فصل 07

CHAPTER 7

CREATE THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL

A month after I’d finished working the case of Jeffrey Schilling in May 2001, I got orders from headquarters to head back to Manila. The same bad guys who’d taken Schilling, a brutal group of radical Islamists named the Abu Sayyaf, had raided the Dos Palmas private diving resort and taken twenty hostages, including three Americans: Martin and Gracia Burnham, a missionary couple from Wichita, Kansas; and Guillermo Sobero, a guy who ran a California waterproofing firm.

Dos Palmas was a negotiator’s nightmare from the start. The day after the kidnappings, the recently elected Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, set up the most confrontational, nonconstructive dynamic possible by publicly declaring “all-out war” on the Abu Sayyaf.

Not exactly empathetic discourse, right?

It got a lot worse.

The Philippine army and marines had a turf war in the midst of the negotiations, pissing off the kidnappers with several botched raids. Because American hostages were involved, the CIA, the FBI, and U.S. military intelligence were all called in and we too squabbled among ourselves. Then the kidnappers raped and killed several hostages, 9/11 happened, and the Abu Sayyaf was linked to Al Qaeda.

By the time the crisis concluded in an orgy of gunshots in June 2002, Dos Palmas had officially become the biggest failure in my professional life. To call it a train wreck would be generous, if you know what I mean.

But failures plant the seeds of future success, and our failure in the Philippines was no exception.

If the Dos Palmas calamity showed me anything, it was that we all were still suffering under the notion that negotiation was a wrestling match where the point is to exhaust your opponent into submission, hope for the best, and never back down.

As my disappointment with Dos Palmas forced me to reckon with our failed techniques, I took a deep look into the newest negotiating theories—some great and some completely harebrained—and I had a chance encounter with a case in Pittsburgh that completely changed how I looked at the interpersonal dynamics of negotiation conversations.

From the ashes of Dos Palmas, then, we learned a lesson that would forever change how the FBI negotiated kidnappings. We learned that negotiation was coaxing, not overcoming; co-opting, not defeating. Most important, we learned that successful negotiation involved getting your counterpart to do the work for you and suggest your solution himself. It involved giving him the illusion of control while you, in fact, were the one defining the conversation.

The tool we developed is something I call the calibrated, or open-ended, question. What it does is remove aggression from conversations by acknowledging the other side openly, without resistance. In doing so, it lets you introduce ideas and requests without sounding pushy. It allows you to nudge.

I’ll explain it in depth later on, but for now let me say that it’s really as simple as removing the hostility from the statement “You can’t leave” and turning it into a question.

“What do you hope to achieve by going?”

DON’T TRY TO NEGOTIATE IN A FIREFIGHT

The moment I arrived in Manila on the Burnham-Sobero case I was sent down to the Mindanao region, where the Philippine military was lobbing bullets and rockets into a hospital complex where the Abu Sayyaf and the hostages were holed up.

This was no place for a negotiator, because it’s impossible to have a dialogue in the middle of a firefight. Then things got worse: when I woke up the next morning, I learned that during the night the kidnappers had taken their hostages and escaped.

The “escape” was the first sign that this operation was going to be a rolling train wreck and that the Philippine military was less than a trustworthy partner.

During debriefings following the episode, it was revealed that during a cease-fire a military guy had collected a suitcase from the thugs in the hospital, and not long after that all the soldiers on the rear perimeter of the hospital had been called away for a “meeting.” Coincidentally—or not—the bad guys chose that moment to slip away.

Things really blew up two weeks later, on the Philippines’ Independence Day, when Abu Sabaya announced that he was going to behead “one of the whites” unless the government called off its manhunt by midday. We knew this meant one of the Americans and anticipated it would be Guillermo Sobero.

We didn’t have any direct contact with the kidnappers at the time because our partners in the Philippine military had assigned us an intermediary who always “forgot” to make sure we were present for his phone calls with the kidnappers (and similarly “forgot” to tape them). All we could do was send text messages offering to schedule a time to speak.

What ended up happening was that just before the noon deadline, Sabaya and a member of the Philippine presidential cabinet had a conversation on a radio talk show, and the government conceded to Sabaya’s demand to name a Malaysian senator as a negotiator. In exchange, Sabaya agreed not to kill a hostage.

But it was too late to fix this atmosphere of confrontation, distrust, and lies. That afternoon, the hostages heard Sabaya on the phone yelling, “But that was part of the agreement! That was a part of the agreement!” Not long after, the Abu Sayyaf beheaded Guillermo Sobero and for good measure the group took fifteen more hostages.

With none of the important moving parts anywhere near under our control and the United States largely uninterested in spite of Sobero’s murder, I headed back to Washington, D.C. It seemed like there was little we could do.

Then 9/11 changed everything.

Once a minor terrorist outfit, the Abu Sayyaf was suddenly linked to Al Qaeda. And then a Philippine TV reporter named Arlyn dela Cruz got into the Abu Sayyaf camp and videotaped Sabaya as he taunted the American missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham, who were so emaciated they looked like concentration camp survivors. The video hit the U.S. news media like thunder. Suddenly, the case became a major U.S. government priority.

THERE IS ALWAYS A TEAM ON THE OTHER SIDE

The FBI sent me back in. Now I was sent in to make sure a deal got made. It was all very high profile, too. Some of my contacts reported that FBI director Robert Mueller was personally briefing President George W. Bush every morning on what we were doing. When Director Mueller showed up in the U.S. Embassy in Manila and I was introduced to him, a look of recognition came over his face. That was a very heady moment.

But all the support in the world won’t work if your counterpart’s team is dysfunctional. If your negotiation efforts don’t reach past your counterpart and into the team behind him, then you’ve got a “hope”-based deal—and hope is not a strategy.

One of the things I failed to fully appreciate then was that the kidnappers had changed negotiators themselves. Sabaya had been replaced.

My boss Gary Noesner had, in a previous kidnapping, pointed out to me that a change in negotiators by the other side almost always signaled that they meant to take a harder line. What I didn’t realize at the time was this meant Sabaya was going to play a role as a deal breaker if he wasn’t accounted for.

Our new tack was to buy the Burnhams back. Although the United States officially doesn’t pay ransoms, a donor had been found who would provide $300,000. The new Abu Sayyaf negotiator agreed to a release.

The ransom drop was a disaster. The kidnappers decided that they wouldn’t release the Burnhams: or, rather, Sabaya, who was physically in charge of the hostages, refused to release them. He had cut his own side-deal—one we didn’t know about—and it had fallen through. The new negotiator, now embarrassed and in a foul mood, covered himself by claiming that the payment was short $600. We were baffled—“Six hundred dollars? You won’t let hostages go because of six hundred dollars?”—and we tried to argue that if the money was missing, it must have been the courier who had stolen the money. But we had no dynamic of trust and cooperation to back us up. The $300,000 was gone and we were back to rarely answered text messages.

The slow-motion wreck culminated about two months later with a botched “rescue.” A team of Philippine Scout Rangers walking around in the woods came across the Abu Sayyaf camp, or so they said. Later we heard another government agency had tipped them off. That other government agency (OGA) had not told us about their location because . . . because . . . why? That’s something I will never understand.

The Scout Rangers formed a skirmish line from a tree line above the camp and opened fire, indiscriminately pouring bullets into the area. Gracia and Martin were taking a nap in their hammocks when the fire started raining down. They both fell out of their hammocks and started to roll down the hill toward safety. But as a sheet of bullets from their rescuers fell on them, Gracia felt a searing burn flare through her right thigh. And then, she felt Martin go limp.

Minutes later, after the last rebels fled, the squad of Philippine soldiers tried to reassure Gracia that her husband was fine, but she shook her head. After a year in captivity, she had no time for fantasies. Gracia knew her husband was dead, and she was right: he’d been hit in the chest, three times, by “friendly” fire.

In the end, the supposed rescue mission killed two of the three hostages there that day (a Philippine nurse named Ediborah Yap also died), and the big fish—Sabaya—escaped to live a few more months. From beginning to end, the thirteen-month mission was a complete failure, a waste of lives and treasure. As I sat in the dark at home a few days later, dispirited and spent, I knew that something had to change. We couldn’t let this happen again.

If the hostages’ deaths were going to mean something, we would have to find a new way to negotiate, communicate, listen, and speak, both with our enemies and with our friends. Not for communication’s sake, though.

No. We had to do it to win.

AVOID A SHOWDOWN

No two ways about it, my return to the United States was a time of reckoning. I questioned—I even doubted—some of what we were doing at the FBI. If what we knew wasn’t enough, we had to get better.

The real kick in the pants came after my return, when I was reviewing information about the case, a lot of which we hadn’t had in the field. Among the piles of information was one fact that totally blew my mind.

Martin Burnham had been overheard on a phone call to someone. I wondered what in God’s name our hostage was doing talking on the phone without us knowing. And with whom was he talking? There’s only one reason a hostage ever gets on a phone. It’s to provide proof of life. Someone else had been trying to ransom the Burnhams out.

It turned out to be someone working for a crooked Philippine politician who’d been running a parallel negotiation for the Burnhams’ release. He wanted to buy the hostages out himself in order to show up Philippine president Arroyo.

But it wasn’t so much that this guy was going behind our backs that bothered me. As is pretty clear already, there were a whole lot of underhanded things going on. What really ate at me was that this schmuck, who wasn’t an FBI-trained hostage negotiator, had pulled off something that I hadn’t been able to.

He’d gotten to speak to Martin Burnham on the phone. For free.

That’s when I realized that this crooked pol’s success where we had failed was a kind of metaphor for everything that was wrong with our one-dimensional mindset.

Beyond our problems with the Philippine military, the big reason we had no effective influence with the kidnappers and hostages was that we had this very tit-for-tat mentality. Under that mentality, if we called up the bad guys we were asking for something, and if they gave it to us we had to give them something back. And so, because we were positive that the Burnhams were alive, we’d never bothered to call and ask for proof of life. We were afraid to go into debt.

If we made an “ask” and they granted it, we’d owe. Not making good on a debt risked the accusation of bad-faith negotiation and bad faith in kidnappings gets people killed.

And of course we didn’t ask the kidnappers to talk directly to the hostage because we knew they’d say “no” and we were afraid of being embarrassed.

That fear was a major flaw in our negotiating mindset. There is some information that you can only get through direct, extended interactions with your counterpart.

We also needed new ways to get things without asking for them. We needed to finesse making an “ask” with something more sophisticated than closed-ended questions with their yes-no dynamic.

That’s when I realized that what we had been doing wasn’t communication; it was verbal flexing. We wanted them to see things our way and they wanted us to see it their way. If you let this dynamic loose in the real world, negotiation breaks down and tensions flare. That whole ethos permeated everything the FBI was doing. Everything was a showdown. And it didn’t work.

Our approach to proof-of-life questions embodied all these problems.

At the time, we proved that our hostages were alive by devising questions that asked for a piece of information only the hostage could know. Computer-security-style questions, like, “What’s the name of Martin’s first dog?” or “What’s Martin’s dad’s middle name?” This particular type of question had many failings, however. For one thing, it had sort of become a signature of law enforcement in the kidnapping world. When a family starts asking a question of that type, it’s a near certainty that the cops are coaching them. And that makes kidnappers very nervous.

Even beyond the nerves, you had the problem that answering questions like those required little, if any, effort. The bad guys go and get the fact and give it to you right away, because it’s so easy. Bang, bang, bang! It happens so fast that you didn’t gain any tactical advantage, any usable information, any effort on their part toward a goal that serves you. And all negotiation, done well, should be an information-gathering process that vests your counterpart in an outcome that serves you.

Worst of all, the bad guys know that they have just given you something—a proof of life—which triggers this whole human reciprocity gene. Whether we like to recognize it or not, a universal rule of human nature, across all cultures, is that when somebody gives you something, they expect something in return. And they won’t give anything else until you pay them back.

Now, we didn’t want to trigger this whole reciprocity thing because we didn’t want to give anything. So what happened? All of our conversations became these paralyzed confrontations between two parties who wanted to extract something from each other but didn’t want to give. We didn’t communicate, out of pride and fear.

That’s why we failed, while numbskulls like this crooked Philippine politician just stumbled in and got what we so desperately needed. That is, communication without reciprocity. I sat back and wondered to myself, How the hell do we do that?

SUSPEND UNBELIEF

While I was racking my brains over how this sleazy politician managed to get Martin Burnham on the phone while we never could, FBI Pittsburgh had a kidnapping case.

My partner Chuck brought me the tapes from the case because he thought it was funny. You see, one Pittsburgh drug dealer had kidnapped the girlfriend of another Pittsburgh drug dealer, and for whatever reason the victim drug dealer came to the FBI for help. Coming to the FBI seemed kind of contrary to his best interests, being a drug dealer and all, but he did it because no matter who you are, when you need help you go to the FBI. Right?

On the tapes, our hostage negotiators are riding around with this drug dealer while he’s negotiating with the other drug dealer. Normally we would have had the guy ask a bulletproof proof-of-life question, like, “What was the name of the girlfriend’s teddy bear when she was little?” But in this situation, this drug dealer hadn’t yet been coached on asking a “correct” question. So in the middle of the conversation with the kidnapper, he just blurts, “Hey, dog, how do I know she’s all right?” And the funniest thing happened. The kidnapper actually went silent for ten seconds. He was completely taken aback. Then he said, in a much less confrontational tone of voice, “Well, I’ll put her on the phone.” I was floored because this unsophisticated drug dealer just pulled off a phenomenal victory in the negotiation. To get the kidnapper to volunteer to put the victim on the phone is massively huge.

That’s when I had my “Holy shit!” moment and realized that this is the technique I’d been waiting for. Instead of asking some closed-ended question with a single correct answer, he’d asked an open-ended, yet calibrated one that forced the other guy to pause and actually think about how to solve the problem. I thought to myself, This is perfect! It’s a natural and normal question, not a request for a fact. It’s a “how” question, and “how” engages because “how” asks for help.

Best of all, he doesn’t owe the kidnapper a damn thing. The guy volunteers to put the girlfriend on the phone: he thinks it’s his idea. The guy who just offered to put the girlfriend on the line thinks he’s in control. And the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.

The genius of this technique is really well explained by something that the psychologist Kevin Dutton says in his book Split-Second Persuasion.1 He talks about what he calls “unbelief,” which is active resistance to what the other side is saying, complete rejection. That’s where the two parties in a negotiation usually start.

If you don’t ever get off that dynamic, you end up having showdowns, as each side tries to impose its point of view. You get two hard skulls banging against each other, like in Dos Palmas. But if you can get the other side to drop their unbelief, you can slowly work them to your point of view on the back of their energy, just like the drug dealer’s question got the kidnapper to volunteer to do what the drug dealer wanted. You don’t directly persuade them to see your ideas. Instead, you ride them to your ideas. As the saying goes, the best way to ride a horse is in the direction in which it is going.

Our job as persuaders is easier than we think. It’s not to get others believing what we say. It’s just to stop them unbelieving. Once we achieve that, the game’s half-won. “Unbelief is the friction that keeps persuasion in check,” Dutton says. “Without it, there’d be no limits.” Giving your counterpart the illusion of control by asking calibrated questions—by asking for help—is one of the most powerful tools for suspending unbelief. Not long ago, I read this great article in the New York Times2 by a medical student who was faced with a patient who had ripped out his IV, packed his bags, and was making a move to leave because his biopsy results were days late and he was tired of waiting.

Just then a senior physician arrived. After calmly offering the patient a glass of water and asking if they could chat for a minute, he said he understood why the patient was pissed off and promised to call the lab to see why the results were delayed.

But what he did next is what really suspended the patient’s unbelief: he asked a calibrated question—what he felt was so important about leaving—and then when the patient said he had errands to handle, the doctor offered to connect the patient with services that could help him get them done. And, boom, the patient volunteered to stay.

What’s so powerful about the senior doctor’s technique is that he took what was a showdown—“I’m going to leave” versus “You can’t leave”—and asked questions that led the patient to solve his own problem . . . in the way the doctor wanted.

It was still a kind of showdown, of course, but the doctor took the confrontation and bravado out of it by giving the patient the illusion of control. As an old Washington Post editor named Robert Estabrook once said, “He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.” This same technique for suspending unbelief that you use with kidnappers and escaping patients works for anything, even negotiating prices. When you go into a store, instead of telling the salesclerk what you “need,” you can describe what you’re looking for and ask for suggestions.

Then, once you’ve picked out what you want, instead of hitting them with a hard offer, you can just say the price is a bit more than you budgeted and ask for help with one of the greatest-of-all-time calibrated questions: “How am I supposed to do that?” The critical part of this approach is that you really are asking for help and your delivery must convey that. With this negotiating scheme, instead of bullying the clerk, you’re asking for their advice and giving them the illusion of control.

Asking for help in this manner, after you’ve already been engaged in a dialogue, is an incredibly powerful negotiating technique for transforming encounters from confrontational showdowns into joint problem-solving sessions. And calibrated questions are the best tool.

CALIBRATE YOUR QUESTIONS

A few years ago, I was consulting with a client who had a small firm that did public relations for a large corporation. The folks at the big company were not paying their bills, and as time went on, they owed my client more and more money. They kept her on the hook by promising lots of repeat business, implying that she would get a pile of revenue if she just kept working. She felt trapped.

My advice for her was simple: I told her to engage them in a conversation where she summarized the situation and then asked, “How am I supposed to do that?”

She shook her head. No way. The idea of having to ask this question just terrified her. “If they tell me I have to, then I’m trapped!” was her reaction.

She also heard the question as “You’re screwing me out of money and it has to stop.” That sounded like the first step to her getting fired as a consultant.

I explained to her that this implication, though real, was in her mind. Her client would hear the words and not the implication as long as she kept calm and avoided making it sound by her delivery like an accusation or threat. As long as she stayed cool, they would hear it as a problem to be solved.

She didn’t quite believe me. We walked through the script several times, but she was still afraid. Then a few days later she called me, totally giddy with happiness. The client had called with another request and she had finally gotten up the courage to summarize the situation, and ask, “How am I supposed to do that?” And you know what? The answer she got was “You’re right, you can’t and I apologize.” Her client explained that they were going through some internal problems, but she was given a new accounting contact and told she’d be paid within forty-eight hours. And she was.

Now, think about how my client’s question worked: without accusing them of anything, it pushed the big company to understand her problem and offer the solution she wanted. That in a nutshell is the whole point of open-ended questions that are calibrated for a specific effect.

Like the softening words and phrases “perhaps,” “maybe,” “I think,” and “it seems,” the calibrated open-ended question takes the aggression out of a confrontational statement or close-ended request that might otherwise anger your counterpart. What makes them work is that they are subject to interpretation by your counterpart instead of being rigidly defined. They allow you to introduce ideas and requests without sounding overbearing or pushy.

And that’s the difference between “You’re screwing me out of money, and it has to stop” and “How am I supposed to do that?”

The real beauty of calibrated questions is the fact that they offer no target for attack like statements do. Calibrated questions have the power to educate your counterpart on what the problem is rather than causing conflict by telling them what the problem is.

But calibrated questions are not just random requests for comment. They have a direction: once you figure out where you want a conversation to go, you have to design the questions that will ease the conversation in that direction while letting the other guy think it’s his choice to take you there.

That’s why I refer to these questions as calibrated questions. You have to calibrate them carefully, just like you would calibrate a gun sight or a measuring scale, to target a specific problem.

The good news is that there are rules for that.

First off, calibrated questions avoid verbs or words like “can,” “is,” “are,” “do,” or “does.” These are closed-ended questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or a “no.” Instead, they start with a list of words people know as reporter’s questions: “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how.” Those words inspire your counterpart to think and then speak expansively.

But let me cut the list even further: it’s best to start with “what,” “how,” and sometimes “why.” Nothing else. “Who,” “when,” and “where” will often just get your counterpart to share a fact without thinking. And “why” can backfire. Regardless of what language the word “why” is translated into, it’s accusatory. There are very rare moments when this is to your advantage.

The only time you can use “why” successfully is when the defensiveness that is created supports the change you are trying to get them to see. “Why would you ever change from the way you’ve always done things and try my approach?” is an example. “Why would your company ever change from your long-standing vendor and choose our company?” is another. As always, tone of voice, respectful and deferential, is critical.

Otherwise, treat “why” like a burner on a hot stove—don’t touch it.

Having just two words to start with might not seem like a lot of ammunition, but trust me, you can use “what” and “how” to calibrate nearly any question. “Does this look like something you would like?” can become “How does this look to you?” or “What about this works for you?” You can even ask, “What about this doesn’t work for you?” and you’ll probably trigger quite a bit of useful information from your counterpart.

Even something as harsh as “Why did you do it?” can be calibrated to “What caused you to do it?” which takes away the emotion and makes the question less accusatory.

You should use calibrated questions early and often, and there are a few that you will find that you will use in the beginning of nearly every negotiation. “What is the biggest challenge you face?” is one of those questions. It just gets the other side to teach you something about themselves, which is critical to any negotiation because all negotiation is an information-gathering process.

Here are some other great standbys that I use in almost every negotiation, depending on the situation:

? What about this is important to you?

? How can I help to make this better for us?

? How would you like me to proceed?

? What is it that brought us into this situation?

? How can we solve this problem?

? What’s the objective? / What are we trying to accomplish here?

? How am I supposed to do that?

The implication of any well-designed calibrated question is that you want what the other guy wants but you need his intelligence to overcome the problem. This really appeals to very aggressive or egotistical counterparts.

You’ve not only implicitly asked for help—triggering goodwill and less defensiveness—but you’ve engineered a situation in which your formerly recalcitrant counterpart is now using his mental and emotional resources to overcome your challenges. It is the first step in your counterpart internalizing your way—and the obstacles in it—as his own. And that guides the other party toward designing a solution.

Your solution.

Think back to how the doctor used calibrated questions to get his patient to stay. As his story showed, the key to getting people to see things your way is not to confront them on their ideas (“You can’t leave”) but to acknowledge their ideas openly (“I understand why you’re pissed off”) and then guide them toward solving the problem (“What do you hope to accomplish by leaving?”).

Like I said before, the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control. That’s why calibrated questions are ingenious: Calibrated questions make your counterpart feel like they’re in charge, but it’s really you who are framing the conversation. Your counterpart will have no idea how constrained they are by your questions.

Once I was negotiating with one of my FBI bosses about attending a Harvard executive program. He had already approved the expenditure for the travel, but on the day before I was supposed to leave he called me into his office and began to question the validity of the trip.

I knew him well enough to know that he was trying to show me that he was in charge. So after we talked for a while, I looked at him and asked, “When you originally approved this trip, what did you have in mind?” He visibly relaxed as he sat back in his chair and brought the top of his fingers and thumbs together in the shape of a steeple. Generally this is a body language that means the person feels superior and in charge.

“Listen,” he said, “just make sure you brief everyone when you get back.”

That question, calibrated to acknowledge his power and nudge him toward explaining himself, gave him the illusion of control.

And it got me just what I wanted.

HOW NOT TO GET PAID

Let’s pause for a minute here, because there’s one vitally important thing you have to remember when you enter a negotiation armed with your list of calibrated questions. That is, all of this is great, but there’s a rub: without self-control and emotional regulation, it doesn’t work.

The very first thing I talk about when I’m training new negotiators is the critical importance of self-control. If you can’t control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence the emotions of another party?

To show you what I mean, let me tell you a story.

Not long ago, a freelance marketing strategist came to me with a problem. One of her clients had hired a new CEO, a penny pincher whose strategy was to cut costs by offshoring everything he could. He was also a male chauvinist who didn’t like the assertive style in which the strategist, a woman, conducted herself.

Immediately my client and the CEO started to go at each other on conference calls in that passive-aggressive way that is ever present in corporate America. After a few weeks of this, my client decided she’d had enough and invoiced the CEO for the last bit of work she’d done (about $7,000) and politely said that the arrangement wasn’t working out. The CEO answered by saying the bill was too high, that he’d pay half of it and that they would talk about the rest.

After that, he stopped answering her calls.

The underlying dynamic was that this guy didn’t like being questioned by anyone, especially a woman. So she and I developed a strategy that showed him she understood where she went wrong and acknowledged his power, while at the same time directing his energy toward solving her problem.

The script we came up with hit all the best practices of negotiation we’ve talked about so far. Here it is by steps:

1. A “No”-oriented email question to reinitiate contact: “Have you given up on settling this amicably?”

2. A statement that leaves only the answer of “That’s right” to form a dynamic of agreement: “It seems that you feel my bill is not justified.”

3. Calibrated questions about the problem to get him to reveal his thinking: “How does this bill violate our agreement?”

4. More “No”-oriented questions to remove unspoken barriers: “Are you saying I misled you?” “Are you saying I didn’t do as you asked?” “Are you saying I reneged on our agreement?” or “Are you saying I failed you?” 5. Labeling and mirroring the essence of his answers if they are not acceptable so he has to consider them again: “It seems like you feel my work was subpar.” Or “. . . my work was subpar?”

5. A calibrated question in reply to any offer other than full payment, in order to get him to offer a solution: “How am I supposed to accept that?”

6. If none of this gets an offer of full payment, a label that flatters his sense of control and power: “It seems like you are the type of person who prides himself on the way he does business—rightfully so—and has a knack for not only expanding the pie but making the ship run more efficiently.” 8. A long pause and then one more “No”-oriented question: “Do you want to be known as someone who doesn’t fulfill agreements?”

From my long experience in negotiation, scripts like this have a 90 percent success rate. That is, if the negotiator stays calm and rational. And that’s a big if.

In this case, she didn’t.

The first step—the magic email—worked better than she imagined, and the CEO called within ten minutes, surprising her. Almost immediately her anger flared at the sound of his patronizing voice. Her only desire became to show him how he was wrong, to impose her will, and the conversation became a showdown that went nowhere.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that she didn’t even get half.

With that in mind, I want to end this chapter with some advice on how to remain rational in a negotiation. Even with all the best techniques and strategy, you need to regulate your emotions if you want to have any hope of coming out on top.

The first and most basic rule of keeping your emotional cool is to bite your tongue. Not literally, of course. But you have to keep away from knee-jerk, passionate reactions. Pause. Think. Let the passion dissipate. That allows you to collect your thoughts and be more circumspect in what you say. It also lowers your chance of saying more than you want to.

The Japanese have this figured out. When negotiating with a foreigner, it’s common practice for a Japanese businessman to use a translator even when he understands perfectly what the other side is saying. That’s because speaking through a translator forces him to step back. It gives him time to frame his response.

Another simple rule is, when you are verbally assaulted, do not counterattack. Instead, disarm your counterpart by asking a calibrated question. The next time a waiter or salesclerk tries to engage you in a verbal skirmish, try this out. I promise you it will change the entire tenor of the conversation.

The basic issue here is that when people feel that they are not in control, they adopt what psychologists call a hostage mentality. That is, in moments of conflict they react to their lack of power by either becoming extremely defensive or lashing out.

Neurologically, in situations like this the fight-or-flight mechanism in the reptilian brain or the emotions in the limbic system overwhelm the rational part of our mind, the neocortex, leading us to overreact in an impulsive, instinctive way.

In a negotiation, like in the one between my client and the CEO, this always produces a negative outcome. So we have to train our neocortex to override the emotions from the other two brains.

That means biting your tongue and learning how to mindfully change your state to something more positive. And it means lowering the hostage mentality in your counterpart by asking a question or even offering an apology. (“You’re right. That was a bit harsh.”) If you were able to take an armed kidnapper who’d been surrounded by police and hook him up to a cardiac monitor, you’d find that every calibrated question and apology would lower his heart rate just a little bit. And that’s how you get to a dynamic where solutions can be found.

KEY LESSONS

Who has control in a conversation, the guy listening or the guy talking?

The listener, of course.

That’s because the talker is revealing information while the listener, if he’s trained well, is directing the conversation toward his own goals. He’s harnessing the talker’s energy for his own ends.

When you try to work the skills from this chapter into your daily life, remember that these are listener’s tools. They are not about strong-arming your opponent into submission. Rather, they’re about using the counterpart’s power to get to your objective. They’re listener’s judo.

As you put listener’s judo into practice, remember the following powerful lessons:

? Don’t try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation.

? Avoid questions that can be answered with “Yes” or tiny pieces of information. These require little thought and inspire the human need for reciprocity; you will be expected to give something back.

? Ask calibrated questions that start with the words “How” or “What.” By implicitly asking the other party for help, these questions will give your counterpart an illusion of control and will inspire them to speak at length, revealing important information.

? Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.

? Calibrate your questions to point your counterpart toward solving your problem. This will encourage them to expend their energy on devising a solution.

? Bite your tongue. When you’re attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question.

? There is always a team on the other side. If you are not influencing those behind the table, you are vulnerable.