Getting to Yes: Negotiating an agreement without giving in

by Roger Fisher

The soft negotiator wants to avoid personal conflict and so makes concessions readily to reach agreement. He or she wants an amicable resolution; yet often ends up exploited and feeling bitter. The hard negotiator sees any situation as a contest of wills in which the side that takes the more extreme positions and holds out longer fares better. He or she wants to win; yet often ends up producing an equally hard response that exhausts the negotiator and his or her resources and harms the relationship with the other side.

The method of principled negotiation developed at the Harvard Negotiation Project is to decide issues on their merits rather than through a haggling process focused on what each side says it will and won’t do. It suggests that you look for mutual gains whenever possible, and that where your interests conflict, you should insist that the result be based on some fair standards independent of the will of either side.

judged by three criteria: It should produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible. It should be efficient. And it should improve or at least not damage the relationship between the parties.

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

In a soft negotiating game the standard moves are to make offers and concessions, to trust the other side, to be friendly, and to yield as necessary to avoid confrontation.

The game of negotiation takes place at two levels. At one level, negotiation addresses the substance; at another, it focuses—usually implicitly—on the procedure for dealing with the substance. The first negotiation may concern your salary, the terms of a lease, or a price to be paid. The second negotiation concerns how you will negotiate the substantive question: by soft positional bargaining, by hard positional bargaining, or by some other method.

People: Separate the people from the problem. Interests: Focus on interests, not positions. Options: Invent multiple options looking for mutual gains before deciding what to do. Criteria: Insist that the result be based on some objective standard.

problem. Taking positions just makes this worse because people’s egos become identified with their positions. Making concessions “for the relationship” is equally problematic, because it can actually encourage and reward stubbornness, which can lead to resentment that ends up damaging the relationship.

During the analysis stage you are simply trying to diagnose the situation—to gather information, organize it, and think about it. You will want to consider the people problems of partisan perceptions, hostile emotions, and unclear communication, as well as to identify your interests and those of the other side.

During the planning stage you deal with the same four elements a second time, both generating ideas and deciding what to do.

Again during the discussion stage, when the parties communicate back and forth, looking toward agreement, the same four elements are the best subjects to discuss.

To sum up, in contrast to positional bargaining, the principled negotiation method of focusing on basic interests, mutually satisfying options, and fair standards typically results in a wise agreement.

A working relationship where trust, understanding, respect, and friendship are built up over time can make each new negotiation smoother and more efficient.

Misunderstanding can reinforce prejudice and lead to reactions that produce counterreactions in a vicious circle; rational exploration of possible solutions becomes impossible and a negotiation fails.

Every negotiator has two kinds of interests: in the substance and in the relationship

At a minimum, a negotiator wants to maintain a working relationship good enough to produce an acceptable agreement (and effective implementation) if one is possible given each side’s interests.

Positional bargaining puts relationship and substance in conflict. Framing a negotiation as a contest of will over positions aggravates the entangling process.

Positional bargaining deals with a negotiator’s interests both in substance and in a good relationship by trading one off against the other.

Disentangle the relationship from the substance; deal directly with the people problem

Dealing with a substantive problem and maintaining a good working relationship need not be conflicting goals if the parties are committed and psychologically prepared to treat each separately on its own legitimate merits. Base the relationship on mutually understood perceptions, clear two-way communication, expressing emotions without blame, and a forward-looking, purposive outlook.

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.

As useful as looking for objective reality can be, it is ultimately the reality as each side sees it that constitutes the problem in a negotiation and opens the way to a solution.

Put yourself in their shoes. How you see the world depends on where you sit. People tend to see what they want to see.

The ability to see the situation as the other side sees it, as difficult as it may be, is one of the most important skills a negotiator can possess.

Don’t deduce their intentions from your fears. People tend to assume that whatever they fear, the other side intends to do.

Blaming is an easy mode to fall into, particularly when you feel that the other side is indeed responsible. But even if blaming is justified, it is usually counterproductive.

Under attack, the other side will become defensive and will resist what you have to say. They will cease to listen, or they will strike back with an attack of their own. Assessing blame firmly entangles the people with the problem.

Look for opportunities to act inconsistently with their perceptions. Perhaps the best way to change someone’s perceptions is to send them a message different from what they expect.

Give them a stake in the outcome by making sure they participate in the process.

If you want the other side to accept a disagreeable conclusion, it is crucial that you involve them in the process of reaching that conclusion.

Face-saving involves reconciling an agreement with principle and with the self-image of the negotiators. Its importance should not be underestimated.

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.

Make emotions explicit and acknowledge them as legitimate.

Making your feelings or theirs an explicit focus of discussion will not only underscore the seriousness of the problem, it will also make the negotiations less reactive and more “pro-active.”

Hence, instead of interrupting polemical speeches or walking out on the other party, you may decide to control yourself, sit there, and allow them to pour out their grievances at you. When constituents are listening, such occasions may release their frustration as well as the negotiator’s. Perhaps the best strategy to adopt while the other side lets off steam is to listen quietly without responding to their attacks, and occasionally to ask the speaker to continue until he has spoken his last word. In this way, you offer little support to the inflammatory substance, give the speaker every encouragement to speak himself out, and leave little or no residue to fester.

In a negotiation, you may be so busy thinking about what you are going to say next, how you are going to respond to that last point or how you are going to frame your next argument, that you forget to listen to what the other side is saying now. Or you may be listening more attentively to your constituency than to the other side.

It has been said that the cheapest concession you can make to the other side is to let them know they have been heard.

Once you have made their case for them, then come back with the problems you find in their proposal. If you can put their case better than they can, and then refute it, you maximize the chance of initiating a constructive dialogue on the merits and minimize the chance of their believing you have misunderstood them.

Speak about yourself, not about them. In many negotiations, each side explains and condemns at great length the motivations and intentions of the other side. It is more persuasive, however, to describe a problem in terms of its impact on you than in terms of what they did or why: “I feel let down” instead of “You broke your word.” “We feel discriminated against” rather than “You’re a racist.”

Speak for a purpose. Sometimes the problem is not too little communication, but too much.

Face the problem, not the people. If negotiators view themselves as adversaries in a personal face-to-face confrontation, it is difficult to disentangle their relationship from the substantive problem.

however precarious your relationship may be, try to structure the negotiation as a side-by-side activity in which the two of you—with your different interests and perceptions, and your emotional involvement—jointly face a common task.

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

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

As valuable as it is to have many options, people involved in a negotiation rarely sense a need for them.

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 overcome these constraints, you need to understand them.

A brainstorming session is designed to produce as many ideas as possible to solve the problem at hand. The key ground rule is to postpone all criticism and evaluation of ideas. The group simply invents ideas without pausing to consider whether they are good or bad, realistic or unrealistic. With those inhibitions removed, one idea should stimulate another, like firecrackers setting off one another.

The key to wise decision-making, whether in wine-making, sports, or negotiation, lies in selecting from a great number and variety of options.

suffer. An outcome in which the other side gets absolutely nothing is worse for you than one that leaves them mollified. In almost every case, your satisfaction depends to a degree on making the other side sufficiently content with an agreement to want to live up to it.

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!”