Lisa Leong:

ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Okay, so you may have witnessed some tense conflicts at work. Someone may have even raised their voice at you. But I bet it wasn’t the person William Ury found himself in front of in 2003.

William Ury:

Once I found myself being yelled at by the president of a country, the president of Venezuela, in this case Hugo Chavez, in front of his entire cabinet.

Lisa Leong:

William is one of the world’s leading negotiation and conflict experts. But right at that moment, he was feeling a very human reaction. His face flushed and his jaw clenched.

William Ury:

All the works down the drain, I was feeling embarrassed, flustered, whatever.

Lisa Leong:

So William did something that changed the whole dynamic.

William Ury:

Then I watched his body language, and body language is important in negotiation. I watched his shoulders slowly slink, and in a weary tone of voice he asked me, he said, so, Ury, what should I do?

Lisa Leong:

You’ll hear what technique William used to calm Chavez down, and guess what? His technique didn’t involve saying, just calm down, Chavez. Cool your boots, will ya?

William Ury:

I would say we tend, when we’re faced with conflict, to fall into what I would call the 3A trap.

Lisa Leong:

Hello, I’m Lisa Leong, and in this episode of This Working Life, how to nail negotiation and conquer conflict at work with William Ury.

William Ury:

My title, I’m the, well, I’m the author of Possible, if that’s a title. I’m the co-founder of the Harvard Program on Negotiation.

Lisa Leong:

And if you’re thinking, gosh, his name sounds familiar, well, you may have one of his original books on your bookshelf, a seminal book on negotiation called Getting to Yes, that he co-wrote with Roger Fisher.

Now, interestingly, William Ury actually started off studying anthropology.

William Ury:

I did. Anthropology for me was simply a license to be curious, and I was very curious about our human species, and I wanted to understand in particular our proclivity for conflict and how we could find a better way to deal with our deepest differences than blowing the whole world to smithereens. So I’ve seen people rise to the occasion. I’ve seen conflict can bring out the worst in people, but it can often sometimes bring out the best in people.

Lisa Leong:

Well, let’s go back to 1977. You get a call from Professor Roger Fisher about a paper you’d written. What was that paper?

William Ury:

The paper was an anthropological perspective, a prospective Middle East peace negotiation. I was just imagining as a graduate student, I was grading graduate student papers, and I was just imagining myself as a fly on the wall in a Middle East peace negotiation.

What would I see as an anthropologist? How would I know if the negotiations were going well or going poorly? And I was inspired by Roger Fisher in that paper, so I sent him the paper, but I didn’t expect him to reply. Professors didn’t usually reply, and they certainly didn’t call you. And yet one January, very cold, freezing night, I was in my third-floor attic room, and at 10 p.m. I got this call that said, This is Professor Roger Fisher, and I’ve just read your paper about the Middle East.

And I thought it was interesting enough that I took the central chart in it, and I sent it to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East because he’s working on Middle East peace negotiations, and I thought he might be interested. Okay. Wow. I didn’t know what to say. I was speechless. I never imagined, first of all, receiving a call from a professor, and let alone that some idea that had popped into my head in that little attic room might be useful to an actual practitioner working on the world’s most difficult, complicated negotiations. So when Roger invited me to work with him, I said yes, and I’ve been hooked on negotiation and finding better ways to deal with our differences ever since.

Lisa Leong:

And what were you picking up on in that position of flying the wall, do you think, about the nature of conflict?

William Ury:

You know, Lisa, it was really simple. It was just saying, Wow, if things are going badly, people are going to be dwelling on the past and what was wrong and what the other side did, and there’d be the blame game. And if things were going better, they’d be focusing on who could do what to try to improve the situation, reconcile tomorrow morning, and they’d be focused on the future. They’d be focused on what could be done rather than just hurling invective at each other about who was right or who was wrong.

And it was fairly simple, but that was the essence of it, is like move the focus from the past and the future to what’s wrong to what can be done.

Lisa Leong:

And I guess, William, that shows us that conflict doesn’t always have to be destructive. It can be constructive.

William Ury:

That’s it. I mean, in a funny way, conflict, speaking as an anthropologist, conflict is something natural. It’s part of life. And in its healthy form, it allows us to engage our differences. You know, the best decisions are often made by surfacing different points of view, looking for creative ideas.

It’s not by avoiding it. It’s by engaging with the issues. It’s by leaning into it. That’s the way out, is to lean into conflict, even though it doesn’t seem like something so pleasant. It’s to actually embrace it, you know, lean in with curiosity, embrace it with creativity, and then transform it, change its form from the destructive fight into a constructive, creative, collaborative negotiation.

Lisa Leong:

Actually, I’m quite scared of conflict myself.

Like I tend to avoid it at all costs. So why might this be unhelpful, especially in the workplace?

William Ury:

Well, yeah, Lisa, I’m a little bit like you. We all have our proclivities. I would say we tend, when we’re faced with conflict, to fall into what I would call the 3A trap.

Either we avoid, you know, which doesn’t solve the problem. I mean, the problem still continues, and it may come back to burn us. It gets worse sometimes. Or we attack, you know, we go on the attack, and oftentimes that produces this counterattack. Or the third A is we accommodate or we appease, we give in, which is not very satisfactory either.

And so the question is how do we get out of that 3A trap?

Lisa Leong:

Okay, William, so let’s get practical here. How can we better understand and navigate conflict? I’d love to go to the beautiful, generous case study that you have in your book, which is Abelio Diniz, Brazil’s best-known business leader, two years deep in a very bitter dispute with his French business partner. So can you set the scene for us?

What was the conflict about?

William Ury:

It was about what so often business disputes are about. It’s about control. It’s about control over the business, who is going to run the business. Abelio was the chair.

He’d founded the business with his father. His French business partner was the largest shareholder and wanted control. And they’d had some kind of agreement but had fallen through the cracks, and they’d been fighting each other hammer and tongs for two and a half years, lawsuits, arbitrations, you know, shout-outs in every boardroom meeting, and even character assassinations in the press. It had gotten really ugly. It affected not only them but their families, thousands and thousands of employees.

It’s 150,000 employees. And so it was so bad that even the Brazilian president had to call up the French president and talk about it.

Lisa Leong:

And it sounds like it was stuck in one of the A’s, which was the attack.

William Ury:

It was very much in the attack. And that’s the thing that I’ve learned, Lisa, over these years is that the single biggest obstacle to me getting what I want in a negotiation is not what I think it is.

It’s not the difficult person on the other side of the table. It’s the person sitting on this side of the table. It’s me, the person I look at in the mirror every morning. It’s in our natural, human, very understandable tendency to react, which is to act without thinking, to act out of fear, out of anger, as they were doing in this situation. And in those situations, everything gets reduced to a kind of win-lose battle.

And in the end, because of people’s interdependence, it means everybody loses. The parties lose, but everybody loses. The families lose. The employees lose. Everyone loses.

So the question is there’s got to be a better way out of this situation.

Lisa Leong:

And, you know, when we’re talking about managing ourselves first, I mean you have such a powerful tool, a surprisingly simple tool, and that is to pause. Can you talk us through that?

William Ury:

The opposite of reacting is to pause. It’s simply to stop for a moment.

The best way to start, paradoxically, is to stop. It’s to pause. It might be in the middle of a conversation. You might just take a deep breath or a couple deep breaths to get a little oxygen in your brain. Or it might be to take a break.

Or, as I like to do, go for a walk, go for a walk in nature. Go out, do a workout, have a cup of tea with your friend, whatever it is. We all have our favorite ways of what I call going to the balcony, which is the balcony is simply a metaphor for imagining that you’re negotiating on a stage. Part of your mind goes to a mental and emotional balcony overlooking that stage. It’s a place of calm and perspective that we all know.

It’s a place where we can keep our eyes on the prize, what’s truly important to us, and see the bigger picture.

Lisa Leong:

And in relation to this case study, I’ll take you to the moment when you met with Abilio at his home, and you started with your go-to question, which is, Abilio, what do you really want from this negotiation? What did he initially say?

William Ury:

Well, he initially, this was in his home, and I was just meeting him for the first time, and that’s the balcony question, what do you really want? And he, like any good business leader, just had his list, and it was like a certain amount of stock, and an elimination of the three-year non-compete clause, and the company headquarters, the company sports team, et cetera.

Those are, in negotiation, we call those your positions, the concrete things you say you want the money. But then I like to probe, I like to go deeper than that. It’s a little bit like an iceberg. That’s the part that’s above the water. What’s underneath the water?

What is the deep underlying motivation? So I said, Abilio, I understand that, but tell me, what do you really want? And he wasn’t used to being asked that question. It was like, because usually we just stay at our positions. I said, what do you mean?

I said, well, you know, you’re a man who seems to have everything. You’ve got a young family here. You’ve got wealth. You’ve got everything you want. What do you want here?

Well, he looked at me for a long time. He thought about it. And finally he looked at me and he said, you know what I really want? I want my freedom. And the way, the tone with which he pronounced the word freedom gave me a sense that we’d hit what was really bothering him.

You know, 20 years earlier or more, he had been actually had the unfortunate experience of being kidnapped actually by an urban guerrilla group who, as he was coming out of his house and held in a coffin for a week, he thought he wouldn’t survive. So freedom really resonated for him. And I said to him, so what does freedom actually really mean to you in this case? He said, well, it’s freedom to spend time with my family, which is the most important thing in my life and freedom to make the deals, the business deals I love to make. Well, once we had, once we were able to go to the balcony, go down to what he really wanted, then it became a lot easier to negotiate.

Lisa Leong:

Because it turned out Abelio’s rival wanted the same thing.

William Ury:

By getting at the underlying interests, which for Abelio was freedom, the other one I think I really sensed from him was dignity. You know, we all want our dignity. And for him, he felt he couldn’t afford to like show that he was weak or that he had lost. And the truth is the other fellow had the same interest, which was he wanted to be free too to run the company and he wanted to have his dignity.

And so once the question became how do we satisfy both sides, freedom and dignity, then an issue that had gone on for two and a half years of conflict was able to be resolved in a few days.

Lisa Leong:

So we have this idea of the balcony. Can we talk about the bridge? In fact, let’s talk about a golden bridge. What is the purpose of the bridge?

Yeah.

William Ury:

It’s like, you know, we’re in a difficult, let’s say, negotiation. You know, you’re over here and I’m way over there, you know, two positions far away. And, you know, I want you to come over to my position, right? But actually it’s not so easy for you to come to my position because it’s almost like a giant chasm, like a canyon, like the Grand Canyon that’s filled with anxiety or fear or unmet needs or distrust or hostility or past baggage.

There’s a lot of things stopping you from moving in the direction I’d like you to move. So my job, which is not always so easy, is to leave my thinking for a moment, move over to where you are, put myself in your shoes, listen to you, see what your needs are, start the conversation from where you are, and then proceed to build a bridge over that chasm, build them a golden bridge, an attractive bridge. Because so often in negotiation we tend to push. You know, we get into pushing the other side. Of course, if I push you, what do you do?

You push me back, right? So we’re just at a stalemate. The opposite is to attract. It’s to actually, my job is not to make it harder for you. My job is to make it easier for you to make the decision I’d like you to make.

That’s the art of building them a golden bridge.

Lisa Leong:

And are there moments, I mean, this is actually a lot more difficult than it first seems because particularly when you’re in the middle of the conflict, to build that empathy can sometimes feel exposing and also really difficult. So what are the things that you have found? I mean, you’ve been in the middle of so many seemingly intractable conflicts. What do you do to help yourself build that empathy, particularly when people are screaming at you, like often scary autocrats?

William Ury:

Right. So first of all, I just want to say this may sound simple because it sounds simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. This can be some of the hardest work we human beings can do. Yeah, it is not so easy. You were mentioning autocrat.

I mean, you know, once I found myself being yelled at by the president of a country, the president of Venezuela, in this case, Hugo Chavez, in front of his entire cabinet. And I’d been working there for a year. So I felt like, oh, all the works down the drain. I was feeling embarrassed, flustered, whatever. But then I remembered to go to the balcony.

And the way I did that was a friend of mine had said, if you’re ever in a tough spot, pinch the palm of your hand. And I said, why would I do that? He said, because it’ll give you momentary pain. It’ll keep you alert. So for whatever reason, I remembered to pinch the palm of my hand.

And then I remembered what the prize was. Was it really going to do me any good to get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? Or, you know, I wanted to calm the situation down. So I bit my tongue and I listened to him. And he went on for half an hour right in my face.

But I was just listening, studying from a balcony perspective. And listening turns out to be the key tool there. And then I watched his body language. And, you know, body language is important in negotiation. I watched his shoulders slowly slink.

And in a weary tone of voice, he asked me, he said, so, Yuri, what should I do? And that is the faint sound of a human mind opening. So I said, well, Mr. President, it’s December. The Christmas festivities have been canceled because of the tensions, the conflict. There are a million people on the streets one way or the other way.

Why don’t you just give everyone a break? You know, let everyone enjoy Christmas, the holidays with their families. And maybe in January there’ll be a better mood. Well, he looked at me for a moment. And then he said, you know what?

That’s an excellent idea. I’m going to propose that in my next speech. And he clapped his hand on my back. His mood had completely shifted. And what I learned then and there was that maybe the greatest power that we have in negotiation is the power not to react.

It’s the power to go to the balcony. Instead, it’s the power to pause. To pause and to listen. Listening turns out to be key.

Lisa Leong:

And I feel like listening is the bridge.

William Ury:

Listening is the bridge, exactly. And it’s not the normal kind of listening, Lisa. The normal kind of listening is we sit here. We’re hearing their words. We’re saying, you know, a little voice and say, I disagree with that.

You’re preparing your response. No, I mean true listening where you listen from within their frame of perspective what really matters to them, what they’re really concerned about. And if you can do that, then you’ll know where their thinking is. You’re going to be much better able to influence them. But it’s also a sign of respect.

Because most people feel like people don’t listen to them. And if you listen to people and you really hear them, that helps them go to the balcony. That helps them relax because it’s a sign of respect. And their dignity might not mean much to you, but it means everything to them.

Lisa Leong:

William, when was there a time when there was the option to blow up the bridge but you chose to build it instead despite really wanting to blow it up?

William Ury:

Well, that happens. I mean, you know, it’s tempting, you know. There’s a saying I think the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said, you know, next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is knowing when to forego one. And you sometimes have to forego opportunities. And, yeah, like, you know, even in that situation with President Chavez, you know, I felt like in that moment defending myself, defending my honor, he was saying, you know, you’re a fool.

You’re not seeing the dirty tricks the other side is up to. And he was attacking me. And I felt like defending myself. But if I’d blown up that bridge at that point with him, that would have been the end of the attempt to try and mediate the differences between him and the opposition and help the country along. So we have to forego those opportunities.

Lisa Leong:

Let’s go to the third side. What is this and how does this help with resolving conflict?

William Ury:

Yeah, there’s a tendency in any conflict situation for us to reduce it to just two sides. You know, it’s always one side against the other. It’s husband versus wife, labor versus management, sales versus manufacturing, whatever the situation is.

But in truth, as an anthropologist, I know there’s always a third side. And the third side is the larger whole. It’s the surrounding community. It’s the social context within which the conflict takes place. And that’s a huge untapped resource for us in negotiation.

It might be like, for example, in the case of Abelio, just to take an example. I was brought into the situation by Abelio’s wife, JZ, and his daughter, Ana Maria. They were third-siders. It’s not third-siders don’t have to be neutrals. They were close to Abelio.

They could be friends, relatives, neighbors, associates, co-workers, colleagues, whatever. They were concerned about the conflict because they could see the impact was having on Abelio and on them and on the family. And so they brought me in. I actually was helping Abelio, but I was kind of a third-sider. I was holding the side of the whole.

What’s best here for the whole here? And I was helping Abelio remember the whole, like the family and all the employees and everyone’s at stake here.

Lisa Leong:

And then William did something you might think would be a dangerous move. He reached out to the mentor of Abelio’s business rival.

William Ury:

Who was a banker and had been on the board, and I had lunch with him.

And suddenly he and I became the third side saying, how do we help our friends resolve this thing? Rather than we’re enemies on opposite sides, we’re together on the same side of the table facing a difficult problem of how do we bring our friends together in a good way? And that actually turned out to be the key. We were the third side. Third side was the family, was us, was employees, were the two presidents of the country, whatever.

We were the third side that created like a container within which this very difficult conflict could be gradually or actually in this case not so gradually transformed.

Lisa Leong:

And so tell us the ending to the story and what happened to everyone, including the people on the third side.

William Ury:

Yeah, so I had lunch with this mentor on a Monday in Paris. And by Friday, we had both men at a law office in Sao Paulo, Brazil, signing an agreement, shaking hands, joint announcement, wishing each other well in their future. I brought them to see the executives, the top leadership of the company.

They made a joint presentation, explained what was going on. We had a press conference and it was all over. And I asked Abelio that night, I said, how do you feel? He said, well, I got everything I wanted. He said, but the most important thing is I got my life back.

And then I asked the other side and they felt good about it too. And to this day, I went to Abelio’s birthday party last year and it’s been a number of years. He said, these last years have been the best years of my life. It’s my years of freedom. He got the freedom that he really, truly wanted.

Lisa Leong:

Beautiful. And really at the heart of all of this and the heart of your book is this idea of being a possibleist and having the possibleist mindset. Can you tell us how we can develop this in ourselves and how you’ve done it over time?

William Ury:

For sure. People, after all these years of wandering around the planet and all kinds of difficult, troubling conflicts, wars and so on, particularly in today’s world where there seems to be more conflict, not less, conflict seems to be a growth industry and there’s more polarization, so we need even more resourcing of the kind that feeds us, nourishes us, calms our nervous system so that we can be at our most effective.

Every conflict is made by human beings. It can be transformed by human beings. And I’ve seen it. Why am I a possibleist? Because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

I saw the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. That was supposed to be impossible. I saw race war in South Africa. That was supposed to be impossible. War between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

That was going to be impossible. Guerrilla war in Colombia. That was going to be impossible. And yet all these, and then abelio in business context and family feuds. So I’ve seen people rise to the occasion.

I’ve seen conflict can bring out the worst in people, but it can often sometimes bring out the best in people. Possibleism just means where you see obstacles, look for an opportunity and apply that spirit that we apply to a lot of other things, but apply it to our conflicts. Because I believe that if we can transform our conflicts from destructive fights into constructive negotiations, if we can transform them, we can transform our lives.

Lisa Leong:

William Ury, co-founder of Harvard Law School’s program on negotiation and author of the new book, Possible. Remember not to get caught in the 3A trap.

Avoid, attack and accommodate. But if you do, here’s how you can get out of that trap through constructive conflict, going to the balcony, building a bridge and talking to or becoming the third side. I’m Lisa Leong. Thanks for listening to This Working Life.