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

CHAPTER 10
FIND THE BLACK SWAN
A
t 11:30 a.m. on June 17, 1981, a beautiful 70-degree
spring day with an insistent westerly breeze, thirty-seven-
year-old William Griffin left the second-floor bedroom
where he lived in his parent’s Rochester, New York, home
and trod down the shoe-buffed stairs that led to their
meticulous living room.
At the bottom he stopped, paused, and then, without a
word of warning, shot off three shotgun blasts that killed his
mother and a handyman who was hanging wallpaper and
critically wounded his stepfather. The sound reverberated in
the enclosed space.
Griffin then left the house and shot a workman and two
bystanders as he jogged two blocks to the Security Trust
Company, a neighborhood bank. Seconds after he entered,
people began sprinting from the bank as Griffin took nine
bank employees hostage and ordered the customers to
leave.
For the next three and a half hours, Griffin led police and
FBI agents in a violent standoff in which he shot and
wounded the first two police officers who responded to the
bank’s silent alarm, and shot six people who happened to be

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walking near the bank. Griffin shot off so many rounds—
more than one hundred in all—that the police used a
garbage truck to shield one officer as he was being rescued.
Waving the nine bank employees into a small office at
2:30 p.m., Griffin told the manager to call the police and
deliver a message.
Outside, FBI agent Clint Van Zandt stood by while
Rochester police officer Jim O’Brien picked up the phone.
“Either you come to the front entrance doors of the bank
at three o’clock and have a shoot-out with him in the
parking lot,” the manager blurted through her tears, “or he’s
going to start killing hostages and throwing out bodies.”
Then the line went dead.
Now, never in the history of the United States had a
hostage-taker killed a hostage on deadline. The deadline
was always a way to focus the mind; what the bad guys
really wanted was money, respect, and a helicopter.
Everyone knew that. It was a permanent and inalterable
known known. It was the truth.
But that permanent and inalterable truth was about to
change.
What came next showed the power of Black Swans,
those hidden and unexpected pieces of information—those
unknown unknowns—whose unearthing has game-changing
effects on a negotiation dynamic.
Negotiation breakthroughs—when the game shifts
inalterably in your favor—are created by those who can
identify and utilize Black Swans.

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Here’s how.