Beware the F-word — “Never Split the Difference” Chapter 6 Summary
All negotiation is irrational and emotional. There is always some personal desire, hidden need, underdeveloped notion, or simply blind spot that pushes us towards the negotiation with another person.
On the note of irrationality and emotion, Chris highlights three aspects related to the underlying subjectivity:
- Irrational fear of deadlines
- Mysterious power of odd numbers
- Misunderstanding of fairness
Ultimately, you can manipulate these aspects during negotiation. Once again, this is not necessarily negative manipulation of others or even “gaslighting” them into agreement, no. This is about changing their perspective to make negotiations smoother. Maybe you need to fight for a better salary, or you want to get your kids to listen to you.
But before anything else, there is something more important.
Never Split the Difference
Right, this is the meaning behind the book title: do not compromise.
Win-win scenarios are, put bluntly, garbage. Imagine a moment where your wife wants you to wear the brown shoes but you want to wear the blue shoes. The compromise is for you to wear one of each. A win-win mentality is usually ineffective and often disastrous.
Yes, you still want to focus on empathy, collaboration, and all those positive tactics discussed in earlier chapters. But a win-win mentality can put you in a world of hurt, especially against counterparts going in with a win-lose scenario — and they cast you as the loser beforehand.
No deal is better than a bad deal.
Now imagine a kidnaping. A bad deal is when someone pays for the ransom but the hostage doesn’t come out.
Creative solutions carry some risk, annoyance, confusion, and conflict. But that’s where the great deals are made.
Irrational fear of deadlines
Time is one of the most crucial variables during negotiation. Deadlines can really speed up the conclusion to a negotiation when a person realizes they are almost out of time and have to make a decision.
If you play your cards right, you can anchor the conversation so the other person has a concrete deadline in mind. This will make people say and do things against their best interests as they rush towards a resolution before the deadline hits.
And if we look once more at the neuroscience, there is a deep neurological component to deadlines. You fear the passage of time, you fear the deadlines hits and you lose whatever opportunity was on the table — enter, consequences. And we, as humans, are extremely risk-averse.
As a negotiator you have to work hard to resist the urge to be reactive and impulsive with an impending deadline — instead find a way to flip it on the other person. This goes back to “no deal is better than no deal” — let the deadline consequences come, they will still be better than achieving a half-assed compromise.
Misunderstanding of fairness
The F-word of negotiation: fairness.
This is another instance of interpreting irrational patterns as rational thinking.
For starters, we have a natural tendency to assume the other person holds the same beliefs about fairness that we do. Wrong!
Chris recounts a game from his class to demonstrate this problem. Each pair of students is given 10 dollars to negotiate, one student proposes a split of the value, the other negotiates that split to accept or refuse. None of the splits across the class were rational. Of course they argue the split was rational and thought through but the facts of the experiment are anything but rational:
- The splits were different across the pairs of students (6/4, 8/2, 5/5, …) — if the students were rational, why is reason not convergent in the class?
- They approached negotiation thinking the other person held the same standards of fairness — that’s not empathy, that’s projection
- There were no 9/1 splits — the proposer deemed it unfair to offer such a discrepant split, and the accepter was too proud to accept a meager 1 dollar
However the discrepancies in how fairness is perceived, it is by all means a deal breaker for humans. We will close up and be reluctant to collaboration when we identify unfairness in the way we are treated.
A defensive move to shake the other person
“We just want what’s fair” , says the other person with a naïve tone to directly imply you might not be acting as nice as you should be.
If you are hit with one of these, take a deep breath and reply with “Okay, I apologize. Let’s stop everything and go back to where I started treating you unfairly and we’ll fix it.”.
A nefarious F-bomb
“We’ve given you a fair offer”, the other person says. This pretty much accuses you of being dense or dishonest. After all they “gave you a fair offer” are you too dumb or playing games to accept the offer?
Reply back with an inquisitive “Fair?”, followed by a pause. Then follow up with “It seems like you are ready to provide evidence that supports that”. Now they have to show more of their hand to resolve this conundrum they initially sprung on you.
A positive and constructive F-word
The last variation sets the stage for honesty and empathetic negotiation. Early on the negotiation, you can say “I want you to feel like you are being treated fairly at all times. So please stop me at any time if you feel I’m being unfair, and we’ll address that”.
This opening statement gives the other person a lot of power to cut you out if they ever see your words as unfair. Bonus points that it also sets you up as an honest counterpart.
And another fun neuroscience fact. Tthis time Chris learned it from António Damásio’s “Descarters’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain” (check the somatic marker hypothesis). There is a physical part of the brain responsible for generating emotions.
Bend Their Reality
Two different people can absorb the same situation in completely different terms. Problems, pain, unmet objectives, these have tremendous influence on how a situation is perceived.
Say you have a old mug. If someone tried to sell it to you, you’d haggle the price down because it’s used and old. But flip the script to put you on the seller role — you’d aim to sell the mug with a greater price tag. Only change between the two scenarios is you in relation to the mug — first you’re the buyer, second you’re the seller.
Prospect Theory. That is the best theory out there to describe these emotional and irrational decisions discussed throughout the chapter, created by Daniel Khaneman and Amost Tversky in 1979. The theory describes how people are drawn to certainty compared over probabilities, even if the probability is the better choice.
Here is a new scenario: you have a 95% chance to win $10,000, or a 100% chance to win $9,499. People will usually go for the second option because its guaranteed.
And what about a 95% chance to lose $10,000 or a 100% chance to lose $9,499? Now the first option gets chosen most of the time. This scenario is about loss which incites more risk. We are wired to avoid loss at all costs. In this case, there is still a 5% chance to not lose money at all compared to guaranteed loss of less money.
And so Chris lists six prospect theory tactics to earn an advantage during negotiation. But at its core, you have to persuade the other person that they have something concrete to lose if you don’t get a deal:
- Anchor their emotions
- Let the other person go first
- Establish a range
- Pivot to nonmonetary terms
- Use odd numbers
- Surprise with a gift
Anchor their emotions
Start the conversation with an accusation audit to acknowledge all their fears. This will trigger their loss aversion by getting anchored to negative feelings that get surfaced and resolved early into the exchange.
In other words, you effectively bend their reality by immediately anchoring their perspective to a negative one. However, as discussed in previous chapters, the accusation audit will work in your favor and get the other person to U-turn in a positive direction instead and clear out the negativity.
Let the other person go first… most of the time
This tactic is especially useful in monetary negotiations. Neither side has all the information they need — let the other person go first most of the time.
You likely won’t know enough to start the conversation with confidence. Let them start and anchor the starting value. The other tactics will work in tandem with this one. After all, when you let the other person start, you make yourself vulnerable, especially if you don’t know how experienced the other person is. Gauge the other person and make a decision on whether you take the initiative right off the gate.
Establish a range
In those instances where you go first, alluding to a range is a great option.
And the keyword here is allude, not open straight with a range. “At top places like X Corp., people in this role get paid between $90k and $110k”.
That range, mixed with the allusion, not only anchors your conversation to a real example, but also alludes to where you want to be at. Directly proposing a $90k and $110k salary range can get your boss defensive if they have their hands tied at the moment. The allusion gets them to think through.
Moreover, research shows the other side will be tempted to favor the lower side of the range, if not the lower bound. $90k sounds a lot cheaper than $100k after all. And maybe, before going into the conversation, the $90k was your plan all along.
Pivot to nonmonetary terms
Don’t deal with number in isolation because that leads to bargaining and that will bring subjective baggage to the argument.
Instead, pivot the “how much?” conversation to nonmonetary terms. If the conversation is already at high numbers, thrown in something cheap for you but valuable to them. If the conversation is at low numbers, then do the reverse and ask something valuable for you but cheap to them.
When you talk numbers, use odd numbers
Round numbers like $90,000 sound like a placeholder. Avoid numbers that end with 0. Use concrete numbers like $90,124. This will come across as the result of thoughtful consideration. They will add weight to your argument.
Surprise with a gift
Gifts are great. When timed right, they will come across as conciliatory and promote reciprocity from the other person — they will feel the need to answer in kind.
This can be extremely powerful, for example, when you start with an extreme anchor, expected to be rejected immediately, but then follow up with an unrelated gift.
How to Negotiate a Better Salary
Chris closes out the chapter with a strategy to negotiate salaries. He splits it into three part that take pieces from everything discussed so far in the chapter:
- Be persistent on nonsalary terms
- Salary terms without success terms is Russian roulette
- Spark their interest in your success and gain an unofficial mentor
Be persistent on nonsalary terms
Pleasant persistence, when done well, works as an emotional anchor to create empathy and the right psychological environment with your boss.
Moreover, it increases the chances of learning their current range of options. Maybe they will even raise the salary to compensate for not being able to meet those nonsalary terms, for instance, extra days of vacation.
Just make sure to remain pleasant during the persistence.
Salary terms without success terms is Russian roulette
Once you’ve agreed on a salary define your success metrics, for both your role and your next salary revision. It gives you something concrete to work towards and makes life easier for your boss.
Spark their interest in your success and gain an unofficial mentor
Don’t just sell yourself as another pair of capable hands — sell yourself as a valuable person to your boss. Specifically, ask it in a way they can use it to validate themselves as mentors and demonstrate their value to their boss too.
“What does it take to be successful here?”
If you even ask this during interviews, and of course depending on who you are speaking with, the person can give you a really thoughtful answer and get them invested in you going forward. The key point is that if someone gives you guidance, they will pay attention as to whether you are following their advice.
In a conversation where you’ve managed to woven in the various mechanisms discussed previously — labelling, tactical empathy, odd numbers — you can even go a step further and add “I’m asking you, not the board, for the promotion. I need you to agree with this promotion”. If things go in your favor, then your boss will be 100% invested in getting you that promotion.
Closing Thoughts
All negotiation, done well, should be an information-gathering process that vests your counterpart in an outcome that serves you.
This chapter offers plenty of ammunition to use during negotiations. “Never split the difference” takes a whole other meaning in the early pages, and later learn more nitty-gritty details about responding to different moods and how to better approach monetary negotiations.
