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

“YES” IS NOTHING WITHOUT “HOW”
About a year after the Dos Palmas crisis, I was teaching at
the FBI Academy in Quantico when the Bureau got an
urgent call from the State Department: an American had
been kidnapped in the Ecuadoran jungle by a Colombia-
based rebel group. As the FBI’s lead international hostage
negotiator, this was my baby, so I put a team together and
set up operation headquarters in Quantico.
For a few years, José and his wife, Julie, had been

---

guiding tour groups through the jungle near the Colombian
border. Born in Ecuador, José had become an American
citizen and was working as a paramedic in New York City
when he and Julie decided to set up an ecotourism business
in his native country. José loved the Ecuadoran jungle, and
he’d long dreamed of teaching visitors about the monkeys
that swung through the trees and the flowers that perfumed
the trails.
The business grew as ecotourists fell for the pair’s
obvious passion, and on August 20, 2003, José and Julie
took eleven people on a white-water rafting trip down the
Mira River. After a great day on the water, everyone was
smiling and soaked as they piled into Jeeps and pickups for
the ride to an inn in a nearby village. José told tall tales as
he drove the lead truck, Julie to his right with their eleven-
month-old baby in her lap.
They were five minutes from the inn when three men
jumped into the road and aimed guns at the truck. A fourth
man emerged and held a revolver to Julie’s head as the
thugs pulled José from the car and forced him into the truck
bed. The kidnappers then ordered the caravan through
several small towns to a fork in the road, where they got out
and walked José past Julie’s seat in the cab.
“Just remember,” Julie said, “no matter what happens, I
love you.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” José answered.
And then he and his captors disappeared into the jungle.
The captors wanted $5 million. We wanted to buy time.

---

Ever since the Dos Palmas debacle and the Pittsburgh
epiphany, I had been raring to employ the lessons we’d
learned about calibrated questions. So when José was
kidnapped, I sent my guys down to Ecuador and told them
that we had a new strategy. The kidnapping would provide
an opportunity to prove this approach.
“All we’re going to say is, ‘Hey, how do we know José
is okay? How are we supposed to pay until we know José is
okay?’ Again and again,” I told them.
Although they were queasy about untested techniques,
my guys were game. The local cops were livid, though,
because they always did proof of life the old-fashioned way
(which the FBI had taught them in the first place). Luckily
Julie was with us 100 percent because she saw how the
calibrated questions would stall for time, and she was
convinced that with enough time her husband would find a
way to get home.
The day after the kidnapping, the rebels marched José
into the mountains along the Colombian border and settled
in a cabin high in the jungle. There José built a rapport with
the kidnappers to make himself harder for them to kill. He
impressed them with his knowledge of the jungle and, with
a black belt in karate, he filled the time by teaching them
martial arts.
My negotiators coached Julie every day as we waited for
contact from the rebels. We learned later that the designated
negotiator from José’s captors had to walk to town to
negotiate by phone.

---

My guys told Julie to answer every one of the
kidnappers’ demands with a question. My strategy was to
keep the kidnappers engaged but off balance.
“How do I know José is alive?” she asked the first time
they talked.
To their demand for $5 million, she said, “We don’t
have that kind of money. How can we raise that much?”
“How can we pay you anything until we know José is
okay?” Julie asked the next time they talked.
Questions, always questions.
The kidnapper who was negotiating with Julie seemed
extremely perplexed by her persistent questions, and he kept
asking for time to think. That slowed everything down, but
he never got angry with Julie. Answering questions gave
him the illusion that he had control of the negotiation.
By constantly asking questions and making minuscule
offers, Julie drove the ransom down to $16,500. When they
came to that number, the kidnappers demanded she get it to
them immediately.
“How can I do that when I have to sell my cars and
trucks?” she asked.
Always buying more time.
We were starting to grin because success was within
reach; we were really close to a ransom that the family could
afford.
And then I got a phone call in the middle of the night
from one of my deployed guys in Ecuador, Kevin Rust.
Kevin is a terrific negotiator and the same guy who’d called

---

to tell me a year earlier that Martin Burnham had been
killed. My stomach tied into a knot when I heard his voice.
“We just got a call from José,” Kevin said. “He’s still in
guerrilla territory but he escaped and he’s on a bus and he’s
making his way out.”
It took me half a minute to respond, and when I did all I
could say was “Holy shit! That’s fantastic news!”
What had happened, we learned later, was that with all
the delays and questions, some of the guerrillas peeled off
and didn’t return. Pretty soon there was only one teenager
guarding José at night. He saw an opening late one evening
when it began to chuck down rain. Pounding on the metal
roof, the rain drowned out all other sound as the lone guard
slept. Knowing the wet leaves outside would absorb the
sound of his footsteps, José climbed through the window,
ran down jungle paths to a dirt road, and worked his way to
a small town.
Two days later he was back with Julie and their baby,
just a few days before his daughter’s first birthday.
Julie was right: with enough time he had found a way
home.
Calibrated “How” questions are a surefire way to keep
negotiations going. They put the pressure on your
counterpart to come up with answers, and to contemplate
your problems when making their demands.
With enough of the right “How” questions you can read
and shape the negotiating environment in such a way that
you’ll eventually get to the answer you want to hear. You

---

just have to have an idea of where you want the
conversation to go when you’re devising your questions.
The trick to “How” questions is that, correctly used, they
are gentle and graceful ways to say “No” and guide your
counterpart to develop a better solution—your solution. A
gentle How/No invites collaboration and leaves your
counterpart with a feeling of having been treated with
respect.
Look back at what Julie did when the Colombian rebel
kidnappers made their first demands.
“How can we raise that much?” she asked.
Notice that she did not use the word “No.” But she still
managed to elegantly deny the kidnappers’ $5 million
demand.
As Julie did, the first and most common “No” question
you’ll use is some version of “How am I supposed to do
that?” (for example, “How can we raise that much?”). Your
tone of voice is critical as this phrase can be delivered as
either an accusation or a request for assistance. So pay
attention to your voice.
This question tends to have the positive effect of making
the other side take a good look at your situation. This
positive dynamic is what I refer to as “forced empathy,” and
it’s especially effective if leading up to it you’ve already
been empathic with your counterpart. This engages the
dynamic of reciprocity to lead them to do something for
you. Starting with José’s kidnapping, “How am I supposed
to do that?” became our primary response to a kidnapper

---

demanding a ransom. And we never had it backfire.
Once I was working with an accounting consultant
named Kelly who was owed a pile of money by a corporate
client. She kept consulting because she believed she was
developing a useful contact, and because the promise of a
future payday seemed to justify continuing in good faith.
But at a certain point Kelly was so far behind on her own
bills that she was in a bind. She couldn’t continue to work
with only a vague idea of when she’d get paid, but she
worried that if she pushed too hard she wouldn’t get paid at
all.
I told her to wait until the client asked for more work,
because if she made a firm payment demand right away she
would be vulnerable if they refused.
Luckily for Kelly, the client soon called to ask her for
more work. Once he finished his request, she calmly asked a
“How” question:
“I’d love to help,” she said, “but how am I supposed to
do that?”
By indicating her willingness to work but asking for help
finding a way to do so, she left her deadbeat customer with
no choice but to put her needs ahead of everything else.
And she got paid.
Besides saying “No,” the other key benefit of asking
“How?” is, quite literally, that it forces your counterpart to
consider and explain how a deal will be implemented. A
deal is nothing without good implementation. Poor
implementation is the cancer that eats your profits.

---

By making your counterparts articulate implementation
in their own words, your carefully calibrated “How”
questions will convince them that the final solution is their
idea. And that’s crucial. People always make more effort to
implement a solution when they think it’s theirs. That is
simply human nature. That’s why negotiation is often called
“the art of letting someone else have your way.”
There are two key questions you can ask to push your
counterparts to think they are defining success their way:
“How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we
address things if we find we’re off track?” When they
answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s
right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in.
On the flip side, be wary of two telling signs that your
counterpart doesn’t believe the idea is theirs. As I’ve noted,
when they say, “You’re right,” it’s often a good indicator
they are not vested in what is being discussed. And when
you push for implementation and they say, “I’ll try,” you
should get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Because this
really means, “I plan to fail.”
When you hear either of these, dive back in with
calibrated “How” questions until they define the terms of
successful implementation in their own voice. Follow up by
summarizing what they have said to get a “That’s right.”
Let the other side feel victory. Let them think it was their
idea. Subsume your ego. Remember: “Yes” is nothing
without “How.” So keep asking “How?” And succeed.

---