Show Notes

• Professional background in law enforcement
• The ultimate cold-calling salesman
• Why the vast majority of hostage negotiations last less than 12 hours
• The Chase Manhattan Bank robbery with hostages
• Why negotiation is so important
• Characteristics of a successful negotiation
• What separates great negotiators from everyone else?
• Mirroring
• The science behind silence
• Labeling
• Never split the difference
• The Ackerman method
• Black Swan Theory

Connect With Chris Voss

Website: http://www.blackswanltd.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefbinegotiator
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackswangroupltd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChrisVossNegotiation/

Additional Resources

Book: Never Split The Difference

Summary

Chris Voss is a former Lead FBI Negotiator, author of the book, “Never Split the Difference,” and founder of The Black Swan Group. He has lectured on negotiation at business schools across the country, and has been featured in both television and print media. Chris takes us inside the world of high-stakes negotiation, and reveals how to negotiate successfully in any situation.

Full Transcript

Brian
Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. Chris Voss is a former lead FBI negotiator, a dynamic speaker and author of the book “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on it.” Chris worked in the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit for 24 years and was the FBI’s chief international hostage and kidnapping negotiator from 2003 to 2007. After working on more than 150 international hostage cases, Chris retired from the FBI in 2007 and founded The Black Swan Group, an organization that trains both businesses and individuals on negotiation skills. Chris has lectured on negotiation at business schools across the country, is an adjunct professor at Harvard Law School and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and is a lecturer at the Marshall School of Business at USC. Chris has been seen on ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox News and he has been featured in Forbes, The New York Times Variety and Time Magazine. Welcome, Chris and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Chris
Brian, happy to be here.

Brian
Thank you, Chris. I’m truly honored to have you on the show. We haven’t had anyone from law enforcement, let alone a high level international crisis negotiator. Tell us about your background and how you ended up joining the FBI and becoming a hostage and kidnapping negotiator.

Chris
Originally, I just I wanted to be in law enforcement. My original vision was to be a street cop. When I was about 16 years old I saw a movie based on a true story of two cops in New York, it was called “The Super Cops” and I was inspired by it. They were very creative, very innovative mavericks and the community loved them. They put a lot of bad guys in jail. So I thought, why not have a job where you did a lot of good and you helped a lot of people. Then when I got into law enforcement, Kansas City, Missouri Police Department, my father had higher aspirations for me, so he encouraged me to look at federal law enforcement. I talked to a secret service agent who traveled all over the world with the secret service. I grew up in Iowa, I had never been anywhere. I think I’d seen Canada from from a distance. Crossing the river into Illinois was a big deal for me so traveling all over the world sounded cool. Secret Service wasn’t hiring, but the FBI was at the time. I didn’t know that difference – the Federal alphabet, FBI, CIA, DEA – I didn’t know any of that. I joined the FBI, ended up in New York City Terrorist Task Force; actually was on a SWAT team with the FBI when I was in Pittsburgh, and re-injured my knee…and we had hostage negotiators, [I thought] what do they do? That doesn’t look hard, how hard could it be talking to people? So I shifted to hostage negotiation and it was great. There was much more to it than met the eye and one thing led to another and I’m sitting here in Las Vegas talking to you on your podcast.

Brian
You mentioned a couple things, Chris, you mentioned SWAT, law enforcement, obviously, and television. When I think about a hostage situation – and I think our a lot of our listeners and viewers are probably picturing this too – it’s how it’s depicted on your television or in the movies. Of course, the stereotype is that the cops or the SWAT or FBI go in and they buy time until the snipers are in position and then a sniper takes out the bad guy and saves all the hostages in the bank. Now, after reading your book “Never Split the Difference” it’s clear that that isn’t the actual strategy going into the negotiation and of course, it’s usually not, or almost never, the way it plays out. I’m curious; is there a playbook for entering hostage or kidnapping situation negotiations or how does that work going into it?

Chris
Well, a hostage negotiator is the ultimate cold calling salesman and what’s a cold calling salesman; he’s calling you on a phone, you don’t particularly want to talk to him, and you probably don’t want what he’s selling. I’ve got a call into a bank and they’re not looking forward to talking to me and they don’t want what I’m selling. We can’t force him into it though. That’s like, do you use lawyers to make all your deals? Well, no, that wouldn’t really work. On TV if the negotiators talk to him till they shoot him, if that happened in real life, as soon as we’d showed up they’d start throwing bodies out the front door; the reality of it is you show up and you actually use your tone of voice to calm people down. You find out what’s bugging them – as strange as that sounds – and if you can talk them through it, there’s a really good chance they’ll change their behavior and see that maybe what they’re doing at the moment wasn’t the smartest move. The funniest thing about the difference between hostage negotiation and business negotiation; hostage negotiations tend to be calmer. Now give that some thought. (Brian: Interesting.) How could a conversation with a terrorist or bank robber be calmer? We didn’t know it at the time but just the fact of using a calming, soothing voice actually has a neuroscience impact on the other person; calms them down, makes it easier for them to listen to reason.

Brian
How long is a typical hostage negotiation? I imagine that would go on for hours and maybe sometimes days. How does that work?

Chris
Each one has a profile. When you start learning the business, there are [situations that are] spontaneous, some planned. [They] have a tendency to run from anywhere from two to six hours. Bad guy taking hostages for leverage in a place it’s not his or her house. If they’re by themselves it’s going to run about 12, no more than 24, hours. We call that a planned hostage taking but at a known location.

Brian
And so what happens? They just get tired and and so it never goes on for longer than 24 hours because then they’d have to go to sleep?

Chris
That’s exactly it and that’s why the vast majority of them last less than 12 hours. Like if a bad guy had taken a hostage by himself in an office building, commercial site – any place away from home – you don’t have the ability, the mental energy, to keep it up for for much past 12 hours. You’re not in your house so you don’t know where to get something to eat, you can’t take a nap, you don’t know where to go to the bathroom – actually a lot of real practical considerations. Now bad guy trapped in his house on a confrontation that he’s been planning for a while – and yes, I am using a male personal pronoun, hostage takers are almost exclusively men – in a defensive location, prepared for, guy doesn’t know when it’s going to happen but figures it is going to happen sometime, that’s going to be a little bit more extended duration. Maybe the long siege, it could last – depend upon whether or not he’s by himself – it could last weeks if he’s not by himself. So there are a lot of interesting, but really understandable physical dynamics surrounding the event that can let you predict pretty much how long it’s going to last.

Brian
Chris, I mentioned in your intro that you worked on more than 150 hostage cases. That’s a lot of cases. But I imagine there are some that you remember more vividly than others. Tell us about a case that stands out for you, one that either profoundly impacted you, or maybe caused you to think differently about the world because of the circumstances.

Chris
Well, a lot, a whole variety of them impacted me profoundly. One of the first ones, the one that was a real turning point, happened in my career very early on, Chase Manhattan Bank robbery with hostages. You mentioned TV before, hostage situations in banks on TV and in movies happens all the time. In point of fact, in reality, it’s extremely rare. The one I worked in New York City, which is one of the busier places – as one might imagine – a bank robbery with hostages hadn’t happened there in over 20 years. Bad guys know the good guys are on the way, they tend not to want to get caught inside the bank. And we expected the people in the bank to be in crisis. The lead bank robber – the guy who orchestrated the entire event – he actually was extremely calm, exhibited many of the characteristics of a great business negotiator. What would those be you might ask yourself? Well, a good business negotiator, especially like the CEO of a company is going to say, you know, I got a board I got to answer to, I got people I got to answer to. Anytime you are talking to someone who’s intentionally diminishing their importance in the negotiation, they are the most influential person on their side. They want to talk to you directly because they want to know firsthand what’s going on, but they don’t want to be backed into a corner to make a decision. This first bank robber at the Chase Bank, he kept saying, I have seven guys with me and these guys are dangerous. They’re from all over the world and I’m scared of them. Like, I don’t know what they’re gonna do to me. We initially took all that at face value. I came to learn afterwards, that this is a great tactic of business negotiators; blaming a guy that’s not in the room. There weren’t seven people in the Chase Bank. He was not afraid of all of them. He was not in fear of his life from them in any way, shape or form. But he knew if he kept acting like he was scared of those guys in the bank with him, we’d have trouble pinning him down, which in fact was the case. When we finally realized that, we changed our strategy and tactics that ultimately led to the peaceful surrender of everybody on the inside.

Brian
What happened that caused you to know that the story he was telling you wasn’t the actual reality?

Chris
Well, we didn’t know for sure right away. I was the second negotiator on the phone, I was coaching the first negotiator. The NYPD commander was running the negotiation operation center, a guy named Hugh Magallon, brilliantly talented guy. He sat and he listened to this for about five hours, and finally he looked at me, he said, you know, we’re gonna switch, we’re going to put you on the phone, you gave me several pieces of guidance that were very counter-intuitive, outside of the normal strategies. But he’d listened to it long enough that his gut instinct was telling him there was something different here. By that point in time also, the first guy, who wouldn’t give us his name, we’d identified him. They said, I want you to brace him with his name first chance you get, the other thing I want you to do is you make sure you end every call. Because this guy kept saying to us, I gotta go right now, these guys are coming and he’d hang up. Or he’d say, look, these guys are standing right here, I’m gonna put you on speaker, and he wouldn’t talk to us anymore. So Hugh said, you start controlling the end of these calls, we’re gonna get the upper hand back here in an assertive, but not aggressive manner, not argumentative. I implemented what he told me to do. Lo and behold, the bank robber, not to be outfoxed, puts his buddy on the phone; we switched so he switched. Now his buddy didn’t want to be in the bank and his buddy was looking for a way out. When he put his buddy on the phone, my late night FM, DJ voice, calm and soothing voice, we figured out collectively, within about an hour, that this guy really wanted to get out of there and was worried about getting out of there alive. About an hour and a half into the negotiation, he was surrendering to me outside the bank.

Brian
It’s interesting. You’ve talked about calm and being calm and how calm hostage negotiation is compared to business negotiation. As you’re explaining this situation in the bank, my palms are sweating. It’s really anything but calm, even just listening to it. I can’t imagine the anxiety and the adrenaline rush, I would think, that occurs in the midst of an intense negotiation. Maybe it’s just from the standpoint of the bad guys, the people you’re negotiating with but – although it should be less intense – I’m thinking about people negotiating in everyday life. And it’s really it’s the same way…Chris, people don’t typically attribute negotiation to a calm experience or the night DJ voice. They don’t want to get into it at all. I mean, it’s kind of like public speaking. It’s one of those big fears, whether it’s negotiating for a high salary in their job, or especially, dickering with somebody, like negotiating the price of a car. It seems like a lot of people would rather have a root canal than enter into those kinds of negotiations. Now I understand the importance of negotiating in a hostage situation. Obviously, somebody’s life is on the line, oftentimes and so that’s extremely important. But why is it important for everyone to get over their aversion of negotiating so that we can become more effective negotiators?

Chris
Well, to get into really success performance, success thinking you’ve got to be collaborative. Now, what am I talking about? Most people start their career, start to achieve some success by being competitive, or even cutthroat in negotiation. As soon as you get competitive, if you didn’t have any structure to what you were doing, if you didn’t have a methodology, if you didn’t learn anything, you probably weren’t doing very well. When you get competitive, you get cutthroat, you start thinking win-lose. You score a couple of pretty good negotiations and it’s addictive, you like that. It’s like pulling a slot machine arm and having the thing hit the jackpot and have the slots ring and go off and give you quarters, dimes, whatever you’re playing. It’s an exciting experience. The excitement of those occasional wins causes people to lose track of the fact that the casinos – and I live in Las Vegas but I’ve always thought of Las Vegas gambling as a great metaphor for life – the casinos let you win; they’ve got to let you win one in every 84 pulls to keep you going because the thrill of success is so big, you forget that you lost 83 times. So competitive negotiation goes from maybe zero win rate to maybe a 10% win rate and you think that’s great and it’s exciting. The problem is, getting to collaborative negotiations is counter to that in spirit and ultimately far more profitable. You start making deals with people, you start making deals that both sides love, therefore both sides want to deal with each other again; you get a velocity of deals. So then not only is the deal probably better for you because you discovered something special you didn’t know, but the other side wants to be a repeat negotiation customer; they want to do it with you again. And that’s how you build relationships with people you can trust over the long run.

Brian
So what’s a successful negotiation then? One where both parties – let’s say just for the example, there are two parties – one where both parties walk away feeling like they’re the ones who have won or…

Chris
Well, having feelings walking away is very important. Now they don’t necessarily feel like they want [to feel], they need to feel like, number one, they got heard. Everybody is much happier with whatever the outcome is if they feel they were heard and they were involved in a process. A lot of people will actually take your deal exactly as proposed, as long as they get to have their say first and they’re sure that you heard it. So they need to feel like they got heard out. Then they need to feel like they were treated fairly. And then the real bonus is, did you discover something in the deal that you didn’t know would be there in the first place, which might have made the deal better for you. One of our clients provides objects, materials, goods and services to some of the biggest names on earth – Home Depot – some of the big stores that are famous for really negotiating really hard on price. This guy – in supplying them – started to talk to them about things other than price to make his products more valuable to them, and actually get substantial increases in his pricing, when he learned how to deliver it in a way that worked for them better and actually worked for him at the same time. So both sides feel better off and my client is making a lot more money and the people that he supplies are much happier with him because he delivers it in a way that’s really tailored for them. It’s really how the deal is implemented for them. He wants his guys to consistently search for better ways to provide the service that’s more tailored to them. Whether it’s delivery, whether it’s volume of delivery, it could be any one of a number of ways, it’s actually easy for them to implement, and the other side likes it a lot. What makes this price necessary for you, makes this timetable necessary for you? What are you up against here? What kind of challenges are you facing? How can we deliver our service in a way that adapts to your challenges so that what we are giving you is even more valuable? I realize that sounds very theoretical but in point of fact, it’s really a great way to, not just hold your price, but raise your prices, because the intangibles will end up making a big difference – if you can get them to tell you what those intangibles are. That’s what about this whole approach, this methodology, which we refer to as trust-based influence. How do I deal with you in a way that you’re going to trust me, so that you can tell me this stuff that you won’t tell anybody else?

Brian
That makes total sense. Chris, as you know, our guests on LifeExcellence are people who have achieved success at a high level in their chosen professions and I think you just talked about one. What are other characteristics that separate great negotiators from everyone else? Is it simply being equipped with tactics and strategies like the one you just described, or is there more to it than that?

Chris
Well, you’ve got to be coachable. You’ve got to like to learn. I’ve got a class on Masterclass, my negotiation course on Masterclass. It has consistently been their top selling course, their most viewed course, or in their top most viewed courses. It’s done really well for them. Masterclass told me a long time ago that the people that love Masterclass are ambitious. A lot of people overlook the word ambitious but if you’re really ambitious, a characteristic is you like innovative stuff, you like to learn, you’re kind of curious about how to get better, and you’re willing to put in the work if it’s interesting and innovative, and it actually makes a difference. Now, you’re hard working, but being hard working alone isn’t enough – it’s essential and inadequate. You’ve got to like interesting and innovative things because you don’t want to be like the rest of the crowd and you realize that best practices are often just common practices, which make you average.

Brian
I have to confess, I’m not familiar with your Masterclass, but I’ll definitely check it out and I encourage our listeners and viewers to do so as well. But your book, “Never Split the Difference” is a great book, I’ve read it a couple of times. I don’t expect you to remember this, but you and I actually met in 2019 in Chicago when you spoke at the Global Leadership Summit. So I bought your book and we took a photo together with the book and I took it home and read it immediately and then I read it again, preparing for this interview. It’s really a terrific book. Chris, what I like about it, is you combine captivating stories of successful negotiations with practical tools and techniques that we can all use in everyday negotiations. We love entertainment and I think that really sets your book apart in in the negotiation genre. Because a lot of times we’ll pick up these books about negotiation, and it’s a list of strategies, and certainly can’t compare to the international hostage or kidnapping negotiations that you’ve experienced. So I think that differentiates your book from the others. But aside from that, the tools and tactics are great, too. Now, unfortunately, we won’t have enough time on the show today to all become expert negotiators. But I’d love to talk about two or three tactics our listeners and viewers can begin developing today in order to negotiate more effectively. Would that be okay? (Chris: I’d love it.) I’ve written down a couple. The first concept that I wrote down is mirroring. What is mirroring, Chris, and how does it help when we’re negotiating?

Chris
Mirroring is not the body language mirroring that everybody’s familiar with. The hostage negotiator’s mirror, The Black Swan method mirror, first starts with just repeating the last one to three words what somebody just said. And it could be just one word, it’s not really more than five, once you start to get more than five, you’re really paraphrasing, which is a separate skill. But mirroring is a concise skill and you just upward inflect or downward inflect, however you want. Like, if you just said to me, I’m really interested in being more effective as a negotiator, I might say, more effective as a negotiator? An upward inflection, curious tone of voice. And you’d be like, yeah, you know what I’ve been seeing about negotiation…and you start to give me information, you start to expand on what you just said. Mirroring is this elegant, simple skill that doesn’t actually require a whole lot of brainpower, but really gets other people talking if you can sit in silence, because every now and then you’re going to let the mirror sink. If I had said, improved in negotiation skills? And you might go, yeah, and then we both got to sit there in the silence while your thoughts connect, and I wait for you to go on. So the mirroring is a great skill to get somebody to re-word what they just said. You can take a little bit more of a deep dive in what you want them to talk more about.

Brian
A little more of a deep dive?

Chris
Nice! Very nice. I love it. Exactly right, yeah. You want somebody to expand on what they were just saying and add to it.

Brian
Let’s talk about silence because, first of all, it’s not something that people are comfortable with whether it’s in conversations or negotiation or any context when people are communicating, it’s very uncomfortable for most people to have even a little bit of silence. Why is that so important? And maybe if you could just expand it beyond negotiation to just general communication. What is it that silence does that’s helpful in communication?

Chris
Silence most of the time lets people think, be more contemplative and give you a better response. Now, you said that most of us are uncomfortable with it. I’m going to put a little bit finer point on it. Two out of three people are uncomfortable with silence – for different reasons, because you asked me also why. The Black Swan Group, we test people, we put some people into some of our advanced training. We believe that the world splits up evenly into three types which are basically: fight, flight, make friends – analysts, assertives and accommodates. Fight is the assertive, analysts is a thinker, accommodator is the make-friends person. So the accommodator is a make-friends, relationship oriented person. If you believe in relationships, you think that relationships are money, if you like having lots of friends, if you’ve got lifelong friends that you’re still in touch with throughout your entire life; pretty good chance that you’re an accommodator. If you’re a relationship oriented person, you’re uncomfortable with silence because silence is how you signal anger. The communication, the interaction is so important to you that the meanest thing that you could do is stop talking, withhold that which you value. So you’re uncomfortable with silence, because you are afraid you’re signaling anger, because it’s how you signal anger. And when the other side is silent, then you project and you think they’re angry, so you’re horrified at silence. Now let’s talk about the flight guy; the flight guy’s the analyst. They look at conflict as simply a possibility and they look at conflict as extremely costly and extremely counterproductive, that’s why they flee from conflict because conflict is a waste of time. It doesn’t get anybody anywhere. Now these guys and gals love to think, they love analysis. They like decision trees with all sorts of branches of possibilities on it. You ask an analyst a question, they’re going to want to go silent for 36 hours while they think everything through. Now picture the comedy here, an analyst is talking to an accommodator and the analyst goes dead silent so he or she can think, and the accommodator is saying to themselves, oh, my god, he’s furious, he’s angry, I’ve got to start talking again. And the analyst is thinking like, why don’t they just shut up so I can think this through. Now finally, the third type, the assertive, the aggressive. I’m a natural born assertive, I like to talk because it makes me feel in control and I’m controlling the dynamic and controlling the outcome. So when I’m not talking, I feel out of control and I’m horrified by that. I can’t shut up because I want to maintain control. So our feelings around silence are really driven by which of those three types we are. We’ve got plenty of reason to make the assertion that the world breaks up evenly into thirds; certain groups will skew a little bit in one direction or another but the world breaks up evenly into thirds. So two out of three people struggle with silence. If you can overcome that struggle, I’ll give you a chance to talk and you’re likely to say something really valuable – if I can just shut up long enough to give you the chance to say it.

Brian
Is that a challenge for you as an assertive? It’s interesting that you say you need to talk because you’re such an effective negotiator, obviously, and a lot of negotiation, I think, is allowing the other person to talk, especially if you’re in a hostage situation, I would think, getting them to open up and share things.

Chris
It was a challenge to learn how effective it was. Like my basic nature is…I think of myself as both a mercenary and a missionary. A mercenary is I want to know what works, I’m not going to take a moral judgment on it. I want to know what works, I want to know what’s simply a tool. Now a tool becomes good or evil in the hands of who ever is using it. So I want a tool that works and then I want to use it in a moralistic way. I do have my own core values, the number of things that I believe in – honesty, integrity, treating people well, long term relationships – those are my values and I like to mix that in with tools that work in a way that doesn’t hurt you. So dynamic silence, as soon as I found out that it was an extremely effective method, extremely effective skill within this skill set, like, all right, I can do that because it works.

Brian
You call it dynamic silence. So that’s intentional silence as opposed to not doing anything.

Chris
To get the dynamic out of it, yeah. Originally in the hostage negotiation skills, there were eight FBI skills. There are now nine Black Swan method skills. As a hostage negotiator, it is simply called an effective pause, and generally speaking, how long is a pause? One to three seconds. Then we began to discover what would happen with longer periods of silence and how many great dynamics would come into play if you are willing to go north of three seconds. We think a much more effective label for it, which would make it more attractive to use, is dynamic silence. Go silent. Let the dynamics work for you.

Brian
That’s super effective. I think we could go down a whole rabbit hole on silence and how to use silence after saying a number, for example, in a negotiation, but I don’t want to get sidetracked. So I’m going to go back to the tactics. Mirroring was something that I was actually familiar with Chris, but one tactic that was brand new to me in reading your book was labeling. How does labeling work and why is it so effective? It seems like a powerful tactic everyone can use.

Chris
It requires a little more practice than mirrors to wrap your mind around. A label is a verbal observation of an emotion or a dynamic. What does that look like? Scripting it out it would be: you seem, you sound, you look. You seem angry, you seem upset. It seems like something just crossed your mind. It’s either: you seem, you sound, you look or it seems, it sounds, it looks; or even it feels; it feels like you’re stonewalling, it feels like you’re under a lot of pressure. All those things that I labeled verbally were dynamics or emotions. This is one of the crazier ones, because it appeals to people regardless of their mental energy level or their mental fatigue level. I’ll give you a quick example of three types of skills in succession. If I were to say to you, Brian, why did you wear that jacket? Your instant response is, what do you mean why did I wear the jacket? What’s the matter with it, I always wear this jacket, I love this jacket. This jacket was a gift. The term “why,” even if you didn’t display it overtly, would have instantly triggered defensiveness on your part, which creates friction in our interactions. It’s one of the competitive advantages of the Black Swan method because there’s no shortage of instruction out there that says “find out their why,” “ask them why.” I even saw a Harvard negotiation post recently [which] said ask them why they want something. Well, you’re creating automatic friction when you do that. Now what if instead I change my “why” to a “what” and I said, Brian, what caused you to wear that jacket today? That felt differently to you. It took the sting of accusation out of it. And what it did was it would have triggered deep contemplation on your side. That’s what the word “what” does. And the real intention behind it is to create thought versus actually get an answer. Because if I say, Brian, what made you wear that jacket today? You’re like, wow, interesting, okay. And you’d have gone through the list, you’d have gone into deep thinking, as Danny Kahneman would say. Now, if you’re an analyst, you’re going to answer that question for me in 72 hours, give me a thoughtful answer because you want to think things through. If I’m negotiating with an analyst, and I’m looking for information now, instead I might pick a label and say, Brian seems like you got a reason for wearing that jacket today. You’re going to start laying it out right then and there. It’s not going to cause the deep thinking that the “what” question would have caused, which is fatiguing. It’s going to increase a high likelihood that you’re going to comfortably start laying out your reasoning theory, particularly with an analytical type, who loves to think things through before the answer. So to get them to answer early on, they got to feel like it was their choice. If I say, seems like you got a reason for wearing that jacket, there’s such a choice there as to whether or not you answer, the chances of me getting a really good answer out of you in the moment is very high. And that’s what a label does. It increases the likelihood of information. You don’t feel cornered by it so it actually increases our rapport. You actually kind of liked me saying, seems like you got a reason for wearing that jacket because you do and you’d love to share it if you didn’t think you were going to be criticized.

Brian
Are there particular times when it’s appropriate to use labeling? As you were talking, I was thinking that if you were at a standstill that that might be an appropriate time to use a label. It seems like there’s something standing in the way or it seems like there’s something blocking us from moving forward or from making progress. But maybe that’s not the only time that it’s used. Are there other times? Or is that even accurate?

Chris
That’s very accurate. What we found is, on The Black Swan team, and we all use these skills all the time on colleagues, family, friends, everybody, because we’re always seeking collaboration. And on the team, when you start to raise your skill level pretty high, you may label almost all the time, because you can adjust it and you can adapt it into the moment. It requires you to pay attention to get a good label and you really like putting those points up on the board. Many of the other skills we use as supplemental skills. When you’re trying to make a dynamic change in the moment, I might be trying to get you to see things differently, which may cause me to choose a how or what question. I may need to let you know that there’s some behavior that you’ve engaged in that I’m extremely uncomfortable with in order for me to get you to stop it or to get you to stop talking to me entirely; I’m going to use what’s called an “I message.” I got an email the other day, guy’s pitching me, I get these pitches on emails all the time. I’ll engage, I can smell from the pitch early on, basically, if they’re trying to get me to do something for nothing. So I emailed back and I said, seems like you’ve got a budget, and there was no response, which means they’ve got no budget. Then he came back with me, if I could just get a few minutes of your time, I could lay this all out for you. My next email was an I message; I said, when you avoid a question I asked you, I get concerned, because it’s going to keep me from talking to you over the long term. Because if I bring up an issue that I want an answer to, whether it be with a label or question, if you don’t respond to it, that’s the way you’re always going to be. Now I need to let you know that it’s a problem if it continues, and then you’re either going to adapt, or you’re going to stop talking to me and not waste any more of my time. When I hit this individual with the I message, I haven’t heard from him since which confirms my suspicion that their version of win-win was that they win a lot. [Laughter.]

Brian
And you don’t.

Chris
And I don’t, yeah.

Brian
Chris, one thing that surprised me in your book was reading about compromise, that we shouldn’t compromise, that we shouldn’t split the difference. Now, you know better than I do that it seems like historically, in negotiations, the quickest way to wrap things up is when we’ve gone back and forth a little bit on price and then either I or you say, why don’t we just split the difference and be done with it? What is it that causes us to compromise? Maybe it’s just that; that we want to be done with it. What can we do to equip ourselves to walk away rather than settling for a bad deal? Because I know you say a bad deal is worse than no deal.

Chris
Exactly. Compromise is guaranteed lose-lose. One side is going to feel like they’ve lost a lot more than the other. So what does it do for your long term relationship? Because the real profitability – collaboration – is about long term, profitable relationships. Last century – I’m a last century guy when we just had newspapers – there were these one panel cartoons in the newspapers. There was one I remember called “The Lockhorns.” So it was about a husband and a wife and the husband looks at his wife and says, why don’t we compromise, that way we’ll both be unhappy. I mean, that’s unfortunately the problem with compromise; both people are left unhappy. Now it’s proposed, in a lot of society, as being a good thing to do. You should be willing to compromise. You shouldn’t be aggressive. Politicians compromise, which amazes me. If compromise was a good thing then the US Congress would be one efficient organization and all your tax dollars would be very well spent. Because they fight, fight, fight and compromise at the last minute; that happens every single time. They declare victory in a moment, they go home and they go back to fighting again. I mean, that’s what compromise really gets us. So it’s been sold to us as a good idea. It has this mystique that you’re willing to work with the other side. But in point of fact, the application of it creates lose-lose on a regular basis. I think people do it because they just haven’t been taught a better method. They haven’t really been taught how to collaborate. Most really good business people learn the hard way, how to collaborate. Or what they really learn is quick recognition of someone extremely likely to collaborate, and they just stop dealing with everybody else. I see that very commonly; that experienced business people just sniff out a non-collaborative person or an exploitative person and just stop talking to them right away. They don’t compromise. They just don’t deal with people that are trying to get them to compromise.

Brian
Your book is just chock full of ideas and strategies that we could talk about for hours. By the way, any one of the strategies and tactics that you write about in your book is worth 100 times more than the 15 or 20 bucks on Amazon. So I appreciate that you took time just to put the book together, to put your ideas and tools and techniques and strategies on paper. You wrote about something – this is actually an effective solution, I think, to splitting the difference – it’s something you wrote about, I remember, in the book called “The Ackerman Method,” it blew me away. One thing I liked about it was, unlike some of the other tactics and strategies that take a little bit longer to get the hang of and practice and deploy – the Ackerman Method is simple, it’s easy to understand, it’s easy to apply, and you can use it immediately anytime you’re in an economic transaction. What’s the origin of the Ackerman Method? If you could tell our listeners and viewers how that works.

Chris
I got taught the Ackerman Method when I was an FBI kidnapping negotiator. We had to get the kidnappers – if we were going to allow the family of the company to pay money – we needed to do two things; we needed to get the money down really low, so that it wasn’t a profitable operation for the bad guys and we needed them to let the hostage go, because, you can’t sue a kidnapper for not letting the hostage go. We used to have commanders that would say, when is this going to be over? And our answer would be when the kidnapper feels like he’s gotten everything he can; primary emphasis on the word “feel.” We’re talking about the emotions, the feelings of kidnappers being the key to the hostage’s release, which is insanely absurd. So Ackerman was designed to make them feel like they’ve gotten everything that they could with a bargaining system that basically plays out in three stages. Every time you make a change, you make a raise, you make an increase in your move, it has to be smaller than the one previously. The bad guys psychologically feel like they’re draining you of every last drop. You put a lot of empathy and understanding in between each change in the price, which you’re trying to actually settle far below, far sooner, than you’ve gone through the three stages. And then finally, when you get to the last stage, you have to at least then have used an odd number, if not having used odd numbers all along. And then you throw in something non-tangible, non-monetary, whatever it may be. In kidnapping negotiations, we just say look, the hostage’s family’s got this great stereo, we’ll give you the stereo. But you give the impression that they’ve drained you of every last drop, and they feel like they’ve gotten everything they could. Therefore if the financial exchange is made between the family of the company and the hostages, it’s a small amount of money; which money is really easy to trace so they didn’t get rich off it. It’s the same reason a bank teller is given bait money in a bank robbery, to get to save the teller’s life and to get the bank robber out of the bank without opening the vault to them, but then leaving a trail that you can follow afterwards so that you can catch the bad guy. So Ackerman is this great methodology if you get into bare knuckle bargaining with a highly adversarial opponent that you have to deal with, to make them feel like they’ve gotten everything they can, so that they do the deal when you do come to a price, and they perform as opposed to reneging on the agreement or trying to hold you hostage over something else, which they’re not going to have the appetite to do because you wore them out so much over the first transaction they’re not eager to repeat it.

Brian
That’s so powerful and so impressive. And if you didn’t get that by the way, go back and listen to that again because it’s extremely powerful when you’re negotiating anything economic whether you’re buying a car, buying a house, anything like that. If we could just talk about two points that you made, Chris, and these actually came at the tail end. I’ll start with the the last thing first. You mentioned throwing in the stereo. Is that literally, geez you’ve tapped me out, let’s see what else I have. I can throw in this stereo. Is that the point of that, to make it clear you have absolutely no money left, but you want to get the deal done. So you throw in a, I don’t know, pair of sneakers, or a stereo or whatever it is.

Chris
Yeah, you’ve got an adversary that has to feel like they got the best deal possible. The whole structure is designed every step of the way to contribute to that feeling, in one way or another. Empathy wears them out, because they’re adversarial and you’re trying to be collaborative, and it becomes more work for them than for you. The decreasing changes, makes them feel like they’re pushing you to the limit, then when you want to express it, you’re at your last dollar, your last dime, your at your last penny, but you’re still being collaborative, because you’ve been collaborative the whole time. And you figuratively look around, like, what else have I got to give you? I mean, like, I love my stereo, I love my shoes, whatever it is, can I give you something else, but I’m out of cash, I really am. And you’re going to feel like that, because it’s been such a struggle for you to be competitive while I’m trying to be collaborative. I’m not inflaming the situation at all but I’m really subtly wearing you down so that when we get to the end, you need that last little bit to feel like you got everything you could to make you happy. And that’s when I started offering something non-monetary in nature because I ran out of money.

Brian
That’s great and extremely effective. Say more about the odd dollar amount. So I know we see things in the store that are $1.99 or a course that’s $97 – it’s not $100. How does that enter into negotiation and tell us more about the psychology behind it?

Chris
Odd numbers just feel firmer. Simultaneously, even numbers that end with zero, they seem like offers – tentative, movable, changeable offers. And people react that way, human beings react that way, every human being on the planet, whether it’s a kidnapper in Colombia or whether it’s a business person in Boston, the odd numbers seem to carry some extra weight. One of my favorite examples of the Ackerman Method, one of my students at Georgetown, his apartment complex wanted to raise his rent. And he thought – he was a very playful guy – he wanted to try the process. He was willing to pay the extra rent but he wanted to try the Ackerman Method with this guy. He went through a couple of rounds of bargaining and the first number he laid out was so low that the landlord just laughed him and said, I’d be losing money if I gave that to you. And he kind of laughed back too, he stayed playful the whole time. When they finally got to the last number he threw out, he said, here, here, give me a piece of paper and a pencil. Now he’d already calculated to the last odd dollar, I think it was like $1,921 a month, something like that, that he was going to pay, because he put it in the Ackerman system, and he came up with the numbers in advance. So he asked the guy for a piece of paper and a pencil. And in front of him, he just wrote a bunch of numbers, I don’t know, he might have wrote his birthday. He might have wrote his shoe size, he might have wrote down how much he weighed. And then he wrote down the number that he already had, he circled it, and he handed back to the guy. And the guy looked at him says, wow, you must be an accountant, which he wasn’t and he wasn’t going to give that up. He said, well, yeah, I am. And the landlord said, you know, we got a deal. And he ended up actually paying less per month than what his existing lease agreement was.

Brian
Well, it makes it seem more calculated, doesn’t it? Like you’ve really taken time to figure out exactly what it is that you can either afford or pay and if it’s an odd amount it gives it more credibility, I would think.

Chris
It does. That’s exactly what happens. I don’t know why it does. I just know it works.

Brian
That’s great. Chris, your company is called The Black Swan Group, which is based on the Black Swan theory. What is the Black Swan theory? And what makes that such a fitting name for your company?

Chris
Well, the little things that make all the difference in the world, the subtle little tiny shifts, the two millimeter shifts. In 2007 Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote this great book called “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” and it was just when I was getting out of the FBI and I loved the book. I love Taleb’s writing. I’ve got several of his books. He’s an interesting thinker and insightful. I thought that that was a great metaphor for what the skills do.

Brian
How can people learn more about you? We’ve talked about your book “Never Split the Difference.” You mentioned your Masterclass. How can our listeners and viewers learn more about you and about negotiation?

Chris
The website is BlackSwanLTD.com. As soon as you go there, you’re going to get the opportunity, first of all, to subscribe to our newsletter, which is complimentary, actionable, and concise. It comes out on Tuesday mornings. It’s a usable, easily to digest, article and practical advice for negotiation, plus any announcements about training or new products will come through that newsletter; you’ll get it Tuesday morning, wherever you are in the world. Now, the website also has a lot of free stuff on it, ways to get started with us. You take the book, and you add in the newsletter and you’ll start to get better at negotiations right away. You’ll be ready for some of our more advanced training, when you’re really ready to take some big leaps forward. So wherever you are, we’ll meet you whatever skill level you are, you only have got to be ambitious and coachable.

Brian
I really appreciate all that, Chris. We’ll include all of those resources in the show notes. Just one other comment on the book. I really love how you’re quick to give credit to other authors and books that have helped you along the way, and can help us all to become better negotiators. So when you pick up the book, “Never Split the Difference” and go through it you’re going to learn lots of tools, techniques and strategies but you’ll also have the advantage of a master negotiator, Chris Voss, and he’s – I’m guessing Chris – read dozens, if not hundreds, of books on negotiation and you’ve mentioned a few that have made the difference in your life. So what we have is a little list of best, most powerful negotiation books and so I highly recommend that book. This has been terrific. Thanks again for joining us on the show, Chris.

Chris
It’s been a pleasure, Brian, thank you very much.

Brian
And to our listeners and viewers, thanks again for tuning into LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Chris Voss on social media, and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.