Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In

by Roger Fisher

Most negotiations take place in the context of an ongoing relationship where it is important to carry on each negotiation in a way that will help rather than hinder future relations and future negotiations. In fact, with many long-term clients, business partners, family members, fellow professionals, government officials, or foreign nations, the ongoing relationship is far more important than the outcome of any particular negotiation.

Give them a stake in the outcome by making sure they participate in the process. If they are not involved in the process, they are unlikely to approve the product. It is that simple.

This is how voting in democracy works. I used this same method for involving grads with their feedback.

In the English language, “face-saving” carries a derogatory flavor. People say, “We are doing that just to let them save face,” implying that a little pretense has been created to allow someone to go along without feeling badly. The tone implies ridicule. This is a grave misunderstanding of the role and importance of face-saving. Face-saving reflects people’s need to reconcile the stand taken in a negotiation or an agreement with their existing principles and with their past words and deeds.

Many emotions in negotiation are driven by a core set of five interests: autonomy, the desire to make your own choices and control your own fate; appreciation, the desire to be recognized and valued; affiliation, the desire to belong as an accepted member of some peer group; role, the desire to have a meaningful purpose; and status, the desire to feel fairly seen and acknowledged. Trampling on these interests tends to generate strong negative emotions. Attending to them can build rapport and a positive climate for problem-solving negotiation.

What is the difference between appreciation and status?

The time to develop such a relationship is before the negotiation begins. Get to know them and find out about their likes and dislikes. Find ways to meet them informally. Try arriving early to chat before the negotiation is scheduled to start, and linger after it ends. Benjamin Franklin’s favorite technique was to ask an adversary if he could borrow a certain book. This would flatter the person and give him the comfortable feeling of knowing that Franklin owed him a favor.

In consulting, I would ask to help out on releases with teams I had just met.

The basic problem in a negotiation lies not in conflicting positions, but in the conflict between each side’s needs, desires, concerns, and fears.

"Positions" here seems to mean "proposed solution or outcome." But I love this enumeration of interests: needs/wants and fears/concerns. The hard and soft sides of why someone acts and reacts.

Your position is something you have decided upon. Your interests are what caused you to so decide.

Either we have free will or it is determined that we behave as if we do. In either case, we make choices. We can choose to look back or to look forward.

A good negotiator comes to the table with a credible reason in his pocket for leaving when he wants.

Before starting on any give-and-take, find out about the authority on the other side. It is perfectly legitimate to inquire, “Just how much authority do you have in this particular negotiation?” If the answer is ambiguous, you may wish to talk to someone with real authority or to make clear that you on your side are reserving equal freedom to reconsider any point.

Threats are one of the most abused tactics in negotiation. A threat seems easy to make—much easier than an offer. All it takes is a few words, and if it works, you never have to carry it out. But threats can lead to counterthreats in an escalating spiral that can unhinge a negotiation and even destroy a relationship.

My mother. Calling it out as a child resulted in her eternal rejoin, "I'm not making a threat, I'm making a promise." I felt that reframing was unfair, a semantic shift with no change in behaviour. But her admission did change her phrasing. She became self-aware of her own unreasonable expectations and emotionally abusive words. However, those words forever echo in my mind and make it hard to be close to her. I never want to treat anyone like that either.

Sometimes you can interfere with the communication process. You can ignore threats; you can take them as unauthorized, spoken in haste, or simply irrelevant. You can also make it risky to communicate them.

In 1964 an American father and his twelve-year-old son were enjoying a beautiful Saturday in Hyde Park, London, playing catch with a Frisbee. Few in England had seen a Frisbee at that time and a small group of strollers gathered to watch this strange sport. Finally, one homburg-clad Englishman came over to the father: “Sorry to bother you. Been watching you a quarter of an hour. Who’s winning?”

For more interesting examples from the Law of the Sea negotiations, see James K. Sebenius, Negotiating the Law of the Sea: Lessons in the Art and Science of Reaching Agreement (Harvard University Press, 1984).