)

  • your family (“Do you have kids? How do you balance work and home life?”)

  • your background (“What a coincidence that both your parents and mine were born in Berlin!”)

  • your religious conviction (“Do you have any good recipes for [Passover, Easter, etc.]?”)

  • a common interest such as hiking, music, or chess (“I really like skiing, too. It might be fun to get our families together to go skiing over the winter holiday.”)

  You may also be linked through your role as business partners, colleagues, fellow employees, classmates, friends, acquaintances, or fellow alumni of a university. A short discussion on your structural connections can bond you. (“You went to that university? I did, too. What dorm were you in?”)

  Build New Links as Colleagues

  After the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s, some Serbian Members of Parliament (MPs) came to view political parties other than their own as adversaries. This was particularly harmful, given that the governing coalition comprised seventeen parties who needed to negotiate to get any work done. Dan was brought in to train the Serbian MPs in interest-based negotiation. After observing negative emotions on all sides, he asked the Serbian MPs, “What is your best advice on how to negotiate?” In a single sentence, one MP summed up the dynamic that made things so difficult: “We should deceive the other side before they deceive us!”

  The very fact that two people—whatever their shared jobs and experiences may be—are now dealing with each other as negotiators puts each in a role that tends to focus their attention on something about which they disagree. It may be politics, it may be something else, but there is some difference between them. Each, almost automatically, tends to accept the idea that as negotiators they are adversaries. The structure of a negotiation is assumed to be adversarial. That assumption explains why many negotiations fail.

  Regardless of prior connections between you and another, there are ways you can build a connection as colleagues.

  From the outset, treat the other as a colleague. Do not let the assumed structure of a negotiation—or conventional wisdom about how negotiators are supposed to behave—deter you from being constructive. Some simple steps to build links include the following:

  • Arrange to meet in an informal social setting. Before important negotiations between the South African government and the African National Congress (ANC), Roelf Meyer, the government negotiator, arranged to “drop in” for lunch at a friend’s remote country house, knowing that Cyril Ramaphosa, his ANC counterpart, would be there for a fly-fishing weekend.

  • Introduce yourself informally, suggesting that they use your first name. “Hello. I’m Sam Johnson. Please call me Sam. May I call you by your first name?”*

  • Sit side by side, if that is reasonably possible. “Since we are going to be working together, let’s sit together here at this table.”

  • Refer to the importance of their interests. “As I see it, any solution we come up with will have to take care of interests important to you as well as interests important to us. I understand fairly clearly the interests on our side. But I doubt if I understand your interests as well as I should. If you would like to do so, I would welcome your taking a few minutes to lay out what you consider to be important interests on your side. I could then quickly review interests of ours that we think important. This might help us both be clear on the major interests that will have to be taken into account in any agreement we reach.”

  • Emphasize the shared nature of the task you both face. “We certainly face a real challenge in coming up with something both our bosses can be happy with! Let’s jot down your concerns and mine and go forward from there.”

  • Avoid dominating the conversation. “Before going any further, I think I should stop and ask for your ideas and your advice on how we can best proceed.”

  Make yourself indebted to the other. Benjamin Franklin suggested that doing a favor can help build a link between you and another. Rather than doing a favor for other people, however, he suggested that you let them do a favor for you. Borrow a book or otherwise ask them for a small favor that is easy to grant. You become indebted to the other person, and that person feels both generous and connected.

  Plan joint activities. Engaging with your counterpart in a constructive task can build a structural link between you as colleagues or friends. Ask yourself, “What activity might I organize to build a link between us?” For example, political tensions between two countries can be reduced if someone organizes joint economic-development activities or student-exchange programs.

  In most negotiations, you could invite relevant parties to join you for a brainstorming session to nominate ideas to deal with the differences you face. You might shift the meeting to a less formal location, change the seating arrangement so that everyone sits around a circular table, or lighten the mood with an icebreaker such as having each participant share a story from childhood. Or you might invite members of the other team and yours to eat together, to go out for drinks, or to attend a sporting event.

  Exclude with care. Structural links that you build can easily be destroyed if the other person feels left out. Feeling excluded from team activities—whether a meeting, a conversation over coffee, or a questionnaire to colleagues about office space—can have a more powerful emotional consequence than many people realize. One day, during a coaching session with Dan, a high-level government official described the bitter resentment her colleague felt when he received no invitation to an important interdepartmental meeting. He had expected to be included in the meeting and felt alienated from the organization and the organizers. In retaliation, he apparently found a legitimate way to withhold several million dollars’ worth of funds from the department that had organized the meeting. Not until six months later were the funds finally made available.

  Exclusion from a meeting may seem trivial—but not for the person being excluded. As you plan your next meeting, whether lunch with colleagues at the local cafeteria or a meeting of key negotiating parties, remember to ask yourself if there is anyone who might be sensitive to being excluded. Take a moment to decide whether you want to invite them to participate. What are the benefits of inclusion? Possible costs of exclusion? One minute of thought can save you hours of grief. Even if you decide not to invite them, think about whether you could at least touch base with them to explain the reason, so they are not surprised and put in the position of hearing it from someone else.

  REDUCING PERSONAL DISTANCE

  Having explored how to build structural connections, we turn to the other aspect of affiliation—personal connections. These are the personal ties that make us feel closer or more distant from each other. Without such ties, one or both of us may question the other’s honesty, fail to listen carefully, or as Roger recalls, even cancel a meeting:

  In the early 1990s, some colleagues and I were invited to South Africa to give negotiation workshops for President DeKlerk’s all-white cabinet in the capital city of Pretoria and for the African National Congress (ANC) in Johannesburg. As we finished the workshop for the cabinet, the team got a message that the ANC had canceled the worksho
p that had been planned for the following week.

  My colleagues and I went to Johannesburg and met with Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC’s Secretary General, and some of his colleagues. After some discussion, the ANC workshop was rescheduled and conducted.

  On the day following the workshop, Ramaphosa took us to lunch. By that time, I knew Cyril well enough to ask, “Why on earth did you cancel the workshop that we had scheduled?”

  “Because no one knew you,” he replied.

  “But,” I said, “you knew all about me. In fact, if I remember correctly, you once wrote me at Harvard asking if I could get you a fellowship at the Center for International Affairs.”

  “I knew all about you,” Cyril replied. “But I had never heard your voice. I had never seen your eyes. I had never touched you.” He paused, smiled, and shook his head slightly. “I didn’t know who you were.”

  For most people in the world, a human being is not simply a résumé or curriculum vitae. Getting to know someone as a person and being able to connect on a human level is often critical to forging a good working relationship. In even the simplest negotiation, personal ties between two negotiators can be crucial.

  Connecting at a Personal Level

  The degree of affiliation that one feels toward another tends to change, sometimes gradually and sometimes quickly. Without taking the time to become consciously aware of our personal distance from one another, we might not recognize that we are moving closer together or further apart.