Corresponding with someone who had a difficult meeting coming up, where she was not sure how much to trust the person she was meeting with, I gave the following advice:
Proceed under the assumption that they want to do things right. I say this because if they’re gonna be defensive, then it doesn’t matter what you say; it’s not like you’re gonna sweet-talk them into opening up. But if they do want to do better, then maybe there is some hope.
My correspondent responded that the person she was meeting hadn’t been helpful up to this point: “I always assume (and hope for) good intentions and a desire to do better. But I’ll admit I’m feeling less positive after a few days of not getting an answer.”
I continued:
Many of these sorts of meetings require negotiation, and good negotiation often involves withholding of information or outright deception, and I’m not good at either of these things, so I don’t even try. Instead I try some of the classic “Getting to Yes” strategies:
(1) Before the meeting, I ask myself what are my goals: my short-term goals for the meeting and my medium and long-term goals that I’m aiming for.
(2) During the meeting, I explicitly ask the other parties what their goals are.When I think of various counterproductive interactions I’ve had in the past, often it seems this has come in part because I was not clear on my goals or on the goals of the other parties; as a result we butted heads when we could’ve found a mutually-beneficial solution. I’m including here some interactions with bad actors: liars, cheats, etc. Even when working with people you can’t trust, the general principles can apply.
It does not always make sense to tell the other parties what your goals are! But, don’t worry, most people won’t ever ask, as they will typically be focused on trying to stand firm on some micro-issue or another. Kinda like how amateur poker players are notorious for looking over and over again at their own hole cards and not looking enough at you.
The above advice may seem silly because you’re not involved in a negotiation at all! Even so, if you have a sense of what your goals are and what their goals are, this could be helpful. And be careful to distinguish goals from decision options. A goal is “I would like X to happen”; a decision option is “I will do Y.” It’s natural to think in terms of decision options, but I think this is limiting, compared to thinking about goals.
Anyway, that’s just my take from a mixture of personal experience and reading on decision making; I’ve done no direct research on the topic.
The above techniques are not any sort of magic; they’re just an attempt to focus on what is important.
Instead I try some of the classic “Getting to Yes” strategies:
[…]
… I was not clear on my goals or on the goals of the other parties; as a result we butted heads when we could’ve found a mutually-beneficial solution.
I think a useful heuristic here is clarifying positions versus interests, which is often considered part or reaching a “win-win” outcome. What you’re describing with “butting heads” often translates to arguing about positions which often are inherently mutually exclusive or zero sum, even as interests might overlap.
So then the key is to find the overlapping, or shared.
This chart illustrates what I am talking about. I think what you’re referring to as “goals” is basically what I mean by “interests,” although I think that goals can sometimes be conflated with “positions.”
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C5612AQGk97gJoZJH7w/article-cover_image-shrink_600_2000/0/1520167561585?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=yZvxeDL6Xvmm_FPHMXbMJunP_-D5e4ZwvqSUrFeMax8
What’s intersting to me about that chart – that I’ve never thought about before – is it describes a “zone of conflict or compromise” as distinct from a zone of mutual interests. Explicitly shifting the focus away from compromise as a solution is an intersting concept.
I think it is strange/interesting that no mention of “Game Theory.” Has all that stuff been cast aside? Maybe that is the implicit “goal” of today’s blog. The notion of “zero sum” is much easier to analyze than
“Even when working with people you can’t trust, the general principles can apply.”
As it happens, I am as open to trusting people as the next person, provided the next person is Richard M. Nixon.
Negotiations are often best handled at arms length. I’ve seen poor outcomes from a sincere, honest, naive person speaking for themselves vis-a-vis a large corporate entity. Get a lawyer to speak for you. Don’t be afraid of the cost. Nothing is more expensive than poor representation, and a life of scholarship and hard work will not prepare you for doing a good job speaking for yourself.
Oncodoc:
Just to be clear, the advice I was giving was for a research meeting. I advised my correspondent to treat the meeting as if it were a negotiation. But it was not a negotiation, nor was it the kind of meeting you would bring a lawyer to, any more than I would bring a lawyer to a research group meeting or a faculty meeting or whatever. My point was just that the principles of “getting to yes” apply even in settings that would not usually be considered negotiations.
One reason why working with stating goals is better than working with decision options is that goals do not specify one and one only way to get there. As goal researchers like to point out, goals are equifinal, which means that there may be more than one way to achieve the goal (as the old saying goes: many roads lead to Rome). So if you can agree on the goal, but have differences about the way to get there, there may be options for compromise. But to get there, you first have to explicitly articulate your goal and be clear about the equifinality issue. So two thumbs up for Andrew’s advice.
I’m reminded of the first China-US meeting where they listed a bunch of regional areas/issues and had each side prioritize how much they cared about each. The US was surprised to learn how much China cared about Formosa rather than Vietnam. Didn’t change what outcome each side wanted on each, but was a useful insight into others’ thinking.
Where can I read about this? That’s bizarre to me. It was an island full of Chinese people, governed by its civil war opponent, calling itself China. Did it really surprise the US that China cared?
I don’t know the details, sorry. I just read something about it, recently, probably in the context of recent areas of dispute.
I think the point of the story is not that “anyone should have known this”. Nixon and Kissinger and the foreign policy professionals were not Middle American geography-ignorant idiots. And the whole split of Nationalists and Communists and the Red war versus Japanese was less than 30 years from them. (Nixon even having even having been a naval officer in the Pacific in WW2.) But they did not realize how much stronger this priority of the other “side” was versus other regional/global concerns.
Consider that this was a time when VN war was still very active. Korean War was less than 20 years old and the Pueblo incident less than 4 years old. And of course, we lived in the huge context of a nuclear stalemate and global Cold War versus communism (with various other areas of concern, e.g. East Pakistan). Yet, in the end, a partial appeasement (moving to a policy of ambiguity on Taiwan) was enough to carve Red China away from the Soviet Union and change a 1:2 to a 2:1 of world powers.
To me the story is not about what we learned, per se, specifically. But about asking questions, learning, listening. At least they ran a process to ask questions and learn something. If we didn’t learn anything, nothing lost since diplomacy is talk talk, not war, war. But it had at least the potential to reveal something and got the sides talking.
Consider an alternate timeline, where you were King and “knew” the Chinese priorities, but were wrong. I.e. we overestimated how important Formosa was. Having the humility to let a process run, would have uncovered some knowledge, from an opponent. That’s the point of the story. Not “everyone should have known that”.
I understand your point in telling the story, and it’s a good point. My point in asking is that the facts of the anecdote are very interesting to me so I’d like to see a source to read more about it