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

partner, or if he was talking to me in plain sight of Chris
Watts. I only know that I had his full attention, and that he
was looking for a way to end the standoff—or, at least, to
end his role in it.
I learned later that in between phone calls Chris Watts
was busy squirreling cash inside the bank walls. He was also
burning piles of cash, in full view of the two female
hostages. On the face of it, this was bizarre behavior, but to
a guy like Chris Watts there was a certain logic to it.
Apparently, he’d gotten it in his head that he could burn,
say, $50,000, and if $300,000 was reported missing bank
officials wouldn’t think to go looking for the other
$250,000. It was an interesting deception—not exactly
clever, but interesting. It showed a weird attention to detail.
In his own mind at least, if Chris Watts managed to escape
this box he’d made for himself, he could lie low for a while
and come back at some future date for the money he’d
stashed away—money that would no longer be on the
bank’s ledgers.
What I liked about this second guy, Bobby, was that he
didn’t try to play any games with me on the phone. He was
a straight shooter, so I was able to respond as a straight

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shooter in kind. The same way I’d get back whatever I put
out, he was getting back whatever he was putting out, so I
was with him on this. Experience told me all I had to do was
keep him talking and he’d come around. We’d find a way to
get him out of that bank—with or without Chris Watts.
Someone on my team handed me a note: “Ask him if he
wants to come out.”
I said, “Do you want to come out first?”
I paused, remaining silent.
“I don’t know how I’d do it,” Bobby said finally.
“What’s stopping you from doing it right now?” I asked.
“How do I do that?” he asked again.
“Tell you what. Meet me out front right now.”
This was a breakthrough moment for us—but we still
had to get Bobby out of there, and find a way to let him
know that I’d be waiting for him on the other side of the
door. I’d given him my word that I would be the one to take
his surrender, and that he wouldn’t get hurt, and now we
had to make that happen—and very often it’s this
implementation phase that can be the most difficult.
Our team scrambled to put a plan in place to bring this
about. I started putting on bulletproof gear. We surveyed the
scene, figuring I could position myself behind one of the big
trucks we’d parked out in front of the bank, to give me a
measure of cover, just in case.
Then we ran into one of those maddening situations
where one hand didn’t know what the other was doing. It
turned out the bank door had been barricaded from the

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outside early on in the standoff—a precaution to ensure that
none of the bank robbers could flee the scene. We all knew
this, of course, on some level, but when the time came for
Bobby to give himself up and walk out the door, it’s like our
brains went into sleep mode. No one on the SWAT team
thought to remind anyone on the negotiating team of this
one significant detail, so for a couple long beats Bobby
couldn’t get out, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach that
whatever progress we’d just made with this guy would be
for nothing.
So there we were, scrambling to recover. Soon, two
SWAT guys moved forward toward the entrance, with
ballistic shields, guns drawn, to take the locks and the
barricade off the door—and at this point they still didn’t
know what they were facing on the other side. It was a
super-tense moment. There could have been a dozen guns
on these two SWAT guys, but there was nothing for them to
do but make their slow approach. Those guys were rock
solid. They unlocked the door, backed away, and finally we
were good to go.
Bobby came out—his hands in the air. I’d walked him
through a specific set of instructions on what to do when he
came out the door, what to expect. A couple of SWAT guys
patted him down. Bobby turned and looked and said,
“Where’s Chris? Take me to Chris.”
Finally, they brought him around to me, and we were
able to debrief him inside our makeshift command post.
This was the first we learned that there was only one other

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hostage-taker inside—and this naturally set the commander
off. I didn’t learn this until later, but I could see why he
would have been angry and embarrassed at this latest turn.
All along, he’d been telling the media there were a bunch of
bad guys inside—an international assemblage of bad guys,
remember? But now that it turned out it was essentially a
two-man operation, and one of the bad guys had wanted no