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

IT’S NOT CRAZY, IT’S A CLUE
It’s not human nature to embrace the unknown. It scares us.
When we are confronted by it, we ignore it, we run away, or
we label it in ways that allow us to dismiss it. In
negotiations, that label most often takes the form of the
statement, “They’re crazy!”
That’s one reason I’ve been highly critical of some of
the implementation of America’s hostage negotiation policy
—which is that we don’t negotiate with those we refer
broadly to as “the Terrorists,” including groups from the
Taliban to ISIS.
The rationale for this nonengagement is summarized
well by the journalist Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security
analyst: “Negotiations with religious fanatics who have
delusions of grandeur generally do not go well.”

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The alternative we’ve chosen is to not understand their
religion, their fanaticism, and their delusions. Instead of
negotiations that don’t go well, we shrug our shoulders and
say, “They’re crazy!”
But that’s absolutely wrongheaded. We must understand
these things. I’m not saying that because I’m a softheaded
pacifist (the FBI doesn’t hire agents like that) but because I
know understanding such things is the best way to discover
the other side’s vulnerabilities and wants and thereby gain
influence. You can’t get that stuff unless you talk.
No one is immune to “They’re crazy!” You can see it rear
its head in every kind of negotiation, from parenting to
congressional deal making to corporate bargaining.
But the moment when we’re most ready to throw our
hands up and declare “They’re crazy!” is often the best
moment for discovering Black Swans that transform a
negotiation. It is when we hear or see something that doesn’t
make sense—something “crazy”—that a crucial fork in the
road is presented: push forward, even more forcefully, into
that which we initially can’t process; or take the other path,
the one to guaranteed failure, in which we tell ourselves that
negotiating was useless anyway.
In their great book Negotiation Genius,4 Harvard
Business School professors Deepak Malhotra and Max H.
Bazerman provide a look at the common reasons negotiators
mistakenly call their counterparts crazy. I’d like to talk
through them here.

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