Negotiation & Difficult Conversations

The deadline you can't hit. The scope that doubled. The senior person whose idea you think is wrong. The salary conversation you've rehearsed in the shower for six months and never started. Nobody enjoys these, and avoiding them is what turns a manageable problem into an expensive one.

They also go much better with a method. There's a body of work behind negotiation going back more than fifty years. Most of what makes a hard conversation survivable is knowing which of your interests you're protecting before you open your mouth.

Principled Negotiation

Say negotiation and most people picture a standoff. Two sides naming numbers, each grinding the other down, meeting somewhere in a middle nobody wanted.

That's positional bargaining. It's exhausting, it damages the relationship you'll need next month, and it regularly leaves both sides worse off than an available alternative neither of them found.

Roger Fisher and William Ury published the alternative in Getting to Yes in 1981, out of the Harvard Negotiation Project. They called it principled negotiation, and it rests on four principles plus one piece of homework.

Separate the People From the Problem

The fastest way to wreck a negotiation is to make it about the person. "You always cut my designs" turns a problem into an accusation, and now they're defending themselves rather than solving anything with you.

So be hard on the problem and soft on the person. The image Fisher and Ury use is two people on the same side of the table, looking together at a shared problem rather than at each other.

Trade Interests Instead of Positions

This is the heart of it. A position is what somebody says they want. An interest is why they want it, and the two are rarely the same thing.

Getting to Yes illustrates it with two sisters fighting over one orange. They split it in half, and it turns out one wanted the fruit for juice while the other wanted the peel for baking. Both could have had everything they needed, and the compromise gave each of them half of what they wanted.

The work version looks like this. A PM says "we have to ship Friday", which is a position. The interest underneath might be a board demo, a promise they made to someone, or a fear of looking slow. Once you know which, options appear, because a polished core flow by Friday may serve a board demo exactly as well as the whole feature.

You can't find that deal while arguing about the date. You find it by asking why the date matters.

Pro tip: When two positions are stuck against each other, ask "what would that do for you?" It moves the conversation from what each side demands to why, and the overlap almost always hides in the why.

Invent Options for Mutual Gain

Before you argue over one solution, widen the set. Generate several ways to meet both interests, because more options means more chance that one of them costs you little and gives them a lot.

Designers are unusually good at this part. It's divergent thinking pointed at a deal instead of a screen, and the same rule applies. Separate the generating from the judging, or you'll kill the useful option while it's still half-formed.

Use Objective Criteria

Where interests really do conflict, keep it from becoming a contest of wills by anchoring the decision to something neutral. Data, a benchmark, a precedent, a published standard, a shared goal.

"Our usability testing shows this" or "the platform minimum is 44pt" lets both sides yield to the evidence rather than to each other. That saves face on both sides, which is what makes an agreement stick.

Know Your BATNA

Your BATNA is your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement: what you'll do if this deal doesn't happen. It's the source of every bit of calm you'll feel in the room.

Knowing you have a decent alternative means you can walk away, and being able to walk away is what stops you accepting a bad deal out of fear. Walking in without having worked yours out is how people end up saying yes to something they resent for a year.

There's a companion term worth having. The ZOPA, or Zone of Possible Agreement, is the range between the least each side will accept. Where the two BATNAs overlap there's a deal to find, and where they don't, no amount of skill produces one. Knowing which situation you're in saves a lot of hours.

Pro tip: Write your BATNA down as a full sentence before any negotiation that matters, including a salary conversation. "If this doesn't work out I will do X" is a very different feeling from a vague sense that you have options.