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

SLOW. IT. DOWN.
The leader wanted to make us think he and his partners were
taking good care of his hostages, but in reality the security
guard was out of the picture and the second bank teller had
run to the bank basement to hide. Whenever Joe said he
wanted to talk to the hostages, the hostage-taker would stall,
and make it seem like there was this frenzy of activity going
on inside the bank, going to ridiculous lengths to tell us how
much time and energy he and his cohorts were spending on
taking good care of the hostages. Very often, the leader

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would use this as a reason to put Joe on hold, or to end a
call. He’d say, “The girls need to go to the bathroom.” Or,
“The girls want to call their families.” Or, “The girls want to
get something to eat.”
Joe was doing a good job keeping this guy talking, but
he was slightly limited by the negotiating approach that
police departments were using at the time. The approach
was half MSU—Making Shit Up—and half a sort of sales
approach—basically trying to persuade, coerce, or
manipulate in any way possible. The problem was, we were
in too much of a hurry, driving too hard toward a quick
solution; trying to be a problem solver, not a people mover.
Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are
prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can
feel as if they’re not being heard and we risk undermining
the rapport and trust we’ve built. There’s plenty of research
that now validates the passage of time as one of the most
important tools for a negotiator. When you slow the process
down, you also calm it down. After all, if someone is
talking, they’re not shooting.
We caught a break when the robbers started to make
noise about food. Joe was going back and forth with them
for a while on what they were going to have and how we
were going to get it to them. It became a negotiation in and
of itself. We got it all set up, prepared to send the food in on
a kind of robot device, because that’s what this guy was
comfortable with, but then he did an about-face, said to
forget about it. Said they’d found some food inside, so it

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was just one brick wall after another, one smoke screen after
another. It would feel to us like we were making a little
progress, then this guy would take an abrupt turn, or hang
up on us, or change his mind.
Meanwhile, our investigators used the time to run the
registration of every one of the dozens of vehicles found
nearby on the street, and managed to speak to the owners of
every one of them except one—a car belonging to someone
named Chris Watts. This became our one and only lead, at
the time, and as our endless back-and-forth continued on the
phone we sent a group of investigators to the address on
Chris Watts’s registration, where they found someone who
knew Chris Watts and agreed to come down to the scene of
the standoff to possibly identify him.
We still didn’t have a visual on the inside, so our
eyewitness had to be more of an “earwitness”—and he was
able to identify Chris Watts by his voice.
We now knew more about our adversary than he thought
we knew, which put us at a momentary advantage. We were
putting together all the puzzle pieces, but it didn’t get us any
closer to our endgame, which was to determine for sure who
was inside the building, to ensure the health and well-being
of the hostages, and to get them all out safely—the good
guys and the bad guys.