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

ASSUMPTIONS BLIND, HYPOTHESES GUIDE
Good negotiators, going in, know they have to be ready for
possible surprises; great negotiators aim to use their skills to
reveal the surprises they are certain exist.
Experience will have taught them that they are best
served by holding multiple hypotheses—about the situation,
about the counterpart’s wants, about a whole array of
variables—in their mind at the same time. Present and alert
in the moment, they use all the new information that comes
their way to test and winnow true hypotheses from false
ones.
In negotiation, each new psychological insight or
additional piece of information revealed heralds a step
forward and allows one to discard one hypothesis in favor
of another. You should engage the process with a mindset
of discovery. Your goal at the outset is to extract and
observe as much information as possible. Which, by the
way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often
have trouble being negotiators—they’re so smart they think
they don’t have anything to discover.
Too often people find it easier just to stick with what
they believe. Using what they’ve heard or their own biases,
they often make assumptions about others even before
meeting them. They even ignore their own perceptions to
make them conform to foregone conclusions. These

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assumptions muck up our perceptual windows onto the
world, showing us an unchanging—often flawed—version
of the situation.
Great negotiators are able to question the assumptions
that the rest of the involved players accept on faith or in
arrogance, and thus remain more emotionally open to all
possibilities, and more intellectually agile to a fluid situation.
Unfortunately, back in 1993, I was far from great.
Everyone thought the crisis would be over quickly. The
bank robbers had little choice but to surrender—or so we
thought. We actually started the day with intelligence that
the bank robbers wanted to surrender. Little did we know
that was a ruse their ringleader planted to buy time. And
throughout the day, he constantly referred to the influence
the other four bank robbers exerted on him. I hadn’t yet
learned to be aware of a counterpart’s overuse of personal
pronouns—we/they o r me/I. The less important he makes
himself, the more important he probably is (and vice versa).
We would later find out there was only one other bank
robber, and he had been tricked into the robbery. Actually,
three robbers, if you counted the getaway driver, who got
away before we even entered the scene.
The “lead” hostage-taker was running his own
“counterintelligence operation,” feeding us all kinds of
misinformation. He wanted us to think he had a bunch of
co-conspirators with him—from a number of different
countries. He also wanted us to think that his partners were
much more volatile and dangerous than he was.

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Looking back, of course, his game plan was clear—he
wanted to confuse us as much as he could until he could
figure a way out. He would constantly tell us that he wasn’t
in charge and that every decision was the responsibility of
the other guys. He would indicate that he was scared—or, at
least, a little tentative—when we asked him to pass along
certain information. And yet he always spoke with a voice
of complete calm and absolute confidence. It was a
reminder to my colleagues and me that until you know what
you’re dealing with, you don’t know what you’re dealing
with.
Though the call had come in about 8:30 a.m., by the
time we arrived across the street from the bank and made
contact it was probably about 10:30 a.m. The word when we
came on the scene was that this was going to be cookie-
cutter, by the book, short and sweet. Our commanders
thought we’d be in and out of there in ten minutes, because
the bad guys supposedly wanted to give themselves up. This
would later become a problem, when negotiations stalled
and Command became embarrassed, because they’d made
the mistake of sharing this early optimism with the press,
based on all the early misinformation.
We arrived on the scene to take a surrender, but the
situation went sideways almost immediately.
Everything we assumed we knew was wrong.