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

THE FBI GETS EMOTIONAL
As the new hostage negotiating team at the FBI grew and
gained more experience in problem-solving skills during the
1980s and ’90s, it became clear that our system was lacking
a crucial ingredient.
At the time, we were deep into Getting to Yes. And as a
negotiator, consultant, and teacher with decades of

---

experience, I still agree with many of the powerful
bargaining strategies in the book. When it was published, it
provided groundbreaking ideas on cooperative problem
solving and originated absolutely necessary concepts like
entering negotiations with a BATNA: the Best Alternative
To a Negotiated Agreement.
It was genius.
But after the fatally disastrous sieges of Randy Weaver’s
Ruby Ridge farm in Idaho in 1992 and David Koresh’s
Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993, there
was no denying that most hostage negotiations were
anything but rational problem-solving situations.
I mean, have you ever tried to devise a mutually
beneficial win-win solution with a guy who thinks he’s the
messiah?
It was becoming glaringly obvious that Getting to Yes
didn’t work with kidnappers. No matter how many agents
read the book with highlighters in hand, it failed to improve
how we as hostage negotiators approached deal making.
There was clearly a breakdown between the book’s
brilliant theory and everyday law enforcement experience.
Why was it that everyone had read this bestselling business
book and endorsed it as one of the greatest negotiation texts
ever written, and yet so few could actually follow it
successfully?
Were we morons?
After Ruby Ridge and Waco, a lot of people were asking
that question. U.S. deputy attorney general Philip B.

---

Heymann, to be specific, wanted to know why our hostage
negotiation techniques were so bad. In October 1993, he
issued a report titled “Lessons of Waco: Proposed Changes
in Federal Law Enforcement,”4 which summarized an
expert panel’s diagnosis of federal law enforcement’s
inability to handle complex hostage situations.
As a result, in 1994 FBI director Louis Freeh announced
the formation of the Critical Incident Response Group
(CIRG), a blended division that would combine the Crises
Negotiation, Crises Management, Behavioral Sciences, and
Hostage Rescue teams and reinvent crisis negotiation.
The only issue was, what techniques were we going to
use?
Around this time, two of the most decorated negotiators in
FBI history, my colleague Fred Lanceley and my former
boss Gary Noesner, were leading a hostage negotiation class
in Oakland, California, when they asked their group of
thirty-five experienced law enforcement officers a simple
question: How many had dealt with a classic bargaining
situation where problem solving was the best technique?
Not one hand went up.
Then they asked the complementary question: How
many students had negotiated an incident in a dynamic,
intense, uncertain environment where the hostage-taker was
in emotional crisis and had no clear demands?
Every hand went up.
It was clear: if emotionally driven incidents, not rational

---

bargaining interactions, constituted the bulk of what most
police negotiators had to deal with, then our negotiating
skills had to laser-focus on the animal, emotional, and
irrational.
From that moment onward, our emphasis would have to
be not on training in quid pro quo bargaining and problem
solving, but on education in the psychological skills needed
in crisis intervention situations. Emotions and emotional
intelligence would have to be central to effective
negotiation, not things to be overcome.
What were needed were simple psychological tactics and
strategies that worked in the field to calm people down,
establish rapport, gain trust, elicit the verbalization of needs,
and persuade the other guy of our empathy. We needed
something easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute.
These were cops and agents, after all, and they weren’t
interested in becoming academics or therapists. What they
wanted was to change the behavior of the hostage-taker,
whoever they were and whatever they wanted, to shift the
emotional environment of the crisis just enough so that we
could secure the safety of everyone involved.
In the early years, the FBI experimented with both new and
old therapeutic techniques developed by the counseling
profession. These counseling skills were aimed at
developing
positive
relationships
with
people
by
demonstrating an understanding of what they’re going
through and how they feel about it.
It all starts with the universally applicable premise that

---

people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the
cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get
there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates
empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand
what the other side is experiencing.
Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel
listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully
and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and
feelings. In addition, they tend to become less defensive and
oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of
view, which gets them to the calm and logical place where
they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.
The whole concept, which you’ll learn as the centerpiece
of this book, is called Tactical Empathy. This is listening as
a martial art, balancing the subtle behaviors of emotional
intelligence and the assertive skills of influence, to gain
access to the mind of another person. Contrary to popular
opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most
active thing you can do.
Once we started developing our new techniques, the
negotiating world split into two currents: negotiation as
learned at the country’s top school continued down the
established road of rational problem solving, while,
ironically, we meatheads at the FBI began to train our agents
in an unproven system based on psychology, counseling,
and crisis intervention. While the Ivy League taught math
and economics, we became experts in empathy.
And our way worked.

---