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

CALM THE SCHIZOPHRENIC
Our Negotiation Operation Center (NOC) was set up in an

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office in a bank immediately across a narrow street from the
Chase branch. We were way too close to the hostage site, so
right away we were at a disadvantage. We were less than
thirty yards from the crisis point, where ideally you want to
have a little more of a buffer than that. You want to put
some distance between you and whatever worst-case
scenario might be waiting at the other end of the deal.
When my partner and I arrived, I was immediately
assigned to coach the police department negotiator on the
phone. His name was Joe, and he was doing fine—but in
these types of situations, nobody worked alone. We always
worked in teams. The thinking behind this policy was that
all these extra sets of ears would pick up extra information.
In some standoffs, we had as many as five people on the
line, analyzing the information as it came in, offering
behind-the-scenes input and guidance to our man on the
phone—and that’s how we were set up here. We had Joe
taking the lead on the phone, and another three or four of us
were listening in, passing notes back and forth, trying to
make sense of a confusing situation. One of us was trying to
gauge the mood of the bad guy taking the lead on the other
end, and another was listening in for clues or “tells” that
might give us a better read on what we were facing, and so
on.
Students of mine balk at this notion, asking, “Seriously,
do you really need a whole team to . . . hear someone out?”
The fact that the FBI has come to that conclusion, I tell
them, should be a wake-up call. It’s really not that easy to

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listen well.
We are easily distracted. We engage in selective
listening, hearing only what we want to hear, our minds
acting on a cognitive bias for consistency rather than truth.
And that’s just the start.
Most people approach a negotiation so preoccupied by
the arguments that support their position that they are unable
to listen attentively. In one of the most cited research papers
in psychology,1 George A. Miller persuasively put forth the
idea that we can process only about seven pieces of
information in our conscious mind at any given moment. In
other words, we are easily overwhelmed.
For those people who view negotiation as a battle of
arguments, it’s the voices in their own head that are
overwhelming them. When they’re not talking, they’re
thinking about their arguments, and when they are talking,
they’re making their arguments. Often those on both sides
of the table are doing the same thing, so you have what I
call a state of schizophrenia: everyone just listening to the
voice in their head (and not well, because they’re doing
seven or eight other things at the same time). It may look
like there are only two people in a conversation, but really
it’s more like four people all talking at once.
There’s one powerful way to quiet the voice in your
head and the voice in their head at the same time: treat two
schizophrenics with just one pill. Instead of prioritizing your
argument—in fact, instead of doing any thinking at all in the
early goings about what you’re going to say—make your

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sole and all-encompassing focus the other person and what
they have to say. In that mode of true active listening—
aided by the tactics you’ll learn in the following chapters—
you’ll disarm your counterpart. You’ll make them feel safe.
The voice in their head will begin to quiet down.
The goal is to identify what your counterparts actually
need (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) and get them
feeling safe enough to talk and talk and talk some more
about what they want. The latter will help you discover the
former. Wants are easy to talk about, representing the
aspiration of getting our way, and sustaining any illusion of
control we have as we begin to negotiate; needs imply
survival, the very minimum required to make us act, and so
make us vulnerable. But neither wants nor needs are where
we start; it begins with listening, making it about the other
people, validating their emotions, and creating enough trust
and safety for a real conversation to begin.
We were far from that goal with the lead hostage-taker
on the call. He kept putting up these weird smoke screens.
He wouldn’t give up his name, he tried to disguise his voice,
he was always telling Joe he was being put on speaker so
everyone around him in the bank could hear, and then he
would abruptly announce that he was putting Joe on “hold”
and hang up the phone. He was constantly asking about a
van, saying he and his partners wanted us to arrange one for
them so they could drive themselves and the hostages to the
local precinct to surrender. That was where the surrender
nonsense had come from—but, of course, this wasn’t a

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surrender plan so much as it was an escape plan. In the back
of his mind, this guy thought he could somehow leave the
bank without being taken into custody, and now that his
getaway driver had fled the scene he needed access to a
vehicle.
After it was all over, a couple of other details came clear.
We weren’t the only ones who had been lied to. Apparently,
this lead bank robber hadn’t told his partners they were
going to rob a bank that morning. It turned out he was a
cash courier who serviced the bank, and his partners were
under the impression that they were going to burglarize the
ATM. They didn’t sign up for taking hostages, so we
learned that this guy’s co-conspirators were also hostages, in
a way. They were caught up in a bad situation they didn’t
see coming—and, in the end, it was this “disconnect”
among the hostage-takers that helped us to drive a wedge
between them and put an end to the stalemate.