Getting To Yes: A Classic with a Caveat
Published: 2020-03-20 18:53:54

Robert Fisher and William Ury's book, [Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In](https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Yes-Negotiating-Agreement-Without/dp/0143118757), is a classic study of how to conduct successful negotiations. It has gone through several revisions over the past 30 years and continues to be a best seller.

As the authors address in the forward, folks doing creative work sometimes dismiss negotiation as a specialized activity and not part of our everyday life. Instead, the authors point out how we are constantly negotiating, not just on a contract, but on work-life balance, how to divvy up work for a project, how to co-exist in a relationship.

Having established the prevalence of negotiation, the authors address another misperception, which is that negotiation is all about tips and tricks to push the other side into accepting your demands. This is the stereotype of the shady salesperson who uses psychological tactics to pressure you into moving off your price to theirs. Rather than this type of behavior being central to successful negotiation, the authors identify bargaining over positions as the problem with most negotiation. Instead, they recommend focusing on the underlying interests behind given positions, focusing on the problem, not the people, looking for mutual gains and using objective criteria to evaluate options.

If you've done any software consulting or product development, you've probably done a lot of negotiation and I'll illustrate a few of these tips with some anecdotes from my past experiences.



*Focus on Interests, Not Positions*
While working on a contact center implementation for a customer, I was tasked with gathering requirements and implementing a solution for displaying realtime metrics. The customer's opening ask was  30 to 40 metrics, each of which "had to be" updated every few seconds. This was going to be a large effort and a natural way to proceed would have been to haggle down the number of metrics between the two sides.

My team dug deeper into why those metrics were needed in that time frame. Turns out the initial ask was a wishlist from several groups who thought they were listing just what their wildest dreams would be. That got translated into a hard requirement along the way. Once we got past that, we could focus on the customer's interest, around managing the agent population against activity surges and populating performance reports. From there we prioritized and shrank the work ahead of us and could move forward. Instead of trying to win by getting the list down to 20 instead of 40, we exited that bad game and moved into a better one.



*Disentangle the People from the Problem*
Consulting projects can be tough. Sometimes you end up with a "difficult" client, where interactions are fraught and the project life is stressful. In these projects, it is hard to get through negotiations. The relationship is not setup for a natural give and take. I was in such a project a while ago and even the most basic discussions of ongoing work were difficult. 

Personal insults were flung around and I was tempted to throw up my hands and write the project off, but got some good advice from a colleague along the lines of Fisher and Ury's book. To focus on the problem, not the people. In this case, we paused to take an inventory of how we were running the project vs how the client typically worked. We figured out that a major sticking point was that we perceived as being open about our development process seemed confusing and unstructured to them. This led to a lack of trust in our work.

We started providing extremely clear and structured updates on what we were doing; we got way stricter on how meetings were run and on only discussing the work items in flight. These adjustments helped rebuild the client relationship. Our acting more "rigid" was actually a comfort to the client. The same people were no longer as difficult and the project could move forward.



*The Value of Walking Away*
The only critique I have of Fisher and Ury's book is that it does not focus enough on the value of walking away. It is a book focused on solutions, on making negotiations work and has a hopeful tone throughout. The authors acknowledge that it can be difficult to negotiate this way if the other party is not willing, but only glance off the possibility of the best outcome being a failed negotiation with the idea of a BATNA or best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

A BATNA lets you evaluate how far you are willing to go in a negotiation, and how good the outcome really is, with the implication that you should walk away if the BATNA is better. However, the BATNA is situated in the context of two parties where one party is more powerful or unwilling to negotiate.

From my past experience, even a negotiation in good faith, with parties looking for the win-win can end up the worse for all sides. It can be rushed, circumstances change midway through or any number of other reasons. I'd love to see more from these authors on these type of scenarios.



As always happy reading!