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

CHAPTER 7
CREATE THE ILLUSION OF
CONTROL
A
month after I’d finished working the case of Jeffrey
Schilling in May 2001, I got orders from headquarters to
head back to Manila. The same bad guys who’d taken
Schilling, a brutal group of radical Islamists named the Abu
Sayyaf, had raided the Dos Palmas private diving resort and
taken twenty hostages, including three Americans: Martin
and Gracia Burnham, a missionary couple from Wichita,
Kansas; and Guillermo Sobero, a guy who ran a California
waterproofing firm.
Dos Palmas was a negotiator’s nightmare from the start.
The day after the kidnappings, the recently elected
Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, set up the
most confrontational, nonconstructive dynamic possible by
publicly declaring “all-out war” on the Abu Sayyaf.
Not exactly empathetic discourse, right?
It got a lot worse.
The Philippine army and marines had a turf war in the
midst of the negotiations, pissing off the kidnappers with
several botched raids. Because American hostages were
involved, the CIA, the FBI, and U.S. military intelligence

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were all called in and we too squabbled among ourselves.
Then the kidnappers raped and killed several hostages, 9/11
happened, and the Abu Sayyaf was linked to Al Qaeda.
By the time the crisis concluded in an orgy of gunshots
in June 2002, Dos Palmas had officially become the biggest
failure in my professional life. To call it a train wreck would
be generous, if you know what I mean.
But failures plant the seeds of future success, and our
failure in the Philippines was no exception.
If the Dos Palmas calamity showed me anything, it was
that we all were still suffering under the notion that
negotiation was a wrestling match where the point is to
exhaust your opponent into submission, hope for the best,
and never back down.
As my disappointment with Dos Palmas forced me to
reckon with our failed techniques, I took a deep look into
the newest negotiating theories—some great and some
completely harebrained—and I had a chance encounter with
a case in Pittsburgh that completely changed how I looked
at the interpersonal dynamics of negotiation conversations.
From the ashes of Dos Palmas, then, we learned a lesson
that would forever change how the FBI negotiated
kidnappings. We learned that negotiation was coaxing, not
overcoming; co-opting, not defeating. Most important, we
learned that successful negotiation involved getting your
counterpart to do the work for you and suggest your
solution himself. It involved giving him the illusion of
control while you, in fact, were the one defining the

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conversation.
The tool we developed is something I call the calibrated,
or open-ended, question. What it does is remove aggression
from conversations by acknowledging the other side openly,
without resistance. In doing so, it lets you introduce ideas
and requests without sounding pushy. It allows you to
nudge.
I’ll explain it in depth later on, but for now let me say
that it’s really as simple as removing the hostility from the
statement “You can’t leave” and turning it into a question.
“What do you hope to achieve by going?”