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

NORMATIVE LEVERAGE
Every person has a set of rules and a moral framework.
Normative leverage is using the other party’s norms and
standards to advance your position. If you can show
inconsistencies between their beliefs and their actions, you
have normative leverage. No one likes to look like a
hypocrite.
For example, if your counterpart lets slip that they
generally pay a certain multiple of cash flow when they buy
a company, you can frame your desired price in a way that
reflects that valuation.
Discovering the Black Swans that give you normative
valuation can be as easy as asking what your counterpart
believes and listening openly. You want to see what
language they speak, and speak it back to them.
KNOW THEIR RELIGION
In March 2003 I led the negotiation with a farmer who
became one of the most unlikely post-9/11 terrorists you can
imagine.
The drama started when Dwight Watson, a North

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Carolina tobacco grower, hooked up his jeep to a John
Deere tractor festooned with banners and an inverted U.S.
flag and towed it to Washington, D.C., to protest
government policies he thought were putting tobacco
farmers out of business.
When Watson got to the capital, he pulled his tractor into
a pond between the Washington Monument and the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial and threatened to blow it up
with the “organophosphate” bombs he claimed were inside.
The capital went into lockdown as the police blocked off
an eight-block area from the Lincoln Memorial to the
Washington Monument. Coming just months after the
Beltway sniper attacks and alongside the buildup to the Iraq
War, the ease with which Watson threw the nation’s capital
into turmoil freaked people out.
Talking on his cell phone, Watson told the Washington
Post that he was on a do-or-die mission to show how
reduced subsidies were killing tobacco farmers. He told the
Post that God had instructed him to stage his protest and he
wasn’t going to leave.
“If this is the way America will be run, the hell with it,”
he said. “I will not surrender. They can blow [me] out of the
water. I’m ready to go to heaven.”
The FBI deployed me to a converted RV on the National
Mall, where I was to guide a team of FBI agents and U.S.
Park Police as we tried to talk Watson out of killing himself
and who knows how many others.
And then we got down to business.

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Like you’d expect of a negotiation with a guy
threatening to destroy a good part of the U.S. capital, it was
righteously tense. Sharpshooters had their weapons trained
on Watson, and they had the “green light” to shoot if he
made any crazy moves.
In any negotiation, but especially in a tense one like this,
it’s not how well you speak but how well you listen that
determines your success. Understanding the “other” is a
precondition to be able to speak persuasively and develop
options that resonate for them. There is the visible
negotiation and then all the things that are hidden under the
surface (the secret negotiation space wherein the Black
Swans dwell).
Access to this hidden space very often comes through
understanding the other side’s worldview, their reason for
being, their religion. Indeed, digging into your counterpart’s
“religion” (sometimes involving God but not always)
inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and
into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart.
Once you’ve understood your counterpart’s worldview,
you can build influence. That’s why as we talked with
Watson I spent my energy trying to unearth who he was
rather than logically arguing him into surrender.
From this we learned that Watson had been finding it
increasingly hard to make a living on his 1,200-acre tobacco
farm, which had been in his family for five generations.
After being hit by a drought and having his crop quota cut
by half, Watson decided he couldn’t afford the farm

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anymore and drove to Washington to make his point. He
wanted attention, and knowing what he wanted gave us
positive leverage.
Watson also told us he was a veteran, and veterans had
rules. This is the kind of music you want to hear, as it
provides normative leverage. He told us that he would be
willing to surrender, but not right away. As a military police
officer in the 82nd Airborne in the 1970s, he’d learned that
if he was trapped behind enemy lines, he could withdraw
with honor if reinforcements didn’t arrive within three days.
But not before.
Now, we had articulated rules we could hold him to, and
the admission that he could withdraw also implied that,
despite his bluster about dying, he wanted to live. One of
the first things you try to decide in a hostage negotiation is
whether your counterpart’s vision of the future involves
them living. And Watson had answered yes.
We used this information—a piece of negative leverage,
as we could take away something he wanted: life—and
started working it alongside the positive leverage of his
desire to be heard. We emphasized to Watson that he had
already made national news and if he wanted his message to
survive he was going to have to live.
Watson was smart enough to understand that there was a
real chance he wouldn’t make it out alive, but he still had
his rules of military honor. His own desires and fears helped
generate some positive and negative leverage, but they were
secondary to the norms by which he lived his life.

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It was tempting to just wait until the third day, but I
doubted we’d get that far. With each passing hour the
atmosphere was growing tenser. The capital was under siege
and we had reason to believe he might have explosives. If
he made one wrong move, one spastic freak-out, the snipers
would kill him. He’d already had several angry outbursts, so
every hour that passed endangered him. He could still get
himself killed.
But we couldn’t hit on that at all; we couldn’t threaten to
kill him and expect that to work. The reason for that is
something called the “paradox of power”—namely, the
harder we push the more likely we are to be met with
resistance. That’s why you have to use negative leverage
sparingly.
Still, time was short and we had to speed things up.
But how?
What happened next was one of those glorious examples
of how deeply listening to understand your counterpart’s
worldview can reveal a Black Swan that transforms a
negotiation dynamic. Watson didn’t directly tell us what we
needed to know, but by close attention we uncovered a
subtle truth that informed everything he said.
About thirty-six hours in, Winnie Miller, an FBI agent on
our team who’d been listening intently to subtle references
Watson had been making, turned to me.
“He’s a devout Christian,” she told me. “Tell him
tomorrow is the Dawn of the Third Day. That’s the day
Christians believe Jesus Christ left his tomb and ascended to

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Heaven. If Christ came out on the Dawn of the Third Day,
why not Watson?”
It was a brilliant use of deep listening. By combining that
subtext of Watson’s words with knowledge of his worldview
she let us show Watson that we not only were listening, but
that we had also heard him.
If we’d understood his subtext correctly, this would let
him end the standoff honorably and to do so with the feeling
that he was surrendering to an adversary that respected him
and his beliefs.
By positioning your demands within the worldview your
counterpart uses to make decisions, you show them respect
and that gets you attention and results. Knowing your
counterpart’s religion is more than just gaining normative
leverage per se. Rather, it’s gaining a holistic understanding
of your counterpart’s worldview—in this case, literally a
religion—and using that knowledge to inform your
negotiating moves.
Using your counterpart’s religion is extremely effective
in large part because it has authority over them. The other
guy’s “religion” is what the market, the experts, God, or
society—whatever matters to him—has determined to be fair
and just. And people defer to that authority.
In the next conversation with Watson, we mentioned that
the next morning was the Dawn of the Third Day. There was
a long moment of silence on the other end of the line. Our
Negotiation Operation Center was so quiet you could hear
the heartbeat of the guy next to you.

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Watson coughed.
“I’ll come out,” he said.
And he did, ending a forty-eight-hour standoff, saving
himself from harm, and allowing the nation’s capital to
resume its normal life.
No explosives were found.
While the importance of “knowing their religion” should be
clear from Watson’s story, here are two tips for reading
religion correctly:
■
Review everything you hear. You will not hear
everything the first time, so double-check.
Compare notes with your team members. You
will often discover new information that will help
you advance the negotiation.
■
Use backup listeners whose only job is to listen
between the lines. They will hear things you
miss.
In other words: listen, listen again, and listen some more.
We’ve seen how a holistic understanding of your
counterpart’s “religion”—a huge Black Swan—can provide
normative leverage that leads to negotiating results. But
there are other ways in which learning your counterpart’s
“religion” enables you to achieve better outcomes.