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

THE VOICE
After five hours, we were stuck, so the lieutenant in charge
asked me to take over. Joe was out; I was in. Basically, it

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was the only strategic play at our disposal that didn’t
involve an escalation in force.
The man we now knew as Chris Watts had been in the
habit of ending his calls abruptly, so my job was to find a
way to keep him talking. I switched into my Late-Night, FM
DJ Voice: deep, soft, slow, and reassuring. I had been
instructed to confront Watts as soon as possible about his
identity. I also came onto the phone with no warning,
replacing Joe, against standard protocol. It was a shrewd
move by the NYPD lieutenant to shake things up, but it
easily could have backfired. This soothing voice was the
key to easing the confrontation.
Chris Watts heard my voice on the line and cut me off
immediately—said, “Hey, what happened to Joe?”
I said, “Joe’s gone. This is Chris. You’re talking to me
now.”
I didn’t put it like a question. I made a downward-
inflecting statement, in a downward-inflecting tone of voice.
The best way to describe the late-night FM DJ’s voice is as
the voice of calm and reason.
When deliberating on a negotiating strategy or approach,
people tend to focus all their energies on what to say or do,
but it’s how we are (our general demeanor and delivery)
that is both the easiest thing to enact and the most
immediately effective mode of influence. Our brains don’t
just process and understand the actions and words of others
but their feelings and intentions too, the social meaning of
their behavior and their emotions. On a mostly unconscious

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level, we can understand the minds of others not through
any kind of thinking but through quite literally grasping
what the other is feeling.
Think of it as a kind of involuntary neurological
telepathy—each of us in every given moment signaling to
the world around us whether we are ready to play or fight,
laugh or cry.
When we radiate warmth and acceptance, conversations
just seem to flow. When we enter a room with a level of
comfort and enthusiasm, we attract people toward us. Smile
at someone on the street, and as a reflex they’ll smile back.
Understanding that reflex and putting it into practice is
critical to the success of just about every negotiating skill
there is to learn.
That’s why your most powerful tool in any verbal
communication is your voice. You can use your voice to
intentionally reach into someone’s brain and flip an
emotional switch. Distrusting to trusting. Nervous to calm.
In an instant, the switch will flip just like that with the right
delivery.
There are essentially three voice tones available to
negotiators: the late-night FM DJ voice, the positive/playful
voice, and the direct or assertive voice. Forget the assertive
voice for now; except in very rare circumstances, using it is
like slapping yourself in the face while you’re trying to
make progress. You’re signaling dominance onto your
counterpart, who will either aggressively, or passive-
aggressively, push back against attempts to be controlled.

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Most of the time, you should be using the
positive/playful voice. It’s the voice of an easygoing, good-
natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The
key here is to relax and smile while you’re talking. A smile,
even while talking on the phone, has an impact tonally that
the other person will pick up on.
The effect these voices have are cross-cultural and never
lost in translation. On a vacation to Turkey with his
girlfriend, one of our instructors at The Black Swan Group
was befuddled—not to mention a little embarrassed—that
his partner was repeatedly getting better deals in their
backstreet haggling sessions at the spice markets in Istanbul.
For the merchants in such markets throughout the Middle
East, bargaining is an art form. Their emotional intelligence
is finely honed, and they’ll use hospitality and friendliness
in a powerful way to draw you in and create reciprocity that
ends in an exchange of money. But it works both ways, as
our instructor discovered while observing his girlfriend in
action: she approached each encounter as a fun game, so
that no matter how aggressively she pushed, her smile and
playful demeanor primed her merchant friends to settle on a
successful outcome.
When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think
more quickly, and are more likely to collaborate and
problem-solve (instead of fight and resist). It applies to the
smile-er as much as to the smile-ee: a smile on your face,
and in your voice, will increase your own mental agility.
Playful wasn’t the move with Chris Watts. The way the

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late-night FM DJ voice works is that, when you inflect your
voice in a downward way, you put it out there that you’ve
got it covered. Talking slowly and clearly you convey one
idea: I’m in control. When you inflect in an upward way,
you invite a response. Why? Because you’ve brought in a
measure of uncertainty. You’ve made a statement sound like
a question. You’ve left the door open for the other guy to
take the lead, so I was careful here to be quiet, self-assured.
It’s the same voice I might use in a contract negotiation,
when an item isn’t up for discussion. If I see a work-for-hire
clause, for example, I might say, “We don’t do work-for-
hire.” Just like that, plain, simple, and friendly. I don’t offer
up an alternative, because it would beg further discussion,
so I just make a straightforward declaration.
That’s how I played it here. I said, “Joe’s gone. You’re
talking to me now.”
Done deal.
You can be very direct and to the point as long as you
create safety by a tone of voice that says I’m okay, you’re
okay, let’s figure things out.
The tide was turning. Chris Watts was rattled, but he had a
few moves left in him. One of the bad guys went down to
the basement and collected one of the female bank tellers.
She’d disappeared into the bowels of the bank at some
point, but Chris Watts and his accomplice hadn’t chased
after her because they knew she wasn’t going anywhere.
Now one of the bank robbers dragged her back upstairs and
put her on the phone.

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She said, “I’m okay.” That’s all.
I said, “Who is this?”
She said, “I’m okay.”
I wanted to keep her talking, so I asked her name—but
then, just like that, she was gone.
This was a brilliant move on Chris Watts’s part. It was a
threat, teasing us with the woman’s voice, but subtly and
indirectly. It was a way for the bad guy to let us know he
was calling the shots on his end of the phone without
directly escalating the situation. He’d given us a “proof of
life,” confirming that he did indeed have hostages with him
who were in decent enough shape to talk on the phone, but
stopped short of allowing us to gather any useful
information.
He’d managed to take back a measure of control.