Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

by Chris Voss

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 t...