Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

Book Preface

I was intimidated.
I’d spent more than two decades in the FBI, including
fifteen years negotiating hostage situations from New York
to the Philippines and the Middle East, and I was on top of
my game. At any given time, there are ten thousand FBI
agents in the Bureau, but only one lead international
kidnapping negotiator. That was me.
But I’d never experienced a hostage situation so tense,
so personal.
“We’ve got your son, Voss. Give us one million dollars
or he dies.”
Pause. Blink. Mindfully urge the heart rate back to
normal.
Sure, I’d been in these types of situations before. Tons of
them. Money for lives. But not like this. Not with my son on
the line. Not $1 million. And not against people with fancy
degrees and a lifetime of negotiating expertise.
You see, the people across the table—my negotiating
counterparts—were Harvard Law School negotiating
professors.
I’d come up to Harvard to take a short executive negotiating
course, to see if I could learn something from the business
world’s approach. It was supposed to be quiet and calm, a
little professional development for an FBI guy trying to
widen his horizons.
But when Robert Mnookin, the director of the Harvard
Negotiation Research Project, learned I was on campus, he
invited me to his office for a coffee. Just to chat, he said.
I was honored. And scared. Mnookin is an impressive
guy whom I’d followed for years: not only is he a Harvard
law professor, he’s also one of the big shots of the conflict
resolution field and the author of Bargaining with the Devil:
When to Negotiate, When to Fight.
1
To be honest, it felt unfair that Mnookin wanted me, a
former Kansas City beat cop, to debate negotiation with
him. But then it got worse. Just after Mnookin and I sat
down, the door opened and another Harvard professor
walked in. It was Gabriella Blum, a specialist in international
negotiations, armed conflict, and counterterrorism, who’d
spent eight years as a negotiator for the Israeli National
Security Council and the Israel Defense Forces. The toughas-nails IDF.
On cue, Mnookin’s secretary arrived and put a tape
recorder on the table. Mnookin and Blum smiled at me.
I’d been tricked.
“We’ve got your son, Voss. Give us one million dollars
or he dies,” Mnookin said, smiling. “I’m the kidnapper.
What are you going to do?”
I experienced a flash of panic, but that was to be
expected. It never changes: even after two decades
negotiating for human lives you still feel fear. Even in a
role-playing situation.
I calmed myself down. Sure, I was a street cop turned
FBI agent playing against real heavyweights. And I wasn’t a
genius. But I was in this room for a reason. Over the years I
had picked up skills, tactics, and a whole approach to
human interaction that had not just helped me save lives but,
as I recognize now looking back, had also begun to
transform my own life. My years of negotiating had infused
everything from how I dealt with customer service reps to
my parenting style.
“C’mon. Get me the money or I cut your son’s throat
right now,” Mnookin said. Testy.
I gave him a long, slow stare. Then I smiled.
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Mnookin paused. His expression had a touch of amused
pity in it, like a dog when the cat it’s been chasing turns
around and tries to chase it back. It was as if we were
playing different games, with different rules.
Mnookin regained his composure and eyed me with
arched brows as if to remind me that we were still playing.
“So you’re okay with me killing your son, Mr. Voss?”
“I’m sorry, Robert, how do I know he’s even alive?” I
said, using an apology and his first name, seeding more
warmth into the interaction in order to complicate his gambit
to bulldoze me. “I really am sorry, but how can I get you
any money right now, much less one million dollars, if I
don’t even know he’s alive?”
It was quite a sight to see such a brilliant man flustered
by what must have seemed unsophisticated foolishness. On
the contrary, though, my move was anything but foolish. I
was employing what had become one of the FBI’s most
potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.
Today, after some years evolving these tactics for the
private sector in my consultancy, The Black Swan Group,
we call this tactic calibrated questions: queries that the other
side can respond to but that have no fixed answers. It buys
you time. It gives your counterpart the illusion of control—
they are the one with the answers and power after all—and it
does all that without giving them any idea of how
constrained they are by it.
Mnookin, predictably, started fumbling because the
frame of the conversation had shifted from how I’d respond
to the threat of my son’s murder to how the professor would
deal with the logistical issues involved in getting the money.
How he would solve my problems. To every threat and
demand he made, I continued to ask how I was supposed to
pay him and how was I supposed to know that my son was
alive.
After we’d been doing that for three minutes, Gabriella
Blum interjected.
“Don’t let him do that to you,” she said to Mnookin.
“Well, you try,” he said, throwing up his hands.
Blum dove in. She was tougher from her years in the
Middle East. But she was still doing the bulldozer angle, and
all she got were my same questions.
Mnookin rejoined the session, but he got nowhere either.
His face started to get red with frustration. I could tell the
irritation was making it hard to think.
“Okay, okay, Bob. That’s all,” I said, putting him out of
his misery.
He nodded. My son would live to see another day.
“Fine,” he said. “I suppose the FBI might have
something to teach us.”
I had done more than just hold my own against two of
Harvard’s distinguished leaders. I had taken on the best of
the best and come out on top.
But was it just a fluke? For more than three decades,
Harvard had been the world epicenter of negotiating theory
and practice. All I knew about the techniques we used at the
FBI was that they worked. In the twenty years I spent at the
Bureau we’d designed a system that had successfully
resolved almost every kidnapping we applied it to. But we
didn’t have grand theories.
Our techniques were the products of experiential
learning; they were developed by agents in the field,
negotiating through crisis and sharing stories of what
succeeded and what failed. It was an iterative process, not
an intellectual one, as we refined the tools we used day after
day. And it was urgent. Our tools had to work, because if
they didn’t someone died.
But why did they work? That was the question that drew
me to Harvard, to that office with Mnookin and Blum. I
lacked confidence outside my narrow world. Most of all, I
needed to articulate my knowledge and learn how to
combine it with theirs—and they clearly had some—so I
could understand, systematize, and expand it.
Yes, our techniques clearly worked with mercenaries,
drug dealers, terrorists, and brutal killers. But, I wondered,
what about with normal humans?
As I’d soon discover in the storied halls of Harvard, our
techniques made great sense intellectually, and they worked
everywhere.
It turned out that our approach to negotiation held the
keys to unlock profitable human interactions in every
domain and every interaction and every relationship in life.
This book is how it works.