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

DO AN ACCUSATION AUDIT
On the first day of negotiating class each semester, I march
the group through an introductory exercise called “sixty
seconds or she dies.” I play a hostage-taker and a student
has to convince me to release my hostage within a minute.
It’s an icebreaker that shows me the level of my students,
and it reveals to them how much they need to learn. (Here’s
a little secret: the hostage never gets out.)
Sometimes students jump right in, but finding takers is
usually hard because it means coming to the front of the
class and competing with the guy who holds all the cards. If
I just ask for a volunteer, my students sit on their hands and
look away. You’ve been there. You can almost feel your
back muscles tense as you think, Oh please, don’t call on
me.
So I don’t ask. Instead, I say, “In case you’re worried
about volunteering to role-play with me in front of the class,
I want to tell you in advance . . . it’s going to be horrible.”
After the laughter dies down, I then say, “And those of
you who do volunteer will probably get more out of this
than anyone else.”
I always end up with more volunteers than I need.
Now, look at what I did: I prefaced the conversation by
labeling my audience’s fears; how much worse can
something be than “horrible”? I defuse them and wait,
letting it sink in and thereby making the unreasonable seem

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less forbidding.
All of us have intuitively done something close to this
thousands of times. You’ll start a criticism of a friend by
saying, “I don’t want this to sound harsh . . .” hoping that
whatever comes next will be softened. Or you’ll say, “I
don’t want to seem like an asshole . . .” hoping your
counterpart will tell you a few sentences later that you’re not
that bad. The small but critical mistake this commits is
denying the negative. That actually gives it credence.
In court, defense lawyers do this properly by mentioning
everything their client is accused of, and all the weaknesses
of their case, in the opening statement. They call this
technique “taking the sting out.”
What I want to do here is turn this into a process that,
applied systematically, you can use to disarm your
counterpart while negotiating everything from your son’s
bedtime to large business contracts.
The first step of doing so is listing every terrible thing
your counterpart could say about you, in what I call an
accusation audit.
This idea of an accusation audit is really, really hard for
people to get their minds around. The first time I tell my
students about it, they say, “Oh my God. We can’t do that.”
It seems both artificial and self-loathing. It seems like it
would make things worse. But then I remind them that it’s
exactly what I did the first day of class when I labeled their
fears of the hostage game in advance. And they all admit
that none of them knew.

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As an example, I’m going to use the experience of one
of my students, Anna, because I couldn’t be more proud at
how she turned what she learned in my class into $1 million.
At the time, Anna was representing a major government
contractor. Her firm had won a competition for a sizable
government deal by partnering with a smaller company,
let’s call it ABC Corp., whose CEO had a close relationship
with the government client representative.
Problems started right after they won the contract,
though. Because ABC’s relationship had been instrumental
in winning the deal, ABC felt that it was owed a piece of the
pie whether it fulfilled its part of the contract or not.
And so, while the contract paid them for the work of
nine people, they continually cut back support. As Anna’s
company had to perform ABC’s work, the relationship
between ABC and Anna’s company fragmented into
vituperative emails and bitter complaining. Facing an
already low profit margin, Anna’s company was forced into
tough negotiations to get ABC to take a cut to 5.5 people.
The negotiations left a bitter aftertaste on both sides. The
vituperative emails stopped, but then again a l l emails
stopped. And no communication is always a bad sign.
A few months after those painful talks, the client
demanded a major rethink on the project and Anna’s firm
was faced with losing serious money if it didn’t get ABC to
agree to further cuts. Because ABC wasn’t living up to its
side of the bargain, Anna’s firm would have had strong
contractual grounds to cut out ABC altogether. But that

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would have damaged Anna’s firm’s reputation with a very
important customer, and could have led to litigation from
ABC.
Faced with this scenario, Anna set up a meeting with
ABC where she and her partners planned to inform ABC
that its pay was being cut to three people. It was a touchy
situation, as ABC was already unhappy about the first cut.
Even though she was normally an aggressive and confident
negotiator, worries about the negotiations ruined Anna’s
sleep for weeks. She needed to extract concessions while
improving the relationship at the same time. No easy task,
right?
To prepare, the first thing Anna did was sit down with
her negotiating partner, Mark, and list every negative charge
that ABC could level at them. The relationship had gone
sour long before, so the list was huge. But the biggest
possible accusations were easy to spot:
“You are the typical prime contractor trying to force out
the small guy.”
“You promised us we would have all this work and you
reneged on your promise.”
“You could have told us about this issue weeks ago to
help us prepare.”
Anna and Mark then took turns role-playing the two
sides, with one playing ABC and the other disarming these
accusations with anticipatory labels. “You’re going to think
we are a big, bad prime contractor when we are done,”
Anna practiced saying slowly and naturally. “It seems you

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feel this work was promised to you from the beginning,”
Mark said. They trained in front of an observer, honing their
pacing; deciding at what point they would label each fear;
and planning when to include meaningful pauses. It was
theater.
When the day of the meeting arrived, Anna opened by
acknowledging ABC’s biggest gripes. “We understand that
we brought you on board with the shared goal of having
you lead this work,” she said. “You may feel like we have
treated you unfairly, and that we changed the deal
significantly since then. We acknowledge that you believe
you were promised this work.”
This received an emphatic nod from the ABC
representatives, so Anna continued by outlining the situation
in a way that encouraged the ABC reps to see the firms as
teammates, peppering her statements with open-ended
questions that showed she was listening: “What else is there
you feel is important to add to this?”
By labeling the fears and asking for input, Anna was
able to elicit an important fact about ABC’s fears, namely
that ABC was expecting this to be a high-profit contract
because it thought Anna’s firm was doing quite well from
the deal.
This provided an entry point for Mark, who explained
that the client’s new demands had turned his firm’s profits
into losses, meaning that he and Anna needed to cut ABC’s
pay further, to three people. Angela, one of ABC’s
representatives, gasped.

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“It sounds like you think we are the big, bad prime
contractor trying to push out the small business,” Anna said,
heading off the accusation before it could be made.
“No, no, we don’t think that,” Angela said, conditioned
by the acknowledgment to look for common ground.
With the negatives labeled and the worst accusations laid
bare, Anna and Mark were able to turn the conversation to
the contract. Watch what they do closely, as it’s brilliant:
they acknowledge ABC’s situation while simultaneously
shifting the onus of offering a solution to the smaller
company.
“It sounds like you have a great handle on how the
government contract should work,” Anna said, labeling
Angela’s expertise.
“Yes—but I know that’s not how it always goes,”
Angela answered, proud to have her experience
acknowledged.
Anna then asked Angela how she would amend the
contract so that everyone made some money, which pushed
Angela to admit that she saw no way to do so without
cutting ABC’s worker count.
Several weeks later, the contract was tweaked to cut
ABC’s payout, which brought Anna’s company $1 million
that put the contract into the black. But it was Angela’s
reaction at the end of the meeting that most surprised Anna.
After Anna had acknowledged that she had given Angela
some bad news and that she understood how angry she must
feel, Angela said:

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“This is not a good situation but we appreciate the fact
that you are acknowledging what happened, and we don’t
feel like you are mistreating us. And you are not the ‘Big
Bad Prime.’”
Anna’s reaction to how this turned out? “Holy crap, this
stuff actually works!”
She’s right. As you just saw, the beauty of going right
after negativity is that it brings us to a safe zone of empathy.
Every one of us has an inherent, human need to be
understood, to connect with the person across the table. That
explains why, after Anna labeled Angela’s fears, Angela’s
first instinct was to add nuance and detail to those fears.
And that detail gave Anna the power to accomplish what
she wanted from the negotiation.