Mark Raffan:

Mark Raffan, CFPÆ, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor Whether you’re looking to close a big deal in business or navigate a tricky conversation, we’ve got you covered. Also check out our negotiation training on our website at www.negotiations.ninja and level up your negotiation and communication skills. So grab a notebook and get ready, let’s begin. Well, it’s not every day that you get to interview one of the truly greats in the negotiation world. Someone who has literally defined the field of negotiation for many, many, many years.

Today I get to interview the great William Ury. And in this conversation, we take a bit of a different approach to the interview process because his work is so well-known. We don’t really talk about his work so much as we talk about him and his background and sort of what led him to do the things that he’s done. We even talk about a few negotiations that he’s failed at, a really fascinating conversation. He was very gracious and kind and generous with his time.

And I have a great deal of respect for what he’s given to the negotiation world. Enjoy this great episode with William Ury. Well the time has come that we interview the great William Ury, negotiation aficionado, negotiation professor, and certainly a leader in the field. Having written some of the best and most well-known and best-selling works in the negotiation world. Bill, how are you?

William Ury:

It’s a real pleasure to be on this show together with you, Mark, and speak to your listeners who are also negotiation aficionados, I understand.

Mark Raffan:

Yes, they are. And they love talking with and hearing from amazing negotiation professionals like yourself. We’ve had some incredible guests on and I’ve been waiting for this day for quite some time. So I’m so pleased that we get the opportunity to talk to each other.

You really need no introduction, but for the sake of maybe some people that have lived under a rock for the last little while, please tell the listeners a bit about who you are and what you do.

William Ury:

Well, I’m a longtime student and practitioner of the art of negotiation and mediation. I was trained as an anthropologist originally, I got my PhD in anthropology, but I wanted to apply anthropology to something very practical. And I thought nothing better than negotiation, a better way of dealing with our differences than getting into destructive spats, whether it’s in business or strikes or lawsuits or wars. And actually, the topic of wars really, of stopping wars, preventing wars is very much on my mind, has been very much central to my work.

And so I helped found about 40 odd years ago, the program on negotiation at Harvard Law School, still associated with that.

Mark Raffan:

Of which I was a student, by the way.

William Ury:

Oh, really?

Mark Raffan:

Yeah, I took one of those courses that you folks offer and I really loved it, really enjoyed it.

William Ury:

That’s terrific to know.

And I’ve always loved going back and forth between theory and practice, between reflecting on what makes for success and failure in negotiation and trying to apply it in the toughest conflicts I can find around the world. So I’ve worked just about on every continent, both in the work in business, but also in the work of politics and polarization and wars in the Middle East, in Korea, in Chechnya. I worked on the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. So I’ve always had this one question of, can’t we find a better way to deal with our differences than threatening everything that we hold precious?

Mark Raffan:

Certainly, a conflict resolution seems to be a hot topic these days, especially with so much that’s going on in the world.

I mean, as we speak right now, at the beginning of this year, we know that this is the largest election here in human history. And there are over 40 federal elections that will be taking place, certainly that presents a lot of opportunity for disruption and instability and all of the things that come with politics and geopolitics in general. And I think we’re going to have an amazing opportunity to be able to talk about that. But I’d like to maybe take a step back from that and reflect on your journey a bit. And I’d love to know maybe a personal negotiation experience from you that’s had a profound impact on your life or your perspective on things that you rarely get the chance to talk about.

And maybe we could dive into a personal experience around that.

William Ury:

Why don’t we, Mark? So let me take you to my childhood. I was born in the United States, but I spent about half of my childhood growing up in Europe. And it was a very different Europe than the Europe of today.

It was the Europe that was recovering from two devastating wars, World War I and World War II that were the, if anything, the failures, the disastrous failures of negotiation and conflict resolution. I mean, World War I, a lot of historians would say it was a preventable war. The Kaiser went around for three days thinking this thing could be mediated. It wasn’t a necessary war. And then the way in which the peace was negotiated in Versailles in 1919, sowed the seeds for World War II.

And they were effectively part of the same war with a 20-year interlude, tens of millions of people died. And as a child going through cemeteries, and there are ruins still in Europe, and feeling the impact, I asked myself, isn’t there a better way, particularly because there was every kind of sneaking expectation at that point that there might be a World War III. And the school where I was had a nuclear bomb shelter with very thick, heavy metal doors. And that really set me on my path as a kind of like, that was my guiding question. That’s why I went into anthropology.

That’s what motivated me originally to go into the field of negotiation, to look for those better, more creative, more constructive ways to deal with our conflicts.

Mark Raffan:

When I reflect on that, and the stories that I’ve heard from others who’ve sort of been in similar positions around growing up in a difficult time, there’s an appreciation for conflict on a level that I think a lot of people don’t have. For example, I had a great conversation with a woman named Noxon Tooley, who is a mediator for the Ombudsman for the World Bank. And she mediates a lot of disputes in sub-Saharan Africa and all over Africa. And she’s seen conflict at a level that most of us would never even imagine.

And those folks who have seen that, or the after effects of that, it almost sears a memory in their mind of saying like, this cannot ever happen again. We’ve got to find another way. We must find another way. It’s unnerving to me to see people who have no appreciation for conflict and how bad it can get, deal with those situations without seeking out professional insight or advice. And that sort of leads me to the next question that I have for you.

So often I chat with leaders who are humble enough to be able to be in a position saying like, oh, I don’t know what I don’t know. Let me go and seek out the idea. Let me go and seek out the advice. And so one thing that I hope for all of these leaders that haven’t seen the conflict is that they can humble themselves enough to be able to say, okay, I don’t know, let me seek it out. Certainly in the stories that you’ve shared in your books and that you’ve shared when you’ve spoken publicly, you present as such a humble and sincere guy that you’re like, oh, this is what we learned from this.

And this is what we learned from that. I wonder if there’s something that you’ve learned from maybe an unexpected source, whether it’s a book or a person or an experience that has significantly influenced your approach to negotiation that sort of seared that memory in your mind. I mean, outside of walking through some of the difficult things that you saw in Europe growing up, was there a person that impacted you in a way that you’d like to share?

William Ury:

There was. It may not be entirely unconventional to you, but it was very unconventional and unusual to me.

It was when I was a graduate student in social anthropology at Harvard, grading papers late one Sunday night, 10 p.m. on a freezing January night, and the phone rang and the voice said, this is Professor Roger Fisher. I’ve just read your paper about an anthropological perspective on the Middle East peace negotiations. And I thought it was interesting enough that I sent the central chart in that paper to the assistant secretary of state for the Middle East in Washington, who’s working on preparing for Middle East peace negotiations because I thought you might find it interesting. And I was speechless. I was floored.

First of all, you never got a call from a professor, let alone on a weekend. And let alone to think that an idea that had popped into my head on my third floor attic room, rented room there as a graduate student, might be of any potential utility to a practitioner working on what was widely perceived as the world’s most difficult conflict. That was like just jaw-dropping and I didn’t have any words to say. And Roger said, would you come work with me? And that was the beginning of my lifetime adventure with negotiation.

I got hooked and I’ve spent the last 45 years really following that impulse of seeing whether just as we come up with better ways of designing computers, software, whatever, can we apply the same creative intelligence to designing better ways for human beings to reach agreement in difficult circumstances or settle disputes that might prevent widespread bloodshed.

Mark Raffan:

The learnings from your lifetime negotiating high stakes conflict and high stakes negotiations, whether it’s geopolitically or in business, can’t all have been home runs. There must have been some unfortunate ends to some negotiations. So I’d love if you’d be willing to talk about learning from failure and whether you could recall a negotiation or a resolution attempt that maybe didn’t go as planned and what you learned from that experience.

William Ury:

Well, Mark, my career has been marked by much more failure than success in that sense, just because when you’re working on these really difficult situations, you have to expect setbacks all the time.

It takes that persistence. And my very first big mediation ended up or started off with a spectacular failure from which I learned a lot. I was still a graduate student and I was looking, you know, get out of the library and get my hands dirty. And then I got an opportunity from a law professor by the name of Steve Goldberg, who was an arbitrator in the coal industry, said, you know, there’s a coal mine down in Kentucky where there’s been a lot of wildcat strikes, bomb threats, you know, was taken to court. The judge jailed the workforce actually for a night.

I mean, this thing’s getting out of control. The union and management think this might trigger a nationwide coal strike. I don’t know anything about mediation. I’m an arbitrator, but maybe you could help me. So he and I went down there, flew down to Eastern Kentucky, and we got there at the mine.

And the atmosphere was so bad that the management and the union would not even sit in the same room together. They just wouldn’t talk. And so we talked to one, we talked to the other. We engaged in a kind of shuttle diplomacy for about six weeks until the ideas we were bringing and listening to them, you know, were good enough that they were willing to sit down. And in two days, you know, it was like a peace negotiation and 10 union leaders, 10 managers that all signed this agreement to kind of change the way in which they were dealing with disputes.

And there was a kind of feeling like a major peace agreement. Everyone was elated and, you know, union and management. And there was one little detail, which is it had to be ratified by the miners, the hundreds and hundreds of miners in the mine. And you know, that was considered a mere detail and a week later, in fact, there was a vote taken and it was nearly unanimous in rejecting the very agreement that their leadership had just painstakingly negotiated. And why did they reject it?

Not because the agreement on paper was much better for them, but because they didn’t trust management and anything that management put its signature on had to be a trick. And so it was safer just to say no. And so we were back to, you know, zero. And it was just a huge lesson for me from the start that the people who are not at the table in a negotiation are just as important as the people at the table. And that you really need to think through not just the negotiators, but their constituencies.

And to really think through of there being not just one table, you know, where the negotiators are at, but there are at least three tables, you know, there’s the internal tables of both sides and often there’s multiparty. So there are many tables and you really have to go to the balcony, which is one of my favorite metaphors for taking perspective, zoom out and see the larger picture if you’re going to have a hope of trying to reach an agreement that actually is sustainable. So failure from the very start.

Mark Raffan:

… Well, certainly the lesson that I think that comes out of that, and something that I think is really important for the listeners to maybe take note of is we live in an age where there is so much distrust and mistrust that is sown publicly on news or social media or multiple media channels of pre-existing forms of power that now, because of that, we are the people that are not at the negotiating table. We are those workers, to a large extent, with many things that are going on. Because of the mistrust or distrust that has been sown, either by opposition or by foreign actors, there is a level of unknown and instability that comes with that that many of us are now thinking, well, what happens if? What happens if this happens, and what happens if that happens? For the listeners, you’re all amazing, intelligent, educated people.

I would ask that when those situations pop up where you feel that level of mistrust or distrust and you may reject an idea that on the surface may seem good because it’s from an opposing force, you say, oh, therefore I don’t believe it. I would ask that are you going to reject that because of what has been sown in your mind, or are you going to reject that on the basis of the quality or of the ratification or the agreement or whatever it might be? I think that’s an amazing lesson to learn. Oftentimes, I find myself in that very same situation. If I don’t like someone politically or I don’t like someone in business, anything that they often propose, I can feel it on the inside.

I can feel myself going, no, I don’t like that, actually. But then when I take time to think about it, I’m like, you know what, actually there’s some good merit to that. Am I rejecting this because I don’t like this person, or am I rejecting this because of the details within what they’ve proposed? Oftentimes, it’s because I have made the decision that I don’t like them. That’s tough, right?

It’s tough to make that recognition in yourself. I think as a group of people, it’s tough for us to reflect on that going, oh, is this actually a good thing? Even though I don’t like this person, is this a good thing?

William Ury:

That’s right. And in that particular case, the follow-up to that story was, was the negotiation entirely over?

And it looked that way, and my colleague went off, took his summer vacation. But I was young and still not wanting to settle for that, so I proposed that I would move down to the coal mine for the whole summer. And I moved down for a couple months, and I tried to engage with the coal miners. Who distrusted me? Because I was from Boston, and I looked a lot more like a manager than a miner, and talked more like one.

And for a while, I couldn’t get anyone to really engage with me. And then one day, I decided, you know what, because I was trying to engage with them as they emerged from the coal mine, all black and sooty, because the coal dust was enormous. And I said to the mine manager, I said, you know what, I’m going to have to go down in the coal mine. That’s the only way where they’re going to talk to me. He said, you’re going to do that at your own risk, buddy.

They’re rough, tough, you know? And sure enough, but I said, if they’re not going to talk to me up here, I’m going to go down. And so I made many trips. I went down the coal mine, it was a mile underground. You could cut the dust with a knife, you know, you had an oxygen mask, I mean, you know, if you needed it.

If you just spit, your spittle would be all black. You couldn’t walk because you had to bend over, you had one of these lights. And the noise was infernal. But down there, far away from managers, miners would sit and talk with me as they kind of couldn’t smoke down there. So you’d shoot tobacco and they would spit the tobacco everywhere.

And they would talk to me about their gripes and their grievances and their lives. And about the third or fourth time I went down there, I got jumped by four miners who wrestled me to the ground and out of nowhere, pulled out a knife. I could just see the glint, pulled down my pants and like, there was a coal mining initiation called herring where they take, you know, they cut off some pubic hair and whatever. And I mean, it was shocking, of course, and I was very relieved that the operation didn’t go further than that. But the news spread like a wildfire that I had been herred and that I was now a regular coal miner.

And it might not be the way in which you normally would build trust. But suddenly there I, you know, I was one of them and they began to open up even more. We began to build trust little bit by little bit. I was able to persuade them to take their gripes and grievances and try and talk them out rather than walk out. And gradually over those months, the strikes came to an end.

And it was a huge lesson to me about the importance of building trust. You got to go in and you might have to show a little courage and it might not happen in the way you like, but you got to move to where they are. If you’re going to start to dissolve that wall of distrust that’s blocked so many different negotiations nowadays.

Mark Raffan:

Well, I can’t say that I’ll be the first in line to get my pubic hair shaved in a mine in the Southern United States, Bill, but I do appreciate the analogy. It’s an amazing story, man.

An incredible story. You know, there’s so much about negotiation that at least on the surface appears to be changing these days, especially with the impact of technology and artificial intelligence and those kinds of things. And in the age of digital communication like we’re having right now and virtual interactions, artificial intelligence, how do you see technology influencing the dynamics of either negotiation or conflict resolution? Do you see it as a positive? Do you see it as a negative?

Do you see it as both? What do you think?

William Ury:

It’s dramatic. And technology has had a huge impact on negotiation, but you ain’t seen nothing yet with AI coming. AI will make an immense impact on, you know, all kinds of ways.

I’m seeing it with my colleagues, you know, even for training and learning in classes for rehearsing as an aid to negotiation, as a substitute for a human negotiator. So on the positive side can help a lot. On the negative side, the dangers are unknown, but immense. I mean, the people I know who are most knowledgeable about it are fearful even that it could pose an existential risk. You know, if we have artificial general intelligence, we’re going to be dealing, you know, as an anthropologist, I can just say that it’s not impossible.

This might seem inconceivable whether in the next generation or two or sooner, what it means to be human will change. We’ll have silicon intelligence and carbon-based intelligence and the two might be fused and who knows what’s going to happen. So we’re in for a wild ride and technology will definitely have a huge impact on negotiation. Who we’re negotiating with, who’s helping us negotiate in every possible way. It’s a new frontier.

It’s a new world for us that we’re entering.

Mark Raffan:

There’s a ton that’s going on with regards to artificial intelligence and the speed is the thing that maybe alarms me the most. I don’t want to say frightens, but definitely alarms me. The speed at which things are advancing is wild. Is there anything that you’ve noticed maybe from a research perspective or from folks that are working on these things at Harvard and other places where that you can speak to around some of the examples of technology and negotiation?

William Ury:

Yeah. Let me just say that, again, speaking as anthropologist, our brains are designed to deal with kind of linear change. Artificial intelligence is happening at an exponential level. We can’t kind of grasp it. Just like we couldn’t grasp the beginnings of COVID, okay, it’s just going to be…

But it happened so fast and so transformative. So going back to your question, yeah, my colleagues are really… Some of my colleagues like Jared Curhan at MIT, it’s amazing what they’re doing using artificial intelligence in classes for simulations. Like if you’re doing simulations, you can suddenly do a million simulations. If you’re…

You have little bots that your students can interact with, so they can rehearse. And so the possibilities are for learning and training and coaching, have been coached by AI even, are immense, particularly given the exponential rate by which artificial intelligence is getting more and more intelligent. I’d also say, just speaking of negotiation and artificial intelligence, that in terms of controlling the very significant risks that the top companies like OpenAI or people like Elon Musk are seeing in artificial intelligence, negotiation has everything to do with that because there’s an arms race going on with the different companies competing with each other. And it’s a little bit like a prisoner’s dilemma and different countries competing with each other, the Chinese, the Americans, and so on, that people are weakening the safeguards and hurtling forward. And if we can figure out through negotiation, crack that dilemma of how you control that arms race so that we have a chance to respond, to think about it, to put in some guardrails so that we don’t go hurtling off a cliff that we wouldn’t want to go over.

So for me, negotiation, there’s an enormous opportunity for negotiation to actually be of help in making sure that AI stays safe.

Mark Raffan:

Yeah. And I would tend to agree with you. Maybe taking a bit of a left-hand turn here, I’d like to talk about your new book, Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. And as excited as I am for this book, I’m also happy that it’s coming out at this time because I feel like we really need, civilization-wise, we really need a book like this, How to Survive and Thrive.

Every conversation that I have with many entrepreneurs and many business people starts with, I don’t even like with all of the instability that’s going on, I don’t even know how I’m going to be able to thrive and advance in this kind of unstable environment. And that makes me sad, right? Like it makes me sad when I hear that from powerful and amazing people that could make a huge impact on the world. So I’d like to talk about the art of the possible and what this book is really about, because as I read through some of the notes and read through a few things to be able to prepare for this, it appears to me that this is primarily a book of hope. And so maybe we could talk a bit about that and what your hope is for the book.

William Ury:

Yes, Mark. Well, when I first started writing this book a few years ago, I was writing it for Today’s Times, but I had no idea how timely it would be. I mean, right now, 2024 is being billed as the Annus Horribilis, you know, the year of Voldemort. You know, we have more conflict geopolitically in the world than we’ve had in my lifetime. I mean, everywhere you look, Ukraine, the Middle East, U.S., China, Taiwan, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea.

I mean, and not to speak of what you were mentioning at the beginning, the conflict here in the United States and polarization in so many different countries. And it’s like, it’s off the charts. And so that’s what the book speaks to is, okay, if I were a Martian anthropologist for a moment, looking down and saying, okay, we live in a time of enormous opportunities. You know, we’ve been talking about, you know, the AI and all this of abundance, you know, at this point in human evolution, human beings are so much better off in health and all kinds of things. You look around the planet, the technology, the potential is huge.

At the same time, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish if only we can work together. And that’s a big if, because there is a huge wave of destructive conflict flooding us. That conflict is increasing. It’s polarizing us. It’s poisoning relationships.

It’s paralyzing us. And the question is, how do we navigate in these times? And when people ask me, you know, Bill, you’ve been working in all these different, very impossible conflicts around the world from South Africa to Northern Ireland, to Columbia, to the Cold War, to Chechnya and so on. After all these years, are you a pessimist or are you an optimist? And of course, I’m an optimist of sorts, but these times are, you know, wow, it’s happening.

So what I prefer to say now is actually I’m a possible list. In other words, I look and can see some of the negative possibilities, but I can also see the positive possibilities. I am a believer in human potential that we barely tapped our full human potential to deal creatively, constructively, and collaboratively with even impossible seeming conflicts. And the reason why I’m a possible list is because I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes. I was in South Africa during the time of apartheid and watched as that country against all odds, against all expectations transformed itself.

It transformed the conflict, the conflict didn’t end, but it transformed the conflict with Mandela and just the, you know, it seemed impossible, you know, race war. Then I was in Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, you know, people said they’d been fighting for centuries, it was a holy war and yet it shifted. I worked as a senior advisor to the president of Columbia, 50 years of civil war in Columbia, hundreds of thousands dead, millions and millions of victims. And within seven years working hard, you know, again, taking, you know, I went 25 times down to Columbia, the president, the team, they were able to put an end to the longest running war in the Americas. So I’ve seen the worst of humanity, but I’ve also seen how conflict can sometimes bring out our best.

And that’s what makes me a possibleist and that’s why I wrote the book to try to sum up what I’ve learned from others and from these experiences to see what could be helpful to us as we navigate these times, whether it’s political conflict or business conflict or personal conflict.

Mark Raffan:

One final question for you as we wrap up, it seems as though you’ve still got a lot that you’d like to do in the negotiation world. I mean, look at this book that’s now being released, phenomenal about how to be able to be a possibleist in negotiation and conflict. And as someone who’s had a significant impact, maybe the biggest impact on the field of negotiation, what do you want to do next? What kind of legacy do you hope to leave as you continue in your work?

Is there a specific goal that you aspire to achieve? I mean, at least for someone like me who looks at someone like you as someone who’s reached the top of the mountain when it comes to the negotiation world, is there anything else? Like at this point, what else is there?

William Ury:

That’s a really good question, Mark. I’ll say, I’ll just start by saying that a year and a half ago, I became a grandfather.

Congratulations. And on the day that my grandson was born, Diego, I was able to kind of hold him in my arms for an hour, you know, all that pure potential, all that innocence there. I was using it to kind of meditate on the question of if he were 20, what would, looking back at today, what would he and his generation want us to do right now in these challenging times? And I consider him my new boss. And so I’m taking instructions from him and his generation.

So there’s a lot left to do. And I just want to say, you know, I feel that, you know, I’ve spent 45 years in this field. I still feel we’re in the infancy of the field, or at least the adolescence. There’s so much more to be discovered, so much more to be created and invented. There’s so much more potential for human creativity, collaboration, curiosity here.

And so I want to put out a challenge or a request to your listeners, which is, you know, you’re all negotiators, you’re all, you know, interested in this field of negotiation. My request to you on behalf of, you know, the next generation, like my grandson, is to join me as a possible list. You know, you don’t have to be, I’m not asking you don’t have to be an optimist or a pessimist, you can be a possible list. And I have a hunch you might already be one. In other words, someone who actually believes that we can take these obstacles in conflict and find opportunities, find possibilities, find those little cracks, those little opportunities that can make all the difference.

Because my dream is that together, you know, we might form a worldwide, call it a league of possible lists, you know, of people willing to tackle the world’s toughest conflicts, whether they’re at home, at work, or in the world, starting with your own. Because I believe that if we can transform our conflicts, in other words, we may not be able to resolve them, but at least we can change the form from destructive fighting to creative negotiation, then if we can transform our conflicts, we can transform our lives, we can transform the lives of the people around us, we can transform our world. And if it’s not going to be us, who is it going to be? And if it’s not going to be now, when is it going to be?

Mark Raffan:

The great William Ury, everyone.

Words of wisdom from someone who has influenced all of you. Whether you know it or not, many of the things that Bill has written, spoken about, and taught has found its way into either your university, your work, your life. Bill Ury, thank you so much for being with me.

William Ury:

It’s been a great pleasure, Mark. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation.