Do better than win/win



Yes, but that’s not good enough. Let me explain.








How our favourite thing ruins our negotiations

In the following piece, comedian Louis CK inadvertently – but beautifully – captures one of the key insights for why negotiations go off track:

So what is the insight? Our tendency to self-servingly pursue our favourite thing at the expense of everyone else.

We would certainly hope that the individual who Louis CK describes belongs to the minority in our society. The bad news is that when we look at a large sample of negotiations we discover that this exact behaviour is pervasive in negotiation. Unskilled negotiators consistently:

  • come up with one desired outcome;
  • pay exactly zero attention to what the other party or other people want;
  • pay exactly zero attention to how pursuing that outcome will effect the other party or other people; and
  • are inflexible and uninterested in compromising on what we want. Or as Louis CK summarizes it – we don’t want to settle for outcomes that only meet 99% of our criteria.

Starting negotiations in this manner predictably leads to the first of the four games that we cover in Negotiation Evolved. This is the game that has the lowest potential for creating value, and the highest risk of producing negative by-products.

Quite disturbingly – this is also the game that we observe in the vast majority of negotiations…