The author, Chris Voss, is a former FBI agent who’s taken the insights he learned from negotiating with hostage takers, kidnappers, bank robbers, and violent terrorists and applied them to everyday situations. He discovered that traditional business school approaches to negotiation failed in these high-stakes scenarios: you can’t apply “win-win” or “getting to yes” when someone is threatening to kill your loved one unless you pay them their ransom.
Given his background, Voss fills the text of Never Split the Difference with tales of Islamic terrorists in the Philippines, bank heists in Manhattan, and kidnappings in Haiti. He’s showing that if an empathy-first approach worked even with violent and unstable criminals, they should be effective in dealing with used-car salespeople and real estate agents.
For this summary, we’ve focused on the more realistic examples that mirror your everyday life, rather than the more extreme stories. Where the book is lacking in effective examples, we’ve created our own example conversations to show the principles at work.
Negotiation triggers fear and anxiety in a lot of us. We worry about getting outmaneuvered by the other side, about not having enough information to make informed decisions, and about deadlines that pressure us into making bad deals. We also think that negotiation is something reserved for high-powered businesspeople and lawyers: not for ordinary people like us.
This is false. Negotiating is something we do every day. In fact, negotiation is taking place whenever you want something from someone else. It can be the major scenarios (buying a car, renting an apartment) but it can also be typical, daily stuff like getting your kids to go to bed when you want them to.
Old-school, classic negotiation theory is premised on the idea that human beings are rational. They are able to calculate what their optimal outcome is, with each step in the negotiation designed to bring them closer to that outcome. These schools of thought imagines humans to be more like computers, evaluating comparative advantages and disadvantages and making decisions based solely on those calculations.
The famous book Getting to Yes is a classic example of the genre. Its theory of negotiation focuses on the two parties being engaged in a mutual act of problem-solving, each of them trying to get to a “win-win” settlement that pleases both parties.
This isn’t what actually happens in real negotiations. People struggle to even identify what constitutes a “win,” let alone work with someone else to achieve one. And many “win-win” scenarios produce a poor outcome for both parties.
What would a “win-win” scenario be in a hostage scenario? The hostage’s family pays the ransom and the kidnapper refuses to release them, holding out for even more: win-win!
Instead of rational interest, we should focus on the powerful cognitive biases that prevent us from recognizing what’s in our best interests. Only then can we turn off these blinders that cloud our judgement: and take advantage of them in others. Examples of biases include:
People respond differently to identical choices based solely on how they’re presented. For example, people have been shown to place more value on moving from 90 percent certainty to 100 percent than from 45 percent to 55 percent (even though there’s no difference).
People fear a loss more than they value an equal gain. You can make your preferred solution far more attractive to your counterpart by framing it as something that prevents them from incurring a loss, rather than framing it as a potential gain.
We are all inherently irrational and impulsive, willing to make decisions with incomplete information and disregard for our own basic material interests if the decision satisfies a deeper emotional need.
Most people have two basic emotional needs: 1) to feel secure and 2) to feel that they are in control.
Successful negotiations, then, must navigate the complexity of human emotions. It’s more about heart than mind: What are my counterpart’s real desires? What do they fear losing the most? How can I show them that my preferred outcome will lead to their preferred outcome?
The key to any negotiation is information. All negotiations are exercises in information-gathering. You already know that the person on the other side of the table is driven by their need for security and autonomy. So, how do you take advantage of those needs to get them to give you the crucial information you need?
By using mirroring, labeling, active listening, accusation audits, and calibrated questions to build rapport with them. We’ll get into how you apply these tactics in greater detail later, but the bottom line is this: get the other person to be more comfortable with you, to see you more as a partner than an adversary. Once this happens, they’ll be far more willing to grant you access to their innermost thought processes and hidden desires: giving you the decisive negotiating advantage.