Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

If you want someone to listen and understand your reasoning, give your interests and reasoning first and your conclusions or proposals later.

Examine their negative judgments to find out their underlying interests and to improve your ideas from their point of view. Rework your ideas in light of what you learn from them, and thus turn criticism from an obstacle in the process of working toward agreement into an essential ingredient of that process.

Pay attention to “core concerns.”

“You have a strong case. Let me see if I can explain it. Here’s the way it strikes me. . . .” Understanding is not agreeing. One can at the same time understand perfectly and disagree completely with what the other side is saying.

Many emotions in negotiation are driven by a core set of five interests: autonomy, the desire to make your own choices and control your own fate; appreciation, the desire to be recognized and valued; affiliation, the desire to belong as an accepted member of some

One lawyer we know attributes his success directly to his ability to invent solutions advantageous to both his client and the other side. He expands the pie before dividing it. Skill at inventing options is one of the most useful assets a negotiator can have.

So show that you understand them. “Let me see whether I follow what you are telling me. From your point of view, the situation looks like this. . . .” As you repeat what you understood them to have said, phrase it positively from their point of view, making the strength of their case clear.

Good listening can increase your negotiation power by increasing the information you have about the other side’s interests or about possible options. Once you understand the other side’s feelings and concerns, you can begin to address them, to explore areas of agreement and disagreement, and to develop useful ways to proceed in the future. Consider

In most negotiations there are four major obstacles that inhibit the inventing of an abundance of options: (1) premature judgment; (2) searching for the single answer; (3) the assumption of a fixed pie; and (4) thinking that “solving their problem is their problem.” To overcome these constraints, you need to understand them.

If negotiators view themselves as adversaries in a personal face-to-face confrontation, it is difficult to disentangle their relationship from the substantive problem. In that context, anything one negotiator says about the problem seems to be directed personally at the other and is received that way. Each side tends to become defensive and reactiv