فصل 02

CHAPTER 2

BE A MIRROR

September 30, 1993

A brisk autumn morning, around eight thirty. Two masked bank robbers trigger an alarm as they storm into the Chase Manhattan Bank at Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street in Brooklyn. There are only two female tellers and a male security guard inside. The robbers crack the unarmed sixty-year-old security guard across the skull with a .357, drag him to the men’s room, and lock him inside. One of the tellers gets the same pistol-whipping treatment.

Then one of the robbers turns to the other teller, puts the barrel in her mouth, and pulls the trigger—click, goes the empty chamber.

“Next one is real,” says the robber. “Now open the vault.”

A bank robbery, with hostages. Happens all the time in the movies, but it had been almost twenty years since there’d been one of these standoffs in New York, the city with more hostage negotiation jobs than any other jurisdiction in the country.

And this happened to be my very first feet-to-the-fire, in-your-face hostage job.

I had been training for about a year and a half in hostage negotiations, but I hadn’t had a chance to use my new skills. For me, 1993 had already been a very busy and incredible ride. Working on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, I had been the co–case agent in an investigation that thwarted a plot to set off bombs in the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the United Nations, and 26 Federal Plaza, the home of the FBI in New York City. We broke it up just as terrorists were mixing bombs in a safe house. The plotters were associated with an Egyptian cell that had ties to the “Blind Sheikh,” who later would be found guilty of masterminding the plot that we uncovered.

You might think a bank robbery would be small potatoes after we busted up a terrorist plot, but by then I had already come to realize that negotiation would be my lifelong passion. I was eager to put my new skills to the test. And besides, there was nothing small about this situation.

When we got the call, my colleague Charlie Beaudoin and I raced to the scene, bailed out of his black Crown Victoria, and made our way to the command post. The whole cavalry showed up for this one—NYPD, FBI, SWAT—all the muscle and savvy of law enforcement up against the knee-jerk desperation of a couple of bank robbers seemingly in over their heads.

New York police, behind a wall of blue and white trucks and patrol cars, had set up across the street inside another bank. SWAT team members, peering through rifle scopes from the roofs of nearby brownstone buildings, had their weapons trained on the bank’s front and rear doors.

ASSUMPTIONS BLIND, HYPOTHESES GUIDE

Good negotiators, going in, know they have to be ready for possible surprises; great negotiators aim to use their skills to reveal the surprises they are certain exist.

Experience will have taught them that they are best served by holding multiple hypotheses—about the situation, about the counterpart’s wants, about a whole array of variables—in their mind at the same time. Present and alert in the moment, they use all the new information that comes their way to test and winnow true hypotheses from false ones.

In negotiation, each new psychological insight or additional piece of information revealed heralds a step forward and allows one to discard one hypothesis in favor of another. You should engage the process with a mindset of discovery. Your goal at the outset is to extract and observe as much information as possible. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often have trouble being negotiators—they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover.

Too often people find it easier just to stick with what they believe. Using what they’ve heard or their own biases, they often make assumptions about others even before meeting them. They even ignore their own perceptions to make them conform to foregone conclusions. These assumptions muck up our perceptual windows onto the world, showing us an unchanging—often flawed—version of the situation.

Great negotiators are able to question the assumptions that the rest of the involved players accept on faith or in arrogance, and thus remain more emotionally open to all possibilities, and more intellectually agile to a fluid situation.

Unfortunately, back in 1993, I was far from great.

Everyone thought the crisis would be over quickly. The bank robbers had little choice but to surrender—or so we thought. We actually started the day with intelligence that the bank robbers wanted to surrender. Little did we know that was a ruse their ringleader planted to buy time. And throughout the day, he constantly referred to the influence the other four bank robbers exerted on him. I hadn’t yet learned to be aware of a counterpart’s overuse of personal pronouns—we/they or me/I. The less important he makes himself, the more important he probably is (and vice versa). We would later find out there was only one other bank robber, and he had been tricked into the robbery. Actually, three robbers, if you counted the getaway driver, who got away before we even entered the scene.

The “lead” hostage-taker was running his own “counterintelligence operation,” feeding us all kinds of misinformation. He wanted us to think he had a bunch of co-conspirators with him—from a number of different countries. He also wanted us to think that his partners were much more volatile and dangerous than he was.

Looking back, of course, his game plan was clear—he wanted to confuse us as much as he could until he could figure a way out. He would constantly tell us that he wasn’t in charge and that every decision was the responsibility of the other guys. He would indicate that he was scared—or, at least, a little tentative—when we asked him to pass along certain information. And yet he always spoke with a voice of complete calm and absolute confidence. It was a reminder to my colleagues and me that until you know what you’re dealing with, you don’t know what you’re dealing with.

Though the call had come in about 8:30 a.m., by the time we arrived across the street from the bank and made contact it was probably about 10:30 a.m. The word when we came on the scene was that this was going to be cookie-cutter, by the book, short and sweet. Our commanders thought we’d be in and out of there in ten minutes, because the bad guys supposedly wanted to give themselves up. This would later become a problem, when negotiations stalled and Command became embarrassed, because they’d made the mistake of sharing this early optimism with the press, based on all the early misinformation.

We arrived on the scene to take a surrender, but the situation went sideways almost immediately.

Everything we assumed we knew was wrong.

CALM THE SCHIZOPHRENIC

Our Negotiation Operation Center (NOC) was set up in an office in a bank immediately across a narrow street from the Chase branch. We were way too close to the hostage site, so right away we were at a disadvantage. We were less than thirty yards from the crisis point, where ideally you want to have a little more of a buffer than that. You want to put some distance between you and whatever worst-case scenario might be waiting at the other end of the deal.

When my partner and I arrived, I was immediately assigned to coach the police department negotiator on the phone. His name was Joe, and he was doing fine—but in these types of situations, nobody worked alone. We always worked in teams. The thinking behind this policy was that all these extra sets of ears would pick up extra information. In some standoffs, we had as many as five people on the line, analyzing the information as it came in, offering behind-the-scenes input and guidance to our man on the phone—and that’s how we were set up here. We had Joe taking the lead on the phone, and another three or four of us were listening in, passing notes back and forth, trying to make sense of a confusing situation. One of us was trying to gauge the mood of the bad guy taking the lead on the other end, and another was listening in for clues or “tells” that might give us a better read on what we were facing, and so on.

Students of mine balk at this notion, asking, “Seriously, do you really need a whole team to . . . hear someone out?” The fact that the FBI has come to that conclusion, I tell them, should be a wake-up call. It’s really not that easy to listen well.

We are easily distracted. We engage in selective listening, hearing only what we want to hear, our minds acting on a cognitive bias for consistency rather than truth. And that’s just the start.

Most people approach a negotiation so preoccupied by the arguments that support their position that they are unable to listen attentively. In one of the most cited research papers in psychology,1 George A. Miller persuasively put forth the idea that we can process only about seven pieces of information in our conscious mind at any given moment. In other words, we are easily overwhelmed.

For those people who view negotiation as a battle of arguments, it’s the voices in their own head that are overwhelming them. When they’re not talking, they’re thinking about their arguments, and when they are talking, they’re making their arguments. Often those on both sides of the table are doing the same thing, so you have what I call a state of schizophrenia: everyone just listening to the voice in their head (and not well, because they’re doing seven or eight other things at the same time). It may look like there are only two people in a conversation, but really it’s more like four people all talking at once.

There’s one powerful way to quiet the voice in your head and the voice in their head at the same time: treat two schizophrenics with just one pill. Instead of prioritizing your argument—in fact, instead of doing any thinking at all in the early goings about what you’re going to say—make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say. In that mode of true active listening—aided by the tactics you’ll learn in the following chapters—you’ll disarm your counterpart. You’ll make them feel safe. The voice in their head will begin to quiet down.

The goal is to identify what your counterparts actually need (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) and get them feeling safe enough to talk and talk and talk some more about what they want. The latter will help you discover the former. Wants are easy to talk about, representing the aspiration of getting our way, and sustaining any illusion of control we have as we begin to negotiate; needs imply survival, the very minimum required to make us act, and so make us vulnerable. But neither wants nor needs are where we start; it begins with listening, making it about the other people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust and safety for a real conversation to begin.

We were far from that goal with the lead hostage-taker on the call. He kept putting up these weird smoke screens. He wouldn’t give up his name, he tried to disguise his voice, he was always telling Joe he was being put on speaker so everyone around him in the bank could hear, and then he would abruptly announce that he was putting Joe on “hold” and hang up the phone. He was constantly asking about a van, saying he and his partners wanted us to arrange one for them so they could drive themselves and the hostages to the local precinct to surrender. That was where the surrender nonsense had come from—but, of course, this wasn’t a surrender plan so much as it was an escape plan. In the back of his mind, this guy thought he could somehow leave the bank without being taken into custody, and now that his getaway driver had fled the scene he needed access to a vehicle.

After it was all over, a couple of other details came clear. We weren’t the only ones who had been lied to. Apparently, this lead bank robber hadn’t told his partners they were going to rob a bank that morning. It turned out he was a cash courier who serviced the bank, and his partners were under the impression that they were going to burglarize the ATM. They didn’t sign up for taking hostages, so we learned that this guy’s co-conspirators were also hostages, in a way. They were caught up in a bad situation they didn’t see coming—and, in the end, it was this “disconnect” among the hostage-takers that helped us to drive a wedge between them and put an end to the stalemate.

SLOW. IT. DOWN.

The leader wanted to make us think he and his partners were taking good care of his hostages, but in reality the security guard was out of the picture and the second bank teller had run to the bank basement to hide. Whenever Joe said he wanted to talk to the hostages, the hostage-taker would stall, and make it seem like there was this frenzy of activity going on inside the bank, going to ridiculous lengths to tell us how much time and energy he and his cohorts were spending on taking good care of the hostages. Very often, the leader would use this as a reason to put Joe on hold, or to end a call. He’d say, “The girls need to go to the bathroom.” Or, “The girls want to call their families.” Or, “The girls want to get something to eat.” Joe was doing a good job keeping this guy talking, but he was slightly limited by the negotiating approach that police departments were using at the time. The approach was half MSU—Making Shit Up—and half a sort of sales approach—basically trying to persuade, coerce, or manipulate in any way possible. The problem was, we were in too much of a hurry, driving too hard toward a quick solution; trying to be a problem solver, not a people mover.

Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard and we risk undermining the rapport and trust we’ve built. There’s plenty of research that now validates the passage of time as one of the most important tools for a negotiator. When you slow the process down, you also calm it down. After all, if someone is talking, they’re not shooting.

We caught a break when the robbers started to make noise about food. Joe was going back and forth with them for a while on what they were going to have and how we were going to get it to them. It became a negotiation in and of itself. We got it all set up, prepared to send the food in on a kind of robot device, because that’s what this guy was comfortable with, but then he did an about-face, said to forget about it. Said they’d found some food inside, so it was just one brick wall after another, one smoke screen after another. It would feel to us like we were making a little progress, then this guy would take an abrupt turn, or hang up on us, or change his mind.

Meanwhile, our investigators used the time to run the registration of every one of the dozens of vehicles found nearby on the street, and managed to speak to the owners of every one of them except one—a car belonging to someone named Chris Watts. This became our one and only lead, at the time, and as our endless back-and-forth continued on the phone we sent a group of investigators to the address on Chris Watts’s registration, where they found someone who knew Chris Watts and agreed to come down to the scene of the standoff to possibly identify him.

We still didn’t have a visual on the inside, so our eyewitness had to be more of an “earwitness”—and he was able to identify Chris Watts by his voice.

We now knew more about our adversary than he thought we knew, which put us at a momentary advantage. We were putting together all the puzzle pieces, but it didn’t get us any closer to our endgame, which was to determine for sure who was inside the building, to ensure the health and well-being of the hostages, and to get them all out safely—the good guys and the bad guys.

THE VOICE

After five hours, we were stuck, so the lieutenant in charge asked me to take over. Joe was out; I was in. Basically, it was the only strategic play at our disposal that didn’t involve an escalation in force.

The man we now knew as Chris Watts had been in the habit of ending his calls abruptly, so my job was to find a way to keep him talking. I switched into my Late-Night, FM DJ Voice: deep, soft, slow, and reassuring. I had been instructed to confront Watts as soon as possible about his identity. I also came onto the phone with no warning, replacing Joe, against standard protocol. It was a shrewd move by the NYPD lieutenant to shake things up, but it easily could have backfired. This soothing voice was the key to easing the confrontation.

Chris Watts heard my voice on the line and cut me off immediately—said, “Hey, what happened to Joe?”

I said, “Joe’s gone. This is Chris. You’re talking to me now.”

I didn’t put it like a question. I made a downward-inflecting statement, in a downward-inflecting tone of voice. The best way to describe the late-night FM DJ’s voice is as the voice of calm and reason.

When deliberating on a negotiating strategy or approach, people tend to focus all their energies on what to say or do, but it’s how we are (our general demeanor and delivery) that is both the easiest thing to enact and the most immediately effective mode of influence. Our brains don’t just process and understand the actions and words of others but their feelings and intentions too, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions. On a mostly unconscious level, we can understand the minds of others not through any kind of thinking but through quite literally grasping what the other is feeling.

Think of it as a kind of involuntary neurological telepathy—each of us in every given moment signaling to the world around us whether we are ready to play or fight, laugh or cry.

When we radiate warmth and acceptance, conversations just seem to flow. When we enter a room with a level of comfort and enthusiasm, we attract people toward us. Smile at someone on the street, and as a reflex they’ll smile back. Understanding that reflex and putting it into practice is critical to the success of just about every negotiating skill there is to learn.

That’s why your most powerful tool in any verbal communication is your voice. You can use your voice to intentionally reach into someone’s brain and flip an emotional switch. Distrusting to trusting. Nervous to calm. In an instant, the switch will flip just like that with the right delivery.

There are essentially three voice tones available to negotiators: the late-night FM DJ voice, the positive/playful voice, and the direct or assertive voice. Forget the assertive voice for now; except in very rare circumstances, using it is like slapping yourself in the face while you’re trying to make progress. You’re signaling dominance onto your counterpart, who will either aggressively, or passive-aggressively, push back against attempts to be controlled.

Most of the time, you should be using the positive/playful voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking. A smile, even while talking on the phone, has an impact tonally that the other person will pick up on.

The effect these voices have are cross-cultural and never lost in translation. On a vacation to Turkey with his girlfriend, one of our instructors at The Black Swan Group was befuddled—not to mention a little embarrassed—that his partner was repeatedly getting better deals in their backstreet haggling sessions at the spice markets in Istanbul. For the merchants in such markets throughout the Middle East, bargaining is an art form. Their emotional intelligence is finely honed, and they’ll use hospitality and friendliness in a powerful way to draw you in and create reciprocity that ends in an exchange of money. But it works both ways, as our instructor discovered while observing his girlfriend in action: she approached each encounter as a fun game, so that no matter how aggressively she pushed, her smile and playful demeanor primed her merchant friends to settle on a successful outcome.

When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). It applies to the smile-er as much as to the smile-ee: a smile on your face, and in your voice, will increase your own mental agility.

Playful wasn’t the move with Chris Watts. The way the late-night FM DJ voice works is that, when you inflect your voice in a downward way, you put it out there that you’ve got it covered. Talking slowly and clearly you convey one idea: I’m in control. When you inflect in an upward way, you invite a response. Why? Because you’ve brought in a measure of uncertainty. You’ve made a statement sound like a question. You’ve left the door open for the other guy to take the lead, so I was careful here to be quiet, self-assured.

It’s the same voice I might use in a contract negotiation, when an item isn’t up for discussion. If I see a work-for-hire clause, for example, I might say, “We don’t do work-for-hire.” Just like that, plain, simple, and friendly. I don’t offer up an alternative, because it would beg further discussion, so I just make a straightforward declaration.

That’s how I played it here. I said, “Joe’s gone. You’re talking to me now.”

Done deal.

You can be very direct and to the point as long as you create safety by a tone of voice that says I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s figure things out.

The tide was turning. Chris Watts was rattled, but he had a few moves left in him. One of the bad guys went down to the basement and collected one of the female bank tellers. She’d disappeared into the bowels of the bank at some point, but Chris Watts and his accomplice hadn’t chased after her because they knew she wasn’t going anywhere. Now one of the bank robbers dragged her back upstairs and put her on the phone.

She said, “I’m okay.” That’s all.

I said, “Who is this?”

She said, “I’m okay.”

I wanted to keep her talking, so I asked her name—but then, just like that, she was gone.

This was a brilliant move on Chris Watts’s part. It was a threat, teasing us with the woman’s voice, but subtly and indirectly. It was a way for the bad guy to let us know he was calling the shots on his end of the phone without directly escalating the situation. He’d given us a “proof of life,” confirming that he did indeed have hostages with him who were in decent enough shape to talk on the phone, but stopped short of allowing us to gather any useful information.

He’d managed to take back a measure of control.

MIRRORING

Chris Watts came back on the phone trying to act like nothing had happened. He was a little rattled, that’s for sure, but now he was talking.

“We’ve identified every car on the street and talked to all the owners except one,” I said to Watts. “We’ve got a van out here, a blue and gray van. We’ve been able to get a handle on the owners of all of the vehicles except this one in particular. Do you know anything about it?” “The other vehicle’s not out there because you guys chased my driver away . . .” he blurted.

“We chased your driver away?” I mirrored.

“Well, when he seen the police he cut.”

“We don’t know anything about this guy; is he the one who was driving the van?” I asked.

The mirroring continued between me and Watts, and he made a series of damaging admissions. He started vomiting information, as we now refer to it in my consulting business. He talked about an accomplice we had no knowledge of at the time. That exchange helped us nail the driver of the getaway car.

Mirroring, also called isopraxism, is essentially imitation. It’s another neurobehavior humans (and other animals) display in which we copy each other to comfort each other. It can be done with speech patterns, body language, vocabulary, tempo, and tone of voice. It’s generally an unconscious behavior—we are rarely aware of it when it’s happening—but it’s a sign that people are bonding, in sync, and establishing the kind of rapport that leads to trust.

It’s a phenomenon (and now technique) that follows a very basic but profound biological principle: We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together. Mirroring, then, when practiced consciously, is the art of insinuating similarity. “Trust me,” a mirror signals to another’s unconscious, “You and I—we’re alike.” Once you’re attuned to the dynamic, you’ll see it everywhere: couples walking on the street with their steps in perfect synchrony; friends in conversation at a park, both nodding their heads and crossing the legs at about the same time. These people are, in a word, connected.

While mirroring is most often associated with forms of nonverbal communication, especially body language, as negotiators a “mirror” focuses on the words and nothing else. Not the body language. Not the accent. Not the tone or delivery. Just the words.

It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective.

By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting. Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers: mirroring or positive reinforcement.

One group of waiters, using positive reinforcement, lavished praise and encouragement on patrons using words such as “great,” “no problem,” and “sure” in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.

I decided it was time to hit him with his name—to let him know we were on to him. I said, “There’s a vehicle out here, and it’s registered to a Chris Watts.”

He said, “Okay.” Not letting anything on.

I said, “Is he there? Is this you? Are you Chris Watts?”

It was a stupid question, on my part. A mistake. For a mirror to be effective, you’ve got to let it sit there and do its work. It needs a bit of silence. I stepped all over my mirror. As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back.

“Are you Chris Watts?”

What the hell could this guy say to that? Of course, he replied, “No.”

I’d made a bone-headed move and given Chris Watts a way to dodge this confrontation, but he was nevertheless rattled. Up until this moment, he’d thought he was anonymous. Whatever fantasy he had running through his head, there was a way out for him, a do-over button. Now he knew different. I composed myself, slowed it down a little, and this time shut my mouth after the mirror—I said, “No? You said ‘okay.’” Now I had him, I thought. His voice went way up. He ended up blurting a few things out, vomiting more information, and became so flustered he stopped talking to me. Suddenly his accomplice, who we later learned was Bobby Goodwin, came onto the phone.

We hadn’t heard from this second hostage-taker, until now. We’d known all along that Chris Watts wasn’t acting alone, but we hadn’t gotten a good read on how many people he had working with him on this, and now here was his unwitting accomplice, thinking our original police department negotiator was still handling our end. We knew this because he kept calling me “Joe,” which told us he’d been in the loop early on, and somewhat less involved as the stalemate dragged on.

At the very least, the disconnect told me these guys weren’t exactly on the same page—but I didn’t jump to correct him.

Another thing: it sounded like this second guy was speaking through a towel, or a sweatshirt—like he was biting on some kind of fabric, even. Going to all these lengths to mask his voice, which meant he was clearly scared. He was nervous, jumpy as hell, anxious over how this standoff was going down.

I tried to set him at ease—still with the downward-inflecting DJ voice. I said, “Nobody’s going anywhere.” I said, “Nobody’s gonna get hurt.”

After about a minute and a half, the jumpiness seemed to disappear. The muffled voice, too. His voice came through much more clearly as he said, “I trust you, Joe.”

The more I kept this second guy on the phone, the more it became clear he was someplace he did not want to be. Bobby wanted out—and, of course, he wanted out without getting hurt. He was already in deep, but he didn’t want it to get any deeper. He didn’t start out that day planning to rob a bank, but it took hearing my calm voice on the other end of the phone for him to start to see a way out. The seventh-largest standing army in the world was at the ready outside the bank doors—that’s the size and scope of the NYPD, in full force, and their guns were fixed on him and his partner. Obviously, Bobby was desperate to step out those doors unharmed.

I didn’t know where Bobby was, inside the bank. To this day, I don’t know if he managed to step away from his partner, or if he was talking to me in plain sight of Chris Watts. I only know that I had his full attention, and that he was looking for a way to end the standoff—or, at least, to end his role in it.

I learned later that in between phone calls Chris Watts was busy squirreling cash inside the bank walls. He was also burning piles of cash, in full view of the two female hostages. On the face of it, this was bizarre behavior, but to a guy like Chris Watts there was a certain logic to it. Apparently, he’d gotten it in his head that he could burn, say, $50,000, and if $300,000 was reported missing bank officials wouldn’t think to go looking for the other $250,000. It was an interesting deception—not exactly clever, but interesting. It showed a weird attention to detail. In his own mind at least, if Chris Watts managed to escape this box he’d made for himself, he could lie low for a while and come back at some future date for the money he’d stashed away—money that would no longer be on the bank’s ledgers.

What I liked about this second guy, Bobby, was that he didn’t try to play any games with me on the phone. He was a straight shooter, so I was able to respond as a straight shooter in kind. The same way I’d get back whatever I put out, he was getting back whatever he was putting out, so I was with him on this. Experience told me all I had to do was keep him talking and he’d come around. We’d find a way to get him out of that bank—with or without Chris Watts.

Someone on my team handed me a note: “Ask him if he wants to come out.”

I said, “Do you want to come out first?”

I paused, remaining silent.

“I don’t know how I’d do it,” Bobby said finally.

“What’s stopping you from doing it right now?” I asked.

“How do I do that?” he asked again.

“Tell you what. Meet me out front right now.”

This was a breakthrough moment for us—but we still had to get Bobby out of there, and find a way to let him know that I’d be waiting for him on the other side of the door. I’d given him my word that I would be the one to take his surrender, and that he wouldn’t get hurt, and now we had to make that happen—and very often it’s this implementation phase that can be the most difficult.

Our team scrambled to put a plan in place to bring this about. I started putting on bulletproof gear. We surveyed the scene, figuring I could position myself behind one of the big trucks we’d parked out in front of the bank, to give me a measure of cover, just in case.

Then we ran into one of those maddening situations where one hand didn’t know what the other was doing. It turned out the bank door had been barricaded from the outside early on in the standoff—a precaution to ensure that none of the bank robbers could flee the scene. We all knew this, of course, on some level, but when the time came for Bobby to give himself up and walk out the door, it’s like our brains went into sleep mode. No one on the SWAT team thought to remind anyone on the negotiating team of this one significant detail, so for a couple long beats Bobby couldn’t get out, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach that whatever progress we’d just made with this guy would be for nothing.

So there we were, scrambling to recover. Soon, two SWAT guys moved forward toward the entrance, with ballistic shields, guns drawn, to take the locks and the barricade off the door—and at this point they still didn’t know what they were facing on the other side. It was a super-tense moment. There could have been a dozen guns on these two SWAT guys, but there was nothing for them to do but make their slow approach. Those guys were rock solid. They unlocked the door, backed away, and finally we were good to go.

Bobby came out—his hands in the air. I’d walked him through a specific set of instructions on what to do when he came out the door, what to expect. A couple of SWAT guys patted him down. Bobby turned and looked and said, “Where’s Chris? Take me to Chris.” Finally, they brought him around to me, and we were able to debrief him inside our makeshift command post. This was the first we learned that there was only one other hostage-taker inside—and this naturally set the commander off. I didn’t learn this until later, but I could see why he would have been angry and embarrassed at this latest turn. All along, he’d been telling the media there were a bunch of bad guys inside—an international assemblage of bad guys, remember? But now that it turned out it was essentially a two-man operation, and one of the bad guys had wanted no part of it, the commander looked like he didn’t have a handle on the situation.

But like I said, we didn’t know about the commander’s reaction just yet. All we knew was that we’d just gotten all this new intel, which told us we were closer to achieving our desired outcome than we had just thought. This was a positive development, something to celebrate. With what we now knew, it was going to be a whole lot easier to negotiate our way through the rest of it, and yet this commander was angry. He didn’t like that he’d been played, so he turned to one of the guys from NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) and commanded them to get a camera inside the bank, a mic . . . something.

Now that I was huddled with Bobby, the commander swapped me out in favor of another primary negotiator on the phone. The new negotiator played it the same way I had, a couple of hours earlier—said, “This is Dominick. You’re talking to me now.” Dominick Misino was a great hostage negotiator—in my view, one of the world’s great closers, which was the term often used for the guy brought in to bang out the last details and secure the deal. He didn’t get rattled and he was good at what he did.

Matter-of-fact. Street smart.

Dominick plowed ahead. And then, an amazing thing happened—a nearly disastrous amazing thing. As Chris Watts was talking to Dominick, he heard an electric tool of some kind burrowing its way through the wall behind him. It was one of our TARU guys, trying to get a bug planted inside—in precisely the wrong spot, at precisely the wrong time. Chris Watts was already rattled enough as it was, his partner giving himself up like that and leaving him to play out the siege on his own. And now, to hear our guys drilling through the wall, it just about set him off.

He responded like a pit bull backed into a corner. He called Dominick a liar. Dominick was unflappable. He kept his cool as Chris Watts raged on the other end of the phone, and eventually Dominick’s cool, calm demeanor brought the guy from a boil to a simmer.

In retrospect, it was a fool move to try to get a bug inside the bank at this late stage—born out of frustration and panic. We’d gotten one of the hostage-takers out of the bank, but now we’d given back a measure of control. Startling the one remaining hostage-taker, who may or may not have been a loose cannon, was absolutely not a good idea.

As Dominick went to work smoothing over the situation, Chris Watts switched things up on us. He said, “What if I let a hostage go?”

This came as if from nowhere. Dominick hadn’t even thought to ask, but Chris Watts just offered up one of the tellers like it was no big deal—and to him, at this late stage in the standoff, I guess it wasn’t. From his view, such a conciliatory move might buy him enough time to figure out a way to escape.

Dominick remained calm, but seized on the opportunity. He said he wanted to talk to the hostage first, to make sure everything went okay, so Chris Watts tapped one of the women and put her on the phone. The woman had been paying attention, knew there’d been some sort of snafu when Bobby wanted to give himself up, so even though she was still completely terrified she had the presence of mind to ask about the door. I remember thinking this showed a lot of brass—to be terrified, held against your will, roughed up a bit, and to still have your wits about you.

She said, “Are you sure you have a key to the front door?”

Dominick said, “The front door’s open.”

And it was.

Ultimately, what happened was one of the women came out, unharmed, and an hour or so later the other woman followed, also unharmed.

We were working on getting the bank guard out, but we couldn’t be sure from the accounts of these bank tellers what kind of shape this guy might be in. We didn’t even know if he was still alive. They hadn’t seen him since first thing that morning. He could have had a heart attack and died—there was just no way to know.

But Chris Watts had one last trick up his sleeve. He pulled a fast one on us and out of the blue, offered to come out. Maybe he thought he could catch us off guard one last time. What was strange about his sudden appearance was that he seemed to be looking about, surveying the scene, like he still thought he’d somehow elude capture. Right up until the moment the cops put the handcuffs on him, his gaze was darting back and forth, scanning for some kind of opportunity. The bright lights were on this guy, he was basically surrounded, but somewhere in the back of his scheming, racing mind he still thought he had a chance.

It was a long, long day, but it went down in the books as a success. Nobody was hurt. The bad guys were in custody. And I emerged from the experience humbled by how much more there was to learn, but at the same time, awakened to and inspired by the elemental power of emotion, dialogue, and the FBI’s evolving toolbox of applied psychological tactics to influence and persuade just about anyone in any situation.

In the decades since my initiation into the world of high-stakes negotiations, I’ve been struck again and again by how valuable these seemingly simple approaches can be. The ability to get inside the head—and eventually under the skin—of your counterpart depends on these techniques and a willingness to change your approach, based on new evidence, along the way. As I’ve worked with executives and students to develop these skills, I always try to reinforce the message that being right isn’t the key to a successful negotiation—having the right mindset is.

HOW TO CONFRONT—AND GET YOUR WAY—WITHOUT CONFRONTATION

I only half-jokingly refer to mirroring as magic or a Jedi mind trick because it gives you the ability to disagree without being disagreeable.

To consider just how useful that can be, think of the average workplace: invariably there is still someone in a position of authority who arrived at that position through aggressive assertiveness, sometimes outright intimidation, with “old school” top-down, command-and-control assumptions that the boss is always right. And let’s not delude ourselves: whatever the enlightened rules of the “new school,” in every environment (work or otherwise) you will always have to deal with forceful type A people who prefer consent to collaboration.

If you take a pit bull approach with another pit bull, you generally end up with a messy scene and lots of bruised feelings and resentment. Luckily, there’s another way without all the mess.

It’s just four simple steps:

1. Use the late-night FM DJ voice.

2. Start with “I’m sorry . . .”

3. Mirror.

4. Silence. At least four seconds, to let the mirror work its magic on your counterpart.

5. Repeat.

One of my students experienced the effectiveness of this simple process at her workplace, where her impulsive boss was known for his “drive-bys”: an infuriating practice by which the boss would suddenly swing by one’s office or cubicle unannounced with an “urgent,” poorly thought out assignment that created a lot of unnecessary work. Past attempts at any kind of debate created immediate pushback. “There’s a better way” was always interpreted by this boss as “the lazy way.” Such a drive-by occurred toward the end of a long consulting engagement, one that had generated literally thousands of documents. The boss, still skeptical of anything “digital,” wanted the security of paper copies.

Popping his head into her office, the boss said, “Let’s make two copies of all the paperwork.”

“I’m sorry, two copies?” she mirrored in response, remembering not only the DJ voice, but to deliver the mirror in an inquisitive tone. The intention behind most mirrors should be “Please, help me understand.” Every time you mirror someone, they will reword what they’ve said. They will never say it exactly the same way they said it the first time. Ask someone, “What do you mean by that?” and you’re likely to incite irritation or defensiveness. A mirror, however, will get you the clarity you want while signaling respect and concern for what the other person is saying.

“Yes,” her boss responded, “one for us and one for the customer.”

“I’m sorry, so you are saying that the client is asking for a copy and we need a copy for internal use?”

“Actually, I’ll check with the client—they haven’t asked for anything. But I definitely want a copy. That’s just how I do business.”

“Absolutely,” she responded. “Thanks for checking with the customer. Where would you like to store the in-house copy? There’s no more space in the file room here.”

“It’s fine. You can store it anywhere,” he said, slightly perturbed now.

“Anywhere?” she mirrored again, with calm concern. When another person’s tone of voice or body language is inconsistent with his words, a good mirror can be particularly useful.

In this case, it caused her boss to take a nice, long pause—something he did not often do. My student sat silent. “As a matter of fact, you can put them in my office,” he said, with more composure than he’d had the whole conversation. “I’ll get the new assistant to print it for me after the project is done. For now, just create two digital backups.” A day later her boss emailed and wrote simply, “The two digital backups will be fine.”

Not long after, I received an ecstatic email from this student: “I was shocked! I love mirrors! A week of work avoided!”

Mirroring will make you feel awkward as heck when you first try it. That’s the only hard part about it; the technique takes a little practice. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’ll become a conversational Swiss Army knife valuable in just about every professional and social setting.

KEY LESSONS

The language of negotiation is primarily a language of conversation and rapport: a way of quickly establishing relationships and getting people to talk and think together. Which is why when you think of the greatest negotiators of all time, I’ve got a surprise for you—think Oprah Winfrey.

Her daily television show was a case study of a master practitioner at work: on a stage face-to-face with someone she has never met, in front of a crowded studio of hundreds, with millions more watching from home, and a task to persuade that person in front of her, sometimes against his or her own best interests, to talk and talk and keep talking, ultimately sharing with the world deep, dark secrets that they had held hostage in their own minds for a lifetime.

Look closely at such an interaction after reading this chapter and suddenly you’ll see a refined set of powerful skills: a conscious smile to ease the tension, use of subtle verbal and nonverbal language to signal empathy (and thus security), a certain downward inflection in the voice, embrace of specific kinds of questions and avoidance of others—a whole array of previously hidden skills that will prove invaluable to you, once you’ve learned to use them.

Here are some of the key lessons from this chapter to remember:

? A good negotiator prepares, going in, to be ready for possible surprises; a great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find.

? Don’t commit to assumptions; instead, view them as hypotheses and use the negotiation to test them rigorously.

? People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.

? To quiet the voices in your head, make your sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say.

? Slow. It. Down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you’ve built.

? Put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart.

There are three voice tones available to negotiators:

1. The late-night FM DJ voice: Use selectively to make a point. Inflect your voice downward, keeping it calm and slow. When done properly, you create an aura of authority and trustworthiness without triggering defensiveness.

2. The positive/playful voice: Should be your default voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking.

3. The direct or assertive voice: Used rarely. Will cause problems and create pushback.

? Mirrors work magic. Repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. We fear what’s different and are drawn to what’s similar. Mirroring is the art of insinuating similarity, which facilitates bonding. Use mirrors to encourage the other side to empathize and bond with you, keep people talking, buy your side time to regroup, and encourage your counterparts to reveal their strategy.