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

FINDING LEVERAGE IN THE PREDICTABLY
UNPREDICTABLE
At exactly 3 p.m., Griffin gestured toward one of his
hostages, a twenty-nine-year-old teller named Margaret
Moore, and told her to walk to the glass bank doors.
Petrified, Moore did as she was ordered, but first cried out
that she was a single parent with a young son.
Griffin didn’t seem to hear her, or to care. Once the
weeping Moore made it to the vestibule, Griffin shot off two
blasts from his twelve-gauge shotgun. Both of the heavy
rounds struck Moore in the midsection, violently blowing
her through the glass door and almost cutting her body in
half.
Outside, law enforcement was stunned into silence. It
was obvious that Griffin didn’t want money or respect or an
escape route. The only way he was coming out was in a
body bag.
At that moment, Griffin walked over to a full-length
bank window and pressed his body against the glass. He
was in full view of a sniper stationed in the church across
the street. Griffin knew quite well the sniper was there;
earlier in the day he’d shot at him.
Less than a second after Griffin’s silhouette appeared in
his scope, the sniper pulled the trigger.
Griffin crumpled to the floor, dead.

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Black Swan theory tells us that things happen that were
previously thought to be impossible—or never thought of at
all. This is not the same as saying that sometimes things
happen against one-in-a-million odds, but rather that things
never imagined do come to pass.
The idea of the Black Swan was popularized by risk
analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his bestselling books
Fooled by Randomness (2001)1
and The Black Swan
(2007),2 but the term goes back much further. Until the
seventeenth century, people could only imagine white
swans because all swans ever seen had possessed white
feathers. In seventeenth-century London it was common to
refer to impossible things as “Black Swans.”
But then the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh went
to western Australia in 1697—and saw a black swan.
Suddenly the unthinkable and unthought was real. People
had always predicted that the next swan they saw would be
white, but the discovery of black swans shattered this
worldview.
Black Swans are just a metaphor, of course. Think of
Pearl Harbor, the rise of the Internet, 9/11, and the recent
banking crisis.
None of the events above was predicted—yet on
reflection, the markers were all there. It’s just that people
weren’t paying attention.
As Taleb uses the term, the Black Swan symbolizes the
uselessness of predictions based on previous experience.
Black Swans are events or pieces of knowledge that sit

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outside our regular expectations and therefore cannot be
predicted.
This is a crucial concept in negotiation. In every
negotiating session, there are different kinds of information.
There are those things we know, like our counterpart’s name
and their offer and our experiences from other negotiations.
Those are known knowns. There are those things we are
certain that exist but we don’t know, like the possibility that
the other side might get sick and leave us with another
counterpart. Those are known unknowns and they are like
poker wild cards; you know they’re out there but you don’t
know who has them. But most important are those things we
don’t know that we don’t know, pieces of information
we’ve never imagined but that would be game changing if
uncovered. Maybe our counterpart wants the deal to fail
because he’s leaving for a competitor.
These unknown unknowns are Black Swans.
With their known knowns and prior expectations so firmly
guiding their approach, Van Zandt, and really, the entire
FBI, were blind to the clues and connections that showed
there was something outside of the predictable at play. They
couldn’t see the Black Swans in front of them.
I don’t mean to single out Van Zandt here. He did all of
law enforcement a service by highlighting this event and he
told me and a room full of agents the story of that horrible
June day during a training session at Quantico. It was an
introduction to the suicide-by-cop phenomenon—when an
individual deliberately creates a crisis situation to provoke a

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lethal response from law enforcement—but there was an
even greater lesson at stake: the point of the story then, and
now, was how important it is to recognize the unexpected to
make sure things like Moore’s death never happen again.
On that day in June 1981, O’Brien kept calling the bank,
but each time the bank employee who answered quickly
hung up. It was at that moment they should have realized
the situation was outside the known. Hostage-takers always
talked because they always had demands; they always
wanted to be heard, respected, and paid.
But this guy didn’t.
Then, midway through the standoff, a police officer
entered the command post with the news that a double
homicide with a third person critically wounded had been
reported a few blocks away.
“Do we need to know this?” Van Zandt said. “Is there a
connection?”
No one knew or found out in time. If they had, they
might have uncovered a second Black Swan: that Griffin
had already killed several people without making monetary
demands.
And then, a few hours in, the hostage-taker had one of
the hostages read a note to the police over the phone.
Curiously, there were no demands. Instead, it was a
rambling diatribe about Griffin’s life and the wrongs he’d
endured. The note was so long and unfocused it was never
read in its entirety. Because of this, one important line—
another Black Swan—wasn’t registered:

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“. . . after the police take my life . . .”
Because these Black Swans weren’t uncovered, Van
Zandt and his colleagues never saw the situation for what it
was: Griffin wanted to die, and he wanted the police to do it
for him.
Nothing like this—a shootout on a deadline?—had ever
happened to the FBI, so they tried to fit the information into
what had happened in the past. Into the old templates. They
wondered, What does he actually want? After scaring them
for a bit, they expected Griffin to pick up the phone and
start a dialogue. No one gets killed on deadline.
Or so they thought.