Getting to Yes: Negotiating an agreement without giving in

by Roger Fisher

the more attention that is paid to positions, the less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties.

To find your way through the jungle of people problems, it is useful to think in terms of three basic categories: perception, emotion, and communication. The various people problems all fall into one of these three baskets.

Pay attention to “core concerns.” 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.

Interests motivate people; they are the silent movers behind the hubbub of positions. Your position is something you have decided upon. Your interests are what caused you to so decide.

If you want someone to listen and understand your reasoning, give your interests and reasoning first and your conclusions or proposals later.

In most negotiations there are four major obstacles that inhibit the inventing of an abundance of options: (1) premature judgment; (2) searching for the single answer; (3) the assumption of a fixed pie; and (4) thinking that “solving their problem is their problem.”

To invent creative options, then, you will need to (1) separate the act of inventing options from the act of judging them; (2) broaden the options on the table rather than look for a single answer; (3) search for mutual gains; and (4) invent ways of making their decisions easy. Each of these steps is discussed below.

Look for mutual gain The third major block to creative problem-solving lies in the assumption of a fixed pie: the less for you, the more for me. Rarely if ever is this assumption true. First of all, both sides can always be worse off than they are now. Chess looks like a zero-sum game; if one loses, the other wins—until a dog trots by and knocks over the table, spills the beer, and leaves you both worse off than before.

If dovetailing had to be summed up in one sentence, it would be: Look for items that are of low cost to you and high benefit to them, and vice versa. Differences in interests, priorities, beliefs, forecasts, and attitudes toward risk all make dovetailing possible. A negotiator’s motto could be “Vive la différence!

In response to power, the most any method of negotiation can do is to meet two objectives: first, to protect you against making an agreement you should reject and second, to help you make the most of the assets you do have so that any agreement you reach will satisfy your interests as well as possible.

What is your BATNA—your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement? That is the standard against which any proposed agreement should be measured. That is the only standard that can protect you both from accepting terms that are too unfavorable and from rejecting terms it would be in your interest to accept.

When the other side is powerful If the other side has big guns, you do not want to turn a negotiation into a gunfight.