0:26 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, dear Mrs. Dean, dear students, dear colleagues, dear Mr. William Ury, welcome to the University of Geneva. I'm Thomas Straub, professor of the Faculty of Geneva School of Economics and Management, in brief, GSEM, at this wonderful university. On behalf of the organizers of this event, BGSEM, the alumni organization of our faculty, and the University of Geneva, we were very pleased to welcome Harvard negotiation and mediation expert William Ury for a talk on Getting to Yes, negotiating in challenging times. Well, negotiation, moreover in challenging contexts, is a familiar issue for many of my colleagues
1:13 at this university. May they be active in international law, in management, in international relations, in human and humanitarian rights, and in so many other fields. Needless to say how often this issue is addressed in our international Geneva, at all sorts of levels, international political actors, NGOs, international organizations, etc., etc. It is thus a very great pleasure to welcome you, Mr. William Ury, uh to this university, and I'm very much looking forward to listening to your talk. But may I now very shortly introduce you.
1:59 William Ury is the author of Getting to Yes, which is the world's best-selling book on negotiation with almost 12 million print copies in English and probably millions more in other languages. He's also co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, an academic program on the theoretical and practical development of negotiation and conflict resolution. He has helped hundreds of businessmen and organization reach mutually profitable agreements with customers, suppliers, unions, and joint ventures, partners,
2:44 and the sort. He has taught negotiation and mediation to tens of thousands of corporate executives, labor leaders, diplomats, and military officers around the world. As a mediator, he's indeed contributed to the resolution of many national and international conflicts, such as civil war in the Middle East, wars in Venezuela, Colombia, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. During the 18th 80s, he helped the US and Soviet governments create nuclear crisis centers designed to avert an accidental nuclear war. Thank you, William, for that.
3:30 With former President Jimmy Carter, William also co-founded the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. Trained as a social anthropologist with a BA from Yale and a PhD from Harvard, William has carried out his research on negotiation not only in the boardroom and at the bargaining table, but also among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the clan warriors of New Guinea. John F. Kennedy stated once, "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." William, thank you for accepting the
4:15 invitation on behalf of the BGSM and also the University of Geneva, the organizers of the event. The floor is yours. Thank you very much. Uh it's a real pleasure to be here in part because I had the privilege of spending a few years here on this beautiful lake going to school many many many years ago. Uh and it left uh indelible good
5:02 memories for me of of Switzerland and of Lac Léman. And while I was there, was a school with many many students from many different parts of the world, I think perhaps this question came to me that's become my life passion, which is how do we as a world, how do we learn to live together? How do we learn to get along? How do we deal with all of our differences in a way that is not destructive, but constructive? And I think that became my question, and so I went and studied anthropology, uh study of humanity of human beings. And if one were an anthropologist right now looking at humanity today,
5:48 maybe an anthropologist living a thousand years from now looking back at this era, I think they an anthropologist might call this the era of the human family reunion. Why do I say that? Because for the first time in tens and hundreds of thousands of years, all the different tribes, all the different language groups on the planet are in touch with each other thanks to the communications revolution. And like many family reunions, it is not all peaceful. It is not It's filled with conflict, with with inequities, with injustice, with resentments. And the question is, how do we how do we deal with it? How do we get along with each other? How can we get to
6:35 yes? And that's the question I would like to discuss with you tonight is, how do we engage practically in this getting in the art of negotiation, of arriving at agreements that are good for all sides. It is not at all easy. I've had the privilege over the last three decades of living in an era where there's been a quiet revolution taking place around the world in every country that I visit. And it's a revolution that accompanies the knowledge revolution. It's a silent revolution. It's a revolution in the way in which we as individuals, as organizations, as societies, the way in which we make decisions. Because traditionally a generation or
7:21 more ago, the principal form of decision making was the people on the top of the hierarchies, the people on the top of the pyramids of power, they make all the decisions, they give the orders, and the people on the bottom simply follow them. But now, thanks in part to the knowledge revolution, those pyramids of power are slowly flattening into organizations that more resemble networks. Horizontal networks where everyone wants to have a say. Everyone wants to have an opinion. The world is becoming like a little Swiss commune where everyone wants to have a say and everyone wants to vote whether it's the you know, whether I'm changing a piece of property, the school, everyone wants to
8:08 have a say. And the question is how do we do that? How do we allow people to have voice and to join together? So, there's been this revolution where we've moved from vertical decision making to horizontal decision making. And another name for horizontal decision making is negotiation. This is what I call the the negotiation revolution, if you will. I'd like to just for a moment here, just imagine here in the in the in this room in this audience. Think about negotiation. The way I would define negotiation very simply and very broadly is simply the act of back-and-forth communication. You're trying to reach agreement with other parties. You have some interests which are in
8:53 common, like perhaps an ongoing relationship. And you have other interests which are in tension with each other. In that broad sense of the term, if you think about who you negotiate with in the course of your day, let me just ask you a couple of questions about your experience. First of all, think about who's it that you engage in this act of communication with? Who Who do you have to negotiate with? Just to see what the variety of situations here in the room is. If you wouldn't mind just calling out, who do you negotiate with? My wife. Your wife, okay. Your your spouse. You know, the that real hard negotiations start at home. Okay, who else do you negotiate with? Your boss. Okay, who else? Your daughter, your children, okay.
9:40 Who else? Yourself, of course. We can often be our own most difficult opponent. Uh so, if you think about you know, when we negotiate with clients or customers or colleagues or co-workers or the authorities, government, you know, if you think about it, let me ask you one question. If you had to make an estimate of how much time you think you spend engaged in negotiating, in other words, in back-and-forth communication with your partner, your spouse, your children, your colleagues, your boss, your staff, your customers or clients, your suppliers, government, how much time would you think it was?
10:26 What percentage what of your time would you guess that it was for you? How much time do you spend engaged in the act of back-and-forth communication trying to reach agreement with those people? 50% 80% 99% Okay, I hear 30%, 50%, 80%, 99%. How many of you just out of curiosity, if you wouldn't mind raising your hand, say at least at least uh 20% of my time I spend engaged in this process, large percentage of my time. How many of you say it's over 50% of my time? Okay, so you can see that it's a huge we don't always think of it as negotiation. But in the broad sense of the term, that's exactly what it is. It's a little bit like Molière Jourdain in that play by Molière who was surprised one day to discover that all his life he had been
11:12 speaking prose. In the same way, you know, we may not think of it as negotiation, but in that broad sense we're negotiating all the time with our families, at work, universities, in the classrooms, with teachers, with fellow students. It's it's a we negotiate from the time we get up in the morning to the time we go to bed at night. Now, one last question. If you think about, say, the last 10 years as you've kind of gotten older, perhaps had more authority in your job, or whatever, last 10 years, would you say that you negotiate more than you negotiated 10 years ago? About the same, or would you negotiate less? How many would say it's more? You're negotiating more.
11:58 Okay, so that you see those hands, that's the negotiation revolution, and that's taking place in every country around the world. We're all pioneers now in trying to figure out how to engage in collective decision-making. How do we do that? And it's not so easy. So, what I'd like to do is share with you uh six uh principles, uh or a number of principles for decide you know deciding how you negotiate, for for improving the way in which you negotiate. But, before I do that, I'd like I think you'll get more value out of the next hour if you have in mind at least one difficult or challenging negotiation that you're currently facing. Might be a negotiation at home, might be a negotiation at work, in the
12:44 classroom, wherever. Just have in mind at least one difficult negotiation that you are currently uh engaged in. So, your negotiating situation, who are the parties, what's the issue, what do you want, what do they want? Everyone have a situation in mind? Okay. So, if you have that in mind, I think you'll get more value because I'm going to lead you through a little bit of a structure, a little bit of a journey, and I'm going to ask you to think about applying this to your own situation, with the hope that maybe by the end of the evening you'll have a new idea of how to approach that situation, or maybe it will lead to a question of yes, but how would this work in my situation? But, often we don't know what do they want. We know usually what we try to know what we want, but
13:29 Right. Well, we will talk exactly about that. So, uh the question is So, let me ask you uh everyone has a situation in mind. If there are two kinds of negotiations, the internal negotiations, for example, inside the family, inside the organization with your co-workers and boss, and then there are the external negotiations, the ones with people outside of the organization, with customers clients suppliers other organizations, and so on. How many out of curiosity have picked an external negotiation? That was the one came to mind to you to work on. An external negotiation. How many of you have Okay. How many of you picked an internal negotiation? Okay. And of those two,
14:15 which, if you had to make a broad generalization, which personally do you find more challenging? The external negotiations or the internal ones? Okay. How many would say external? External. Okay. And how many would say internal? If you look around here, you'll see it's like 90% are saying internal. Now, isn't that interesting? Because when we often think of negotiation, we often think of it as, you know, kind of almost like an external negotiation, like a a business negotiation or something like that. But, in fact, or labor-management negotiation or a negotiation between nations. But, in fact, often times the most difficult negotiations for us are the internal ones. The people who are members of the same family, the same
15:00 organization, who might have the same supposedly have the same mission. Those are often the more difficult ones. And we'll talk a little bit about why that's so. We'll look at both, of course. So, while you have that in mind, your situation in mind, let's let me just uh uh talk a little bit about the challenge in negotiation. How do you approach that negotiation that you have in mind? You could There are a variety of different approaches in negotiation and if we want to just simply classify them in a two by two matrix, you could do it on the uh how much concern do you show for your own interest in that negotiation? And then how much concern do you show for the other side's interest? Your wife, your husband, your customer, your co-worker. That effectively gives us four approaches to negotiation. We could for
15:47 example just show very strong concern for our interests, no concern for the other side, right? And you get this hard adversarial approach. Conversely, we could do the opposite. You know, the customer's always right or I've got to really, you know, I've got to keep my wife, my husband happy or whatever and we we use this really soft accommodating approach. Something a style that is really common, very common, particularly in internal negotiations because people are afraid of conflict, they're afraid of the effects of conflict is they don't talk about anything, they they don't discuss it and so we approach avoidance which is you don't end up showing concern for your own interests and you don't end up
16:32 showing much concern for the other side's interest. You're just avoiding it, no one talks about it. How many of you for example see a lot of avoidance in your families or organizations or even in politics and so on, avoidance, okay, it's very common. So to me the question is how do we do both? How do we simultaneously show strong concern for our interests trying to make sure that our needs are being met, but at the same time show strong concern for the other side's interests? How do we engage in what might be called a mutual gains approach where both sides, all sides can have their essential needs met? And as you can imagine, it's not easy.
17:18 So, I want to talk with you about a number of strategies, six in particular, uh that one could use to to enhance your ability to to reach success. There's no guarantee of success, but how do we enhance our ability? And the theme that runs through this method of cooperative negotiation is the theme of focusing on the interests that lie behind positions. In negotiation, we focus tend to focus on our positions, uh which are concrete demands or stances. Interests are the underlying motivations, what people really want. Going back to the question that was just asked, how do I know what they really want? What are their underlying
18:03 motivations? What are their underlying needs, desires, fears, and concerns? And just to kind of illustrate that point, which is the key theme to me of cooperative negotiation, with a very simple story that comes from a woman who was the one of the founders of modern management theory. Uh she was she lived over a century ago in the city of Boston. Her name was Mary Parker Follett. And one day, she was in a Harvard library in the university, and she saw two students getting into a quarrel because one wanted the window open, and the other one wanted it closed. So, one student gets up, and he opens the window, and the other student gets up and slams the window shut. They bother everyone in the library. So, finally, the librarian comes over, and she asks the first one, "Well, why do you want the window open?"
18:48 And he says, "Well, I want some fresh air." She asks the second one, "Why do you want the window closed?" He said, "The draft, the wind, is blowing my papers." So, then she asks both of them, "Well, how do we get you fresh air without you a draft?" The two of them think about it for a moment, they talk, and one says, "I've got an idea." And he disappears into the room next door and open opens a window there, thus providing fresh air for the first student without a draft for the second. Think about that very simple situation for a moment. You start off as in any negotiation with two positions, an open window and a closed window. The librarian by asking the magic question "Why?"
19:35 puts the focus away from positions onto interests. What are the underlying interests? In this case, fresh air and no draft. And by identifying, uncovering those interests, they're then able to apply their creativity to come up with a solution that meets both sides' interests. Fresh air without a draft. Now, notice that in negotiation, when we often associate negotiation, we associate it with a split-the-difference compromise. Just a compromise in between. But in this particular case, a half-open window would have left both students unsatisfied because it would have been too much draft and not enough fresh air. What you find successful negotiators doing constantly is
20:20 they're always probing behind their people's positions for what are the underlying interests. What are the underlying interests in order to come up with the equivalent of an open window in the next room? Let me, if I may, just uh give you an a an example from real life. A few years ago, I was uh asked to help out in a conflict a big business conflict between a uh a business leader in Brazil and a business leader in France who were fighting over control of Latin America's largest retailer, their largest supermarket. And uh and I didn't know if I could help, but I agreed to meet with the business leader in Brazil. And I asked him this
21:06 question, of course. You know, I said, "So, tell me, what do you want?" And he, like a very good business leader, knows exactly what he wants. And he said, "Well, of course, I want uh stock, you know, the stock, billion dollars, or whatever it was. I want three I want I want the elimination of the non-compete clause. I want real estate. I want the company headquarters." He had a list. And I said, "But, what do you really want?" In other words, those are positions, but what do you really want? What do you most want? You seem to, you know, he was a man who was 76. He had everything in his life. He had a family. I could see the children, the grandchildren. I said, "What do you really want?" And he thought about for a moment. He
21:51 struggled a little bit. And finally, he said, "You know what I want? I want liberdade. I want my freedom. That's what I want." This conflict had gone on for 2 and 1/2 years. There were dozens of lawyers, investment bankers. There were lawsuits, arbitration suits. Uh it had the consequences it was affecting 150,000 employees of the company. This conflict over control of the company and over board. Uh he said, "I want my freedom." Once I knew that he wanted his freedom, then another his interest, then I thought, "Well, maybe I can help. I don't know." And so, when I met the representative of the other side in Paris, they said, "Well, why are you here?" And
22:37 I said, "I'm here parce que la vie est trop court. That's why I'm here." Life is too short for these kinds of conflicts that I mean, it was even straining commercial relations between Brazil and France. It was all over the newspapers. There was It was uh just consuming people, this conflict. And it was supposed to go on for another 8 years, because he was going to be chairman of the board for another 8 years. So, he said, "Well, okay. How do you propose to to solve this problem?" I said, "Well, if we could just focus on interest for a moment. Two interests, two principles. Then I think maybe we would have a chance to solve this. And those principles are freedom for each
23:22 each leader, so they can be free to go on with their lives, free to go on spend time with their families, free to go on with their business deals, free to proceed because they were trapped in this conflict. And the second one was dignity. Neither one wanted to be seen as a loser. Neither one wanted to back down. I said, "If we could just agree on those two interests, those two principles, I think maybe we could have a chance." He said, "Fine." He invited me to his office the next day and in 1 hour we just drew out on a little piece of paper what what what what that would would mean. Now, you know, negotiators had gone at this for months, arbitration, everything like that, but we were just trying to get to the essence of it, which was the underlying interests.
24:07 That was on a Tuesday. By Friday, both men were in a law office in São Paulo, shaking hands, signing an agreement, 70-page agreement, uh giving a joint press release, wishing each other well, speaking to the executives of the company, and they were free. And when I talked to uh my client, I said uh I said how you know, you know, I asked him how it went, and he said he said, "I got everything that I want. Everything that I want. But the most important thing I got was I got my life back." He got his freedom. And interestingly enough, the other side was highly satisfied, too. And this was so this is this is it's not this is simple, but it's not always
24:54 easy, but it just illustrates the power of looking behind positions for what are the real interests and trying to focus the negotiation that way. So, what are the blocks to doing that? So, what I'd like to do is um talk very briefly about six strategies or six powers that you can use to try to change the game from an adversarial or difficult negotiation into a more cooperative one. The first one has to do with the fact as someone said that we negotiate with ourselves that uh that perhaps the biggest obstacle, and this has been a big lesson for me over the years, cuz I've worked in all kinds of difficult situations and difficult labor-management situations, different
25:39 boardroom battles, civil wars, and so on. And there's a lot of difficult people, but I realized that the single biggest obstacle to us getting what we need, to us getting what we want, is not the person on the other side of the table, however difficult they are. It's ourselves. It's the person on this side of the table. It's the person we look at in the mirror every morning. It's ourselves. It lies in our very simple, very understandable, very natural human tendency to react, to act without thinking. As the old saying goes, when you are angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
26:25 And that happens more than not. You're sitting at your desk there, you get an email from a colleague, you've been left out of an important decision, you're very angry. It's easy, so easy just to compose the reply and hit that magic button reply, not just hit reply, you hit reply all, and it goes to everyone, and then you see conflict start to escalate. There is a little button on that screen that we rarely use that says save as draft. That is what I call the balcony button. In other words, the key the alternative is to I like to use the metaphor of imagine that you're negotiating here up
27:11 on a stage uh with the other side. Part of your mind goes to a mental or an emotional balcony overlooking the stage, which is a place of perspective, a place of calm, a place of self-control, a place where we can keep uh our eyes on the prize. That's the balcony. So, going back to the example with the email, you go to the balcony, your favorite thing. I mean, here in Switzerland you go out for a walk in the beautiful bastion and uh whatever you go you go for a run, you you go for a coffee, you have a you know, a you you you you talk to a friend. Whatever you use to go to the balcony, you listen to a piece of music,
27:56 and then you come back, and then you ask yourself the important question, "How can I advance my interests in this situation?" And then you're going to hit the delete button, and you're going to pick up the phone, call your colleague, meet them, try to resolve it in person. So, that's the importance of going to the balcony. And if I may just illustrate it with an example from my own personal experience, some years ago I was involved in the uh in this in the political conflict in the country of Venezuela. Uh Venezuela, as you know, right now is going through a very difficult moment. 10 or 15 years ago, it was very similar. There were a million people on the streets of the capital Caracas demanding the downfall of the president Hugo
28:42 Chávez. There were a million people on the streets supporting Hugo Chávez. There was tension, there was a little bit of violence. International observers were fearing that it would escalate into major civil violence, perhaps even civil war. And uh I was asked by the UN to uh come to Venezuela and just talk with both sides. And I had a I went there a number of times, but and it and I had a number of meetings with the president Hugo Chávez. One of those meetings, he liked to meet at night, we met at 9:00 in the evening. And uh that was the appointment at least that was there with my friend Francisco and and we waited 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 11:30, midnight. Finally, we're ushered
29:27 in to see the president expecting to find him all alone, but in fact, he had his entire cabinet arrayed behind him. And so he gave me a chair. He said, "So, Yuri." He said, "Uh tell me, what's your opinion of how things are going here in Venezuela?" And I said, "Well, Mr. President, I've been meeting with some of your ministers here. I've been meeting with the head of the opposition. I think there is a little progress." Well, that apparently was the wrong word to use because as soon as he heard the word progress, he got extremely angry. He said, "What do you mean, progress? Are you naive? Are you not seeing all the tricks those traitors on the other side are up to?" He got furious. He leaned very close into my face and he proceeded to shout
30:12 for approximately 30 minutes. So, I was thinking, you know, oh, okay, all the work I've done in Venezuela, it's all down the drain. It's feeling a little embarrassed in front of the whole cabinet. Uh you know, my mind is saying, "Well, of course I'm not a fool. I you know, I you know, you you you you you thinking of what to say in return." But then I remembered a friend of mine had once said, uh "Yuri, William, if you're in a difficult situation," he said, "just remember to pinch the palm of your hand." And I said, "Hernan, why would I pinch the palm of my hand?" And he said, "Because it will give you a momentary pain, and it will keep you alert." In other words, it will help you go to the balcony. And for some reason, I remembered that at that moment, and I pinched the palm
30:58 of my hand, and then I could ask myself the question, which is the all-important question on the balcony, which is "What's your core purpose here? What's your core interest? What do you really want? What's the prize?" And for me, that was clear. I was trying to bring peace or calm the situation. So, I realized, is it really going to get advance the situation if I get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? So, I went to the balcony, and I just listened to him. And he was a man who was known to give 8-hour speeches, so I'm sure if we got into an argument, it could have gone all night. But after 30 minutes of me just listening to him and nodding my head, he finally began to get a little tired, and I was watching his body language, and his shoulders went down a little bit, and in a weary tone of voice, he said to me,
31:44 "Okay Yuri what should I do?" That is the faint sound of a human mind opening. Because if you try to reason with someone who's not in a reasonable frame of mind, it's like beating your head against the wall. But there was a tiny opening, so I said, "Mr. President, I think the entire country of Venezuela needs to go to the balcony because it's almost Christmas. Last year, all the festivities were canceled. Why not just call a truce? Give everyone a chance to reflect, have time with their families, and in January, we can pick up the conversation." And he said, "That's an excellent idea. I'm going to propose that in my next speech." His mood had completely shifted. In fact, he said, "Over
32:30 Christmas, I'm going to travel the country, and I want you to come with me." And then he thought for a moment. He said, "Uh oh, but you're a mediator, you're a neutral. Maybe it wouldn't be so good for you to be seen in the my company all the time." But he said, "No problem, I'll give you a disguise." What I learned from that episode was that maybe the greatest power we have is the power not to react, the power to go to the balcony and stay focused on our on our interests. And in today's times with so much going on, that may be you know, the most powerful strategy that we have. We And from the balcony then brings me to the second point is what we look at our interests, but we also need to think about uh our
33:18 Where do we get our power to meet our interests? And one of the key things in negotiation is we tend in negotiation to only we focus on the agreement, naturally enough. That's where our attention goes. But one of the keys to power in negotiation is not just to focus on the agreement, but particularly beforehand to focus on what we call your BATNA, which is an English acronym for your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In other words, what are you going to do or what can you do to satisfy your interests if for some reason you're not able to reach agreement with that person. If you're not able to reach agreement with a customer, is there another customer? With one supplier, is there another supplier?
34:03 If you can't reach agreement with someone, how are you going to satisfy your interests? I mean, imagine for example, uh some of you are students, you might be looking for a job. Imagine you're looking for a job and you have one job opportunity, just one. And you know you're going to be talking for example about salary. Imagine how that negotiation goes. Because you only have one alternative, you're likely to accept anything. But imagine that you take the intervening time, the intervening week, to think about your BATNA. What am I going to do if I don't get that job? What's my alternative? Imagine you you think that I could go back to school. I could maybe you get another job offer. You have some alternative. If you have that other alternative in mind, you're going to have more confidence. And you're going to negotiate with more
34:50 confidence, and that confidence will translate into power. It will be easier for you to achieve your interests. In fact, if you know that you have an alternative, it it calms the situation because you're not so dependent on the other. You can care about the outcome, but not too much. So, having an alternative turns out to be key in negotiation. And if I may just kind of recall an episode from Swiss history, uh there was a time back many hundreds of years ago in the in the 15th century, even before the University of Geneva was created, when the cantons of Switzerland were in a quarrel
35:35 uh that was threatening to turn into a civil war among the cantons. Uh they could not reach agreement. And for them, their only alternative seemed to be to go to war. It was about the introduction of Fribourg Fribourg and Solothurn to to to to the to the confed- to the confederation. And in desperation, someone thought, "Ah, let me consult this monk." Uh there there was a monk you may you would have know him. His name was Saint Saint Saint Nicholas de Flüe. He was a farmer. He was a a soldier. He'd been a counselor, a political leader, and now he was living in his cave as a monk. Someone went to consult
36:21 him. And no one knows what he said, what his advice was. But when that person brought back the news and brought back this that was the solution and the cantons were able to avert civil war, strengthen the federation. That was their BATNA. So, sometimes, if you cannot reach agreement, sometimes a third party, a mediator, an arbitrator, someone can help you resolve that difference. So, again, something to think about. And that that that story, he's I'm here to pay homage to sometimes he's called Brother Klaus uh San Nicola and uh uh and he was in that case the BATNA, the best alternative for for the
37:07 cantons. Which brings me to the third question, which is which is relationship. So much of negotiation turns around human beings. We're not negotiating with computers, although maybe we will be. We're negotiating right now with human beings who have feelings, different perspectives, different ways of seeing things. And so often in life uh we're trying to solve the problem, but the people seem to get in the way. You know, if you take, for example, the the example of the husband and wife, the husband comes home from a hard day at work and he thinks he's focusing on the problem when he says, "Honey, the house is a mess." Well, the wife may not hear that as him
37:53 focusing on the problem. She may hear that as an attack. And so, she says, "Well, you didn't do what you said you'd do. You didn't take the kids to school this morning." And then it goes from there. The house is the problem doesn't get solved, the house doesn't get any cleaner, plans for dinner are spoiled. So often in life, we're trying to solve a problem, but the people get in the way. And the secret in negotiation is is to distinguish on the one hand between the substance the problem itself, and the people. To distinguish between the people and the problem, so that simultaneously we can be soft in dealing with the people, respectful in dealing with the people, as we remain hard and firm in solving the problem. The motto is soft
38:39 on the people, hard on the problem. And the best way I know to be soft on the people, the simplest way, is is to listen. In other words, we think of negotiation as talking, but it's actually more about listening. Let me, if I may, just illustrate something for you. Imagine you're in a difficult Imagine your situation is a difficult one. It's difficult to extract yourself. Yvonne, do you want to come up here for a moment? Let me just Let me just illustrate just something just to leave you with a metaphor here. I want you to just hold on to my finger with the tightest grip you've got. Really tight grip. So, you can't It's like a tough situation. You can't extricate yourself. Now, watch very carefully. I pulled out my finger very easily. What did I do? You pushed it. I went a little bit in his direction. I
39:26 took a step in his direction, and then I was able. I used one of our greatest powers in negotiation, which is the power of surprise. Thank you, Yvonne. Appreciate it. Give him a hand. So, uh the the That's That's the key in negotiation is you have to, in some ways, do the opposite of what the other side expects. And the other side in a negotiation, particularly if it's a difficult one, the last thing they expect is for you to listen to them, to step a little bit to their side, to put yourself in their shoes. That's what I was doing. I was going a little bit in his direction. And because if you think about it, what's negotiation? Negotiation is an exercise in influence. You're trying to change the other side's mind. How can we possibly change their mind
40:14 if we don't know where their mind is? And that's why to me it's like so central power is the ability to put ourselves in the other side's shoes, to empathize with them. Even if they're our total enemy, and particularly if they're our total enemy, we need to understand them if we're going to influence them. You know, Mandela, for example, who I regard as one of the greatest negotiators of the last century. What did he do when he went to jail? The first thing he did was he learned the language of his enemies. He learned Afrikaans. He studied their history. He studied their history of suffering. And that prepared him well when it came to negotiating with them and persuading them to agree to a a democracy, to an
41:00 election in which he became the president of South Africa. The ability to put yourself in in their shoes is key, and the the key to that is to learn to listen. We think of negotiation as talking, but it's actually much more about listening. If you observe the behavior of successful negotiators, you find that they listen far more than they talk. And listening doesn't doesn't mean just superficially hearing the words, it means listening to what's underneath the words. Not just listening to what's said, but listening to what's not said. Listening to the emotions, to the feelings, to where people are coming from. That's the art we need to practice, and it's it's it's amazing to me that in schools, for example, we teach everyone everything, but you don't see courses on listening.
41:46 In universities, where are the courses on listening? It it is the key skill to really to success in life is to learn to listen to others. How can we possibly, you know, uh how can we possibly make agreements if we don't listen? Uh there's, you know, we have lots of talk shows on radio and television, but where are the listen shows? Where do we learn to listen to each other? And that's that's a an an innate human ability that we need to cultivate. Uh and it's not just listening. The The kind of listening we normally do is we listen like this. We're listening to them and we're saying, "I agree with that. I disagree with that." You know, we're listening from within our frame of reference, in our shoes. The key is to try to listen from within their
42:32 shoes, within their frame of reference. And that's that's an art to be worth worth developing, a a great power in negotiation. You know, we often, for example, in negotiation, we we negotiate in teams, we'll appoint a spokesperson, someone who will speak for the team. Just as important is to appoint a listener, someone who listens for the team. It's a full-time job. You know, um in uh in hostage negotiations, uh where, you know, for example, in the United States, we in the in the big cities, we have hostage situations almost on a daily basis in a place like like New York City, where someone gets distraught or bank robbers, they take hostages. In the old days, the way they would resolve that was a little bit John Wayne style. They The police would show up. They
43:18 would pull out a bullhorn and say, "You've got 3 minutes to come out with your hands up." And when that didn't happen, they would toss in tear gas, take out their guns, people would be dead, the hostage might be dead. But then, over the years, they learned there's a better way, which is to listen. So now, the SWAT team arrives just in case that's the Batman, just in case. But the main team that arrives is a group of 10 or 15 people just to listen to this individual. One person gets on the phone, but everyone's listening on the balcony, trying to figure out how we're going to persuade this person. Can we get a hold of his wife, someone he knows? What do we What can we do? And it may take 10 hours. It may take 15 hours, but in well
44:04 over 99% of the cases, guess what happens? The hostage taker surrenders, the hostage is safe. That's the power of listening. Uh it's a an enormous an enormous power. Listening happens to be the cheapest concession you can make as a negotiator. It costs us nothing and it means everything to the other side. Why? Because it conveys respect and that's the underlying tone here is respect. It's the way we can show respect. So, then oh, let me uh imagine this for a moment. Uh you've probably all seen a picture like this. What do you see in this picture? What do you see? How many of you see a young woman just out of curiosity?
44:50 Okay. You see anything you see How many of you see a man? An old man? Anyone see anyone else? Anyone see Anyone see an old woman? Okay, a few of you. Okay. So, this picture is like the reality in which we negotiate. There's one single reality and there are many ways of seeing the reality that may be equally valid because you're all right. There is this picture is like the reality in which we negotiate. There's a young woman, that's her profile, that's her nose, that's her mouth. That's her chin, I mean. Young woman, this is her eyelash, her nose, her chin and that's her her ear.
45:35 Some of you are seeing a man. This is his hat. That's his nose and that's a mustache. See that? And others of you are seeing an older woman in which this is her nose. This is her eye. This is the mouth and that's the chin. Can you see that? So, the trick in negotiation is without abandoning your point of view, to see if you can put yourself in the other side's shoes and see it from the other side's point of view. And sometimes there are three or four or five different points of view. It's that ability that we need when we listen.
46:21 That's the ability, the cognitive ability we need is to be able to shift our perspective without giving up our own perspective. Uh and that allows us then much greater chances to be able to resolve even the difficult conflict like the one you may have selected for yourself. So, having done that, having gone to the balcony thought about what your interests are, what's the prize, thought about your you know, the BATNA put yourself in their shoes, listen to them now how do you the next opportunity is now you're prepared to do to change the game. To change the fundamental game of negotiation from an adversarial confrontation
47:06 to a cooperative exercise in joint problem-solving. It's almost like this. In negotiation, there's a spotlight like there is on me right now. There's a spotlight here. There's in negotiation, the spotlight can be over here on positions. Or it can be over here on what are the interests? What are some options? What's an open window in the next room here? And the question is how do we move that spotlight from over there to here? And the way to do that is to use the next power negotiation, which is the power to reframe. It's one of our greatest powers in negotiation is to move that spotlight, to reframe. In other words, to change the focus of attention from positions
47:53 to interests to options, creative options, to criteria for fairness. And the way we do that is by asking good questions. So, negotiation isn't just about talking. It's about listening, and it's about asking what are called problem-solving questions, questions that move the focus of attention. When the librarian asks those students in the library, "Why do you want the window open? Why do you want the window closed?" She And then they say, "Fresh air and no draft." She's moving that spotlight. She's changing the game. When I asked my Brazilian client and friend, "What do you really want?"
48:38 It moved from a certain sum of money to freedom. And we have that power all the time by asking the right questions. I've been involved uh the last 5 years uh it working with President Santos in Colombia and the Colombian government on how to end a 50-year civil war in Colombia. That has taken 200,000 lives, 6 million refugees, and the question was, "How do you end a 50-year civil war?" There was no trust. It goes back to the human angle. There was such deep distrust. And one of the early challenges was, in a very secret way, we needed to find a way to extricate a guerrilla commander
49:25 from the jungle of Colombia to someplace where the government could talk to him and talk to his people to even begin to think about negotiation. Now, it had to be done in a top secret way, uh and the government person hired a helicopter, but of course, the guerrilla wasn't going to give wasn't going to tell the government where he was because he was afraid there'd be a military attack on it. So, the Red Cross, this is where the Switzerland plays its very useful role. A person from the Red Cross got in the helicopter, handed the coordinates to the pilot, and then the pilot flew out in the middle of the jungle, landed. After a while, hundreds of guerrilla
50:12 came out, each aiming their AK-47 at the helicopter. My friend Jaime is in the helicopter, and you put yourself in his shoes, the world looks a little bit unfriendly at that moment. He had the presence of mind to go to the balcony and think, "How do I change the game? How do I reframe?" We all have that power to reframe. So, given that there's no use staying in the helicopter because a bullet can go through the helicopter, he decided to open the door of the helicopter, walk right up to the commander and say, "Señor Comandante, I am now placing you under the personal protection of the president." That is a reframe. He's got 500 AK-47s aimed after at him,
50:58 and he's putting this guy under the personal protection. But, it worked because he was changing the game, changing the underlying assumption from being enemies to being potential partners in trying to reach an agreement. So, the commander got in the helicopter, they flew off to Cuba, and we've now had 4 and 1/2 years of negotiation, and I'm hoping, knock wood, in the next month or two or three, there will be an agreement, an historic agreement ending 50 years of civil war. How does it start? It starts this way. It starts going to the balcony. Starts putting yourself in their shoes. It starts with changing the game. So, that brings us then to the fifth power we have in negotiation,
51:44 which is negotiation has two words in it. Yes and no. Pythagoras once said that the simplest words in the language, the most basic words in the language are yes and no, and therefore they are the most difficult. And so in negotiation it's not always just about getting to yes. It's about getting to the right yes, and so it's important to know when to say no and how to say no. And it's not so easy. We A lot of us have difficulty saying no to our spouse or to our children or to our boss. How many of you have difficulty saying no? Little bit of difficulty saying no sometimes. Okay, so it's very common. How many of you maybe have no difficulty
52:29 of saying no, but you notice that when you say no it sometimes destroys or under damages the relationship when you say no. Okay, so so the question is what's a better way of saying no? And here I think we can take a lesson from from someone like Gandhi who knew how to say no not in a negative way when he was making a demand that the British end their occupation of India, but in a positive way. And what's a positive no? A positive no basically is like a sandwich. It's it's a yes followed by a no followed by another yes. And so a positive no starts with a yes.
53:16 A yes to your basic interests. In the case of Gandhi it was, you know, yes to freedom, right? And then there is a neutral matter-of-fact respectful no, not a destructive no. But a respectful no, and it doesn't just end there, it ends with a yes on the other side. A constructive proposal that helps the other side move in the direction you want them to move. Let me give you an example. Um Some time ago I had a uh participant in one of my classes at Harvard, a Frenchman whose name was Jacques. Jacques owned an internet company. He was the owner of a big internet company in Seattle. And at one point he described how the all the stock prices of the internet company suddenly fell. There was no
54:01 money in the market. Many of the internet companies, the startups, went bankrupt, many of them. And everyone have was faced with a very difficult challenge of laying off uh people who worked. And he was in the very difficult, uncomfortable position of having to fire, to lay off 500 engineers. Now, normally speaking, what a CEO usually does is they call up the head of human resources and say, "That's your job." And then the head of human resources may even not think that's their job. And so what they do, they everyone wants to avoid. So they put at least what's in English called a pink slip on someone's desk saying, "Sorry, no more job. Leave." And you know, it's it's everyone tries to avoid. But Jacques
54:49 realized that saying no in life, how you say no, is as important if not more important as how you say yes. And so he insisted personally on meeting with every one of those 500 engineers to explain to their face why he was having to let them go. And he used a positive no. He basically uh started with a yes, which is, "Look, you know, for the sake of saving our company, saving our product, saving what we've worked on for so long, you know, we're going to you know, that's the initial yes, we have to save that somehow. There is no money anymore. So I'm not going to be able to pay you, I'm not going to be able to employ you. It's I'm very sorry, but that's kind of a neutral,
55:34 matter-of-fact no. And then it was, "So how can I help you? Can I can we give you a great letter of reference? Can we help you find another job? Can we can you think about maybe going back to school? What can we do for you? How can we help? It was a positive no. It was a yes, no, yes. Well, a year went by, the money came back into the stock market, all the internet companies were trying to hire the best engineers, and guess who had first pick? Jacques. Everyone wanted to work for Jacques. Why? Because he had treated them with respect. And he said that even the few engineers he was not able to hire back, to that day, he would be stopped in the street by someone and thanked personally for the way that person had been fired.
56:21 Because the underlying theme here is respect. It's the as I mentioned, it's the least expensive concession you can make in a negotiation, and it's the one that matters because people's dignity matters a lot to them. And so, uh, that's the positive no. And that brings us to the to the to the yes on the other end, which is, you know, in a going back to your situation for a moment, think about your situation. Uh, and think okay, your mind may be over here, you know, their mind may still be far away. Let me just illustrate one more thing with you. Evon, if you don't mind coming up for 1 second. No trick this time. J- just want to just illustrate again, just all I ask you to do is put up your hands. Put your hands, okay? So,
57:08 uh, what am I doing? I'm pushing him. And what do you think Evon is doing? Resisting. He's resisting. He's pushing back, right? Did I ask him to push back? No, he just does it naturally. That's what happens in negotiation. It's when we're in a spot at the end of negotiation, we try to push the other side. What do they do? They do the opposite, they resist. And unless I'm much stronger than Yvon, we're just in a stalemate. And that's what you see time and again in negotiations. Thank you, Yvon. Thanks. Uh, will give me a hand here. Uh, what you see successful negotiators is the opposite of pushing. Which is to attract. It's almost like this. Your mind is here.
57:54 Their mind may still be way over here. Even after you've done all of this, it's still a distance between you and them. You're over here and you're saying, "Hey, come on over to my position. Come on over here. Come over to where I am." But if you leave your position for a moment, and you put yourself in their shoes, it's not so easy for them to move in the direction you want them to move. Why? Because it's like there's this giant chasm, a canyon, in between where you are and where they are. And that chasm is filled with doubts, anxieties, "Will I look like a failure? Will I be giving in? Will I look like I lost? What will people say? What will my people say? How am I going to explain this?" Those are all the questions that are going on.
58:40 So, it's very hard for them to cross that chasm. So, what's our job as a negotiator? Our job for a moment is to do something that's not so easy. It's to leave where our thinking is for a moment. Go to the balcony, take a step back, and then put ourselves in the shoes of the other side, where their thinking is, start the conversation there, and essentially build them a golden bridge. Build them a bridge over that chasm. Build them a golden bridge. In other words, make it as easy and attractive as possible for the other side to move in the direction we want them to move. To build them that golden bridge. So, if you
59:26 think about it for a moment, uh if you if you think about it for a moment, let me give you an example. There is a uh comes from the filmmaker Steven Spielberg. When he was about 13, there was a bully, an older boy in his class who was 15, who was much stronger, who used to beat him up and make his life pure hell. And this went on for an entire year. And then young Spielberg thought, "How do I get this bully off my back? How do I How do I influence this bully?" So, one day, he goes up to the bully and he says, "You know, I'm making a movie." Even then he was making home movies. He said, "I'm making a movie about fighting the Nazis. And I was wondering if you would care to play the war hero."
1:00:12 Well, the bully laughs in his face. But, a couple days later, kind of gradually, he comes back and says, "Okay." Young Spielberg dresses him up in fatigues, a military uniform, gives him a kind of a play gun, shoots the movie, he's the war hero. And after that, that boy, that bully, became his best friend. His best friend in high school was this bully. How did that change? How did he achieve that change? How did in in my language, how did he build that bully a golden bridge? The first thing you need to look at again is you go to the balcony, you listen, and you ask yourself, "What is the other side really want? Why does a bully bully? What motivates that
1:00:57 bullying behavior?" Would like to guess what Why does a bully bully? Power. Jealousy, attention, you know, control. So, Spielberg says, "How do I How do I help meet those unsatisfied needs? What can I do? Well, I make movies. So, maybe I'll invite him to be the war hero in my movie." By satisfying those unmet needs, he was able to transform that bully into his best friend. And bullies don't just exist in schools, they exist in the world, they exist in nations. We need to learn the art of finding out what are the underlying psychological needs that we all have. We all have a need for attention or control or power. How do we How do we can we meet those needs in a way that moves the other side in the
1:01:44 right direction? That's the art of building the other side a golden bridge. So, basically, if I if I actually just think about in Colombia, for example, just to go back to that example, early on, we had to think about, okay, there had been no negotiations in 10 years. From the government, how could the government build a golden bridge for the the guerrilla movement, the FARC? How How could they bring them to an agreement? If you put yourself If you've been fighting in the jungle for 50 years, and you're going to lay down your weapons, how are you going to explain that to your troops, to all the people who've been fighting with you, all your supporters? Are you going to say, "No, 50 years it was all in vain"?
1:02:30 You have to have an explanation, you have to have a speech. And so, we thought, okay, how could we help them? And if you think about it, they were the issue that they had gone to war on was the issue of social injustice in Colombia, where there was huge inequality in land, for example. So, we began with the issue of land reform. And land reform was something the government already wanted to do. They realized that there needs to be land reform in the country. So, it was an issue where both sides could meet, but it was something that could give the FARC the sense they're not surrendering. They preserve their dignity, their that they can move with land reform, they can fight in politics, they can continue to to to to work democratically for their aims, so they
1:03:16 don't have to feel like they give up. That's the key in building the other side a golden bridge. So, that brings us to these six powers that you could have in your own negotiations, which is the power of going to the balcony, keeping your eyes on the prize, thinking about what your BATNA is, putting yourself in the other side's shoes, listening to them, reframing by asking questions that direct the spotlight from positions onto interests, remembering when it's necessary to give a no, a positive no even, in a positive way, in a respectful way, and then building the other side a golden bridge. You know, I've uh
1:04:02 one of the places where I I've been working over the years is is the Middle East. So, that's one of my favorite regions, maybe my favorite region of the world. It would be might be surprising to some of you, but I find it a place to go to relax, to go for a walk, uh to go for a walk in the Middle East because the interesting thing is when you go for a walk in the Middle East, very surprisingly, instead of finding what we all expect to find, which is hostility, which is how we associate the Middle East, what you find is an incredible ancient tradition of hospitality. Hospitality where the simplest person, the poorest person, invites you into their home, wants to offer you tea or coffee. And and so, for me,
1:04:51 uh that that's that's a reframe. That's a reframe. That's a way of going to the balcony. And right now, in the world, everyone's worried about the Middle East. And I'm not sure I know the answer to the whole problem of the Middle East, but I do know a first step, which is to go for a walk, take the world for a walk, which is why, actually, I'm here in Geneva at this moment is because uh is because there's a board meeting of an organization that I helped found and my colleagues are here, my board members are here to meet to talk about creating a path a little bit like Santiago de Compostela, which I know goes right through here, right through Geneva, right through along the lake.
1:05:36 But a long-distance walking path that is a path of hospitality, a path of hope, a path that follows it's called the Shomonda Varon. It follows this ancient journey of a person who's known in the region to represent the spirit of hospitality that is the essence of the Middle East. So to me in some ways this represents hope, it represents hospitality, and that hospitality which you receive in the Middle East of which there's few regions, few places in the world where there's a deeper sense of hospitality, reminds us that no matter what divides us and there's a lot that divides us right now on this planet, what unites us, our shared humanity is is far greater. So at
1:06:23 some point if you ever like you can check out our our website which is abrahampath.org. Uh it was the path actually has begun to exist in places like in in Palestine in the West Bank, the the the Masada Ibrahim al-Khalil. You can walk it in various places. You can walk there's a beautiful trail now being developed in Jordan called the Jordan Trail. There there are places that are safe where you can walk and to me represent a giant balcony, a place where we can get perspective on the world, a place where we can listen to the other side, a place where we can reframe our perceptions from hostility to hospitality. And so on that note let me just leave you with one last
1:07:09 story from the Middle East, a negotiating story, uh of an inheritance dispute of a man who, when he died, left in his will to his three sons 17 camels. And to the oldest son, he left half the camels. To the middle son, he left a third of the camels. And to the youngest son, he left a ninth of the camels. Well, the three sons got into a little bit of a negotiation. It wasn't so easy because 17 doesn't divide by two, and it doesn't divide by three, and it doesn't divide by nine. And they began their tempers began to get strained, and they began to quarrel, and there was even maybe threat of violence. So, finally, in desperation, they thought about their BATNA. What's their alternative? And they went and they
1:07:56 consulted a wise old woman about their problem. And she thought about their problem for a long time, and finally she said, "Well, I don't know if I can help you. But at least, if you want, I have a camel here. You can have my camel." So, the three sons said, "Okay." So, then they had 18 camels. Well, the first son took his half. 18 does divide by two, so half of 18 is nine. And the middle son took his third. A third of 18 is six. And the youngest son took his ninth. A ninth of 18 is two. Well, if you add nine and six, you get 15 plus two, 17. There's one camel left over. They give it back to the wise old woman.
1:08:42 Now, if you think about that for a moment, you'll find that a lot of our negotiations are a little bit like those 17 camels. There seems to be no way to divide it up. Somehow, if we can learn to go to the balcony, to take a step back like that wise old woman, to change our assumptions a little bit, change the way we see the situation, sometimes we're able to find that 18th camel. So, I want to wish you much success in your own negotiations and finding that 18th camel. Thank you.
1:09:44 Well, you can ask now questions to William if you would like in English and in French. So, please. Yes gentlemen. Hi Bill. My question is how you prepare for cross-cultural negotiation. Let's say that they ask you to go to Yemen and you've never been there. So, it's it's about preparing for for cross-cultural negotiation. Let's say that you have to go to a new country which you have not been before, what do you do to get ready for it? Yeah. Uh do we need to repeat the question? Everyone heard the question, yeah. So, the question is, you know, how do you how do you get ready for cross-cultural negotiations? Which is an extremely important question
1:10:30 because, as you see, we live in a world, I'm sure in Geneva every one of us has cross-cultural negotiations. It's a it's it's one of to me the the cores of modern education is to be prepared to operate in different cultures. So, absolutely, yes. And to to be prepared, I think anything that you can do to learn a little bit of the language, study the history, study try and understand the psychology, the the really and understand too that culture
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