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

“NO” STARTS THE NEGOTIATION
My fascination with “No” in all its beautiful nuance began
with a conversation I had a few months before my
negotiation career began.
I started my career with the Bureau as a member of the
FBI SWAT team in the Pittsburgh Division but after nearly
two years I was transferred to New York, where the FBI
attached me to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). It was
an amazing post: We spent our days and nights tracking
suspected terrorists, investigating their cells, and assessing
whether or how they might strike. We were untying knots of
human anger in the midst of America’s biggest city, making
life-and-death decisions on who was dangerous and who
was just blowing hot air. The work fascinated me.
Ever since my first days with the Bureau, I had been
obsessed with crisis response. The immediacy of the task
enthralled me. The stakes were high. Lives hung in the
balance.
The emotional terrain was complex, changing, and often
conflicting. To successfully gain a hostage’s safe release, a
negotiator had to penetrate the hostage-taker’s motives, state
of mind, intelligence, and emotional strengths and
weaknesses. The negotiator played the role of bully,

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conciliator, enforcer, savior, confessor, instigator, and
peacemaker—and that’s just a few of the parts.
I thought I was cut out for every one of them.
A few weeks after I got to Manhattan, I showed up at the
desk of Amy Bonderow, who ran the FBI’s Crisis
Negotiation Team in New York. I didn’t know beans about
negotiating, so I went for the direct approach.
“I want be a hostage negotiator,” I said.
“Everyone does—got any training?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Any credentials?”
“Nope.” I answered.
“Any experience?” she asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Do you have a degree in psychology, sociology,
anything at all related to negotiation?”
“No.”
“Looks like you answered your own question,” she said.
“No. Now go away.”
“Go away?” I protested. “Really?”
“Yep. As in, ‘Leave me alone.’ Everybody wants to be a
hostage negotiator, and you have no résumé, experience, or
skills. So what would you say in my position? You got it:
‘No.’”
I paused in front of her, thinking, This is not how my
negotiating career ends. I had stared down terrorists; I
wasn’t going to just leave.
“Come on,” I said. “There has to be something I can

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do.”
Amy shook her head and gave one of those ironic
laughs that mean the person doesn’t think you’ve got a
snowball’s chance in hell.
“I’ll tell you what. Yes, there is something you can do:
Volunteer at a suicide hotline. Then come talk to me. No
guarantees, got it?” she said. “Now, seriously, go away.”
My conversation with Amy kicked off my awareness of the
complex and hidden subtleties of conversation, the power of
certain words, the seemingly unintelligible emotional truths
that so often underlie intelligible exchanges.
A trap into which many fall is to take what other people
say literally. I started to see that while people played the
game of conversation, it was in the game beneath the game,
where few played, that all the leverage lived.
In our chat, I saw how the word “No”—so apparently
clear and direct—really wasn’t so simple. Over the years,
I’ve thought back repeatedly to that conversation, replaying
how Amy so quickly turned me down, again and again. But
her “No’s” were just the gateway to “Yes.” They gave her—
and me—time to pivot, adjust, and reexamine, and actually
created the environment for the one “Yes” that mattered.
While assigned to the JTTF, I worked with an NYPD
lieutenant named Martin. He had a hard shell, and whenever
asked for anything he responded with a terse negative. After
I’d gotten to know him a bit, I asked him why. “Chris,” he
said, proudly, “a lieutenant’s job is to say, ‘No.’”
At first, I thought that sort of automated response

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signaled a failure of imagination. But then I realized I did
the same thing with my teenage son, and that after I’d said
“No” to him, I often found that I was open to hearing what
he had to say.
That’s because having protected myself, I could relax
and more easily consider the possibilities.
“No” is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it.
We’ve been conditioned to fear the word “No.” But it is a
statement of perception far more often than of fact. It
seldom means, “I have considered all the facts and made a
rational choice.” Instead, “No” is often a decision,
frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is
scary, and “No” provides a little protection from that
scariness.
Jim Camp, in his excellent book, Start with NO,1
counsels the reader to give their adversary (his word for
counterpart) permission to say “No” from the outset of a
negotiation. He calls it “the right to veto.” He observes that
people will fight to the death to preserve their right to say
“No,” so give them that right and the negotiating
environment becomes more constructive and collaborative
almost immediately.
When I read Camp’s book, I realized this was something
we’d known as hostage negotiators for years. We’d learned
that the quickest way to get a hostage-taker out was to take
the time to talk them out, as opposed to “demanding” their
surrender. Demanding their surrender, “telling” them to
come out, always ended up creating a much longer standoff

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and occasionally, actually contributed to death.
It comes down to the deep and universal human need for
autonomy. People need to feel in control. When you
preserve a person’s autonomy by clearly giving them
permission to say “No” to your ideas, the emotions calm,
the effectiveness of the decisions go up, and the other party
can really look at your proposal. They’re allowed to hold it
in their hands, to turn it around. And it gives you time to
elaborate or pivot in order to convince your counterpart that
the change you’re proposing is more advantageous than the
status quo.
Great negotiators seek “No” because they know that’s
often when the real negotiation begins.
Politely saying “No” to your opponent (we’ll go into this in
more depth in Chapter 9), calmly hearing “No,” and just
letting the other side know that they are welcome to say
“No” has a positive impact on any negotiation. In fact, your
invitation for the other side to say “No” has an amazing
power to bring down barriers and allow for beneficial
communication.
This means you have to train yourself to hear “No” as
something other than rejection, and respond accordingly.
When someone tells you “No,” you need to rethink the
word in one of its alternative—and much more real—
meanings:
■
I am not yet ready to agree;

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■
You are making me feel uncomfortable;
■
I do not understand;
■
I don’t think I can afford it;
■
I want something else;
■
I need more information; or
■
I want to talk it over with someone else.
Then, after pausing, ask solution-based questions or
simply label their effect:
“What about this doesn’t work for you?”
“What would you need to make it work?”
“It seems like there’s something here that bothers you.”
People have a need to say, “No.” So don’t just hope to
hear it at some point; get them to say it early.