Leverage Weekly #65 - Learning to negotiate
tl;dr - Learning is easier with simple theory and simple practice
Negotiation is a complicated topic. In addition to hardball tactics, asymmetric information, disaligned incentives, and high stakes, it is often hard enough just to figure out what a good outcome is, even if everyone lays their cards on the table and plays nice. The German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously declared that war is politics carried out by other means. Negotiation, then, could be thought of as a type of war in which all sides employ devastating means to reach their desired ends.
But let’s wait a moment. Even though negotiation can be thought of in military terms, with the whole bevy of military metaphors and lessons applying, it can also be thought of in terms of simpler things, like communication and trust. In reality, people’s goals are often consistent with one another. The ways they pursue their goals, however, can be alien and confusing, leading to spirals of distrust and something that looks, to the outside observer, like warfare.
The biggest challenge in negotiation is establishing what type of circumstance one is actually in. Is the party on the other side aligned or disaligned, and on which points and to what degree? In some cases, people are what they seem and present their interests and priorities in a straightforward way. In other cases, people bluff, not only about what offers they’re willing to accept, but what they want, how far they’re willing to go, and even who they are aligned with. Knowing the type of circumstance makes it much easier to decide which tools should be brought to bear.
In most cases, parties are friendly or mildly opposed; groups that are more completely opposed tend to avoid one another. In some cases, however, parties are in fact in substantial and unavoidable conflict. The fact that extreme conflict does happen means that one should be prepared for it. The fact that it is rare means that only very rarely should one actually need to deploy the more extreme methods, such as taking a dispute to court.
If the biggest task in negotiation is understanding the nature of the opposing party, the largest challenge in learning negotiation is finding sufficiently easy circumstances to practice in. Haggling over price with a well-intentioned vendor, trying to determine whether a used car is worth buying, or even lower impact circumstances are the right sort of cases to look for, if one wants to learn how to negotiate. Full-on multi-party battles with millions of dollars at stake are not the right place to start learning, for obvious reasons.
Even if one finds sufficiently low-stakes cases, learning to negotiate is very difficult. Unlike video games and sports, feedback from negotiation is hard to parse. Convincing a vendor to lower their price, for instance, might be small victory (since the price is lower) or a major defeat (if the vendor would have gone much lower). One usually doesn’t find out what the other side would have agreed to, apart from what they did agree to. Further, negotiations can take a long time and be very emotionally draining. So the number of cases one gets to train up on is often relatively low.
Luckily, there are ways to supplement one’s learning. A variety of books are available on the topic. For people starting out, a great first book is the classic Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury. Getting to Yes presents a framework, concepts, advice, and tips for the novice negotiator. Learning to apply the ideas in the context of fairly easy actual negotiations is a great place to begin to learn.
Getting to Yes, of course, is not the end of one’s journey, should one try to learn to negotiate. It’s a great beginning. The actual skill of negotiating, however, is very complex, and without examples drawn from real life, it can be hard to tell what good negotiation looks like. In this way, negotiation is like many things that are crucial to being able to make an organization run well: one needs data from real cases to know what success actually looks like.
Learning is easier with simple theory and simple practice.
The week before last was focused primarily on our new contractors, Anna Stillwell and Cliff Sandlin, who are assisting Leverage with fundraising for the Quantum Biology Institute and doing quantum biology research, respectively. They both hit the ground running, with Anna developing a media strategy and penning a first piece and Cliff diving into the literature on weak magnetic field effects.
Several things made it possible for Leverage to make two key hires so quickly. The first is the institute’s experience hiring people and studying the process of hiring; also, Oliver spent some time as a professional recruiter. Another was having a good network, which made sourcing surprisingly easy in this case. A third, however, was the institute’s people-friendly approach to negotiation and legal contracts, which made it much easier to reach agreement than it would have been otherwise.
Apart from expanding the team, things were relatively quiet. Oliver has continued researching dysfunction in science. Melinda is editing videos for our YouTube channel. Geoff took time off to go to SynBioBeta, the premier synthetic biology conference. The team is still advising QBI, for instance, helping to source cheaper instruments and providing guidance on tax law.
The largest direct input from Leverage into QBI is now a weekly presentation, designed to deliver maximum value within a one-hour window. Presentations so far have covered (1) organizational design, (2) motivating the team, and (3) negotiation basics. Presenting information is challenging, since it’s important to have information that is actionable, useful, and tuned exactly to the audience, which in this case are mostly scientists. The negotiation presentation was perhaps the most successful so far, with the QBI team encountering the concept of a BATNA for the first time.
Note: This Leverage Weekly covers the week of May 5-9.