Jeremy:
And on this 21st day of the government shutdown, let’s get the perspective of an internationally recognized expert in negotiations. William Ury is co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and co-author of the book Getting to Yes. He joins us from Boulder, Colorado. Welcome to Here and Now. It’s a great pleasure, Jeremy:.
So you’re one of the world’s foremost experts on negotiations. What do you make of the state of the negotiations around the government shutdown right now?
William Ury:
Well, I don’t know if I’m an expert. I’m a student. I’ve been studying for many decades.
But you always have something to learn here. What I make of it is it’s a classic win-lose contest, which almost inevitably, in my experience, ends up in lose-lose outcomes. Each side thinks they’re going to win, but neither side’s going to back down. So both sides end up losing. And actually, the people who lose the most are us, the citizens, the community, the federal employees, all the people who will be suffering even more from the federal breakdown.
And that, to me, is the key in the negotiation. The secret to solving this is not just the parties. It’s us.
Jeremy:
Is there a way for both sides to at least feel like they have a win and come to a conclusion and reach a deal?
William Ury:
I believe so.
That’s probably the only way it’s going to end up is, what I like to do in negotiation is I like to work backwards. You start with their victory speeches. You know, you write President Trump’s victory speech in which he says to his base, I won. And you write Nancy Pelosi’s victory speech in which she says to her base, I won. And then you work back from that and say, OK, how do we arrive at a deal that has enough in it for both sides that we can get on with our business and the federal government can resume?
Jeremy:
In your book, you write that the parties in a negotiation should focus on interests, not positions. It seems like President Trump is doing the opposite, fixating on the border wall. Democrats keep talking about the more general interest of border security.
William Ury:
That’s true. There’s a tendency in all of us to, in any negotiation, to focus on the position, the thing we say we want, the very concrete thing.
In this case, the wall. The key in negotiation, successful negotiation, is to look behind that position for what are the underlying interests. In other words, the underlying needs or concerns. And in this particular case, it might be border security. How do we keep America safe?
Immigration, how do we handle immigration? There are a lot of underlying interests. How do we deal with the people already here, the dreamers and so on? And if we can get into a conversation, a negotiation in which we address those interests, that actually both sides actually share, we all share. And if we can have that kind of problem-solving, creative dialogue, I’m sure we can find solutions that are good for everyone.
Jeremy:
You also write about the need to manage emotions in a negotiation and to be soft on the people, hard on the problem. President Trump doesn’t seem to be doing that either. Now, he denies that he slammed his hands down on the table and walked out of a room with the leaders of Congress, but they say he did.
William Ury:
Well, yeah, the secret in negotiation to me is it’s almost like you draw a line in your head between the people and the problem so that simultaneously you can be soft on the people, build a relationship while you remain very hard in solving the problem. In fact, the harder you need to be on the problem, usually the softer you need to be on the people.
If the people, their emotions, their egos, and so on, are not going to get in the way of solving the problem.
Jeremy:
The other thing is that your book comes from the point of view that in every negotiation you have to start with the assumption that both sides are interested in reaching an agreement. Do you think that that’s the case here?
William Ury:
Well, I do think that eventually both sides will reach an agreement. And the question is how much pain does there have to be?
And the pain is primarily borne by us, by the American people, and by particularly those who don’t have their jobs right now or are not receiving some critical government service. To me, that’s the key in any negotiation is right now what we need to do is we need to be able to step back, step to the balcony. I call it, you know, step to the balcony. In other words, a place of calm, a place of perspective, a place where we’re not reacting, a place where we can see the big picture, we can focus on the prize. Clearly both parties in this case are not on the balcony.
But what we need to do, we the third side, you know, there’s always, you know, we always think of negotiation as two-sided. You know, in this case, it’s Democrats versus Republicans, the President versus Pelosi. But the key is there’s a third side, which is the surrounding community, which is us. In this case, both sides, they’re playing to us. And in this case, the American people are being held hostage by this negotiation.
And if we can learn to speak up, including this media, including you, including the people who are listening right now, if we make our voices known to our members of Congress to in social media and so on, we will speed up the process because they’ll see that the, both sides will see that they’re losing more by playing the blame game than by engaging in a negotiation that addresses a genuine interest at stake.
Jeremy:
I just read your book for the first time, but the people that I’ve talked to about it know the term that’s in it, which is BATNA. I had never heard that before, but BATNA is the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, which is to say that when you’re in a negotiation, you should have something in your back pocket that says, if I don’t get an agreement, I’m gonna do this, and I’ll be perfectly happy with that. In this case, it seems like President Trump’s BATNA is this executive action to build the wall without congressional approval. As you look at it, do the Democrats have a BATNA?
William Ury:
Yeah, their BATNA might be, for example, to block that, because it’s of questionable legality, as I understand, and you can file lawsuits, and there are a lot of things that can be done. Every negotiation takes place within the shadow of the BATNA, of the alternative, what each side sees as their alternative, and the aim of negotiation is to develop agreements that are better for each side than their perceived alternative, and that’s the challenge at this point. Right now, each side is exercising their BATNA by engaging in this contest, this contest of wills. It will come to a stop eventually, and the question is how long, and the key factor in determining that, I think, is us, is if we make our voices known, then the game needs to change. It needs to change from a win-lose contest to one in which you look for mutual benefit, and particularly benefit for the American citizens.
Jeremy:
This week also saw President Trump’s first Oval Office address to the nation. Part of the goal of that being to reframe the debate over funding the government into talk of a humanitarian crisis. Is that a common negotiation tactic to try to shift the terms of the debate, and do you think it worked in this case?
William Ury:
It is a common tactic. Reframing is one of the greatest powers you have as a negotiation.
Negotiation isn’t just bargaining. There’s a strategic communication in this case, particularly because it’s a political situation, and each side is communicating to the nation. That was his attempt to reframe. I don’t know, I haven’t seen the polls on that of how successful that was, but the real thing is to reframe this from a win-lose arm-wrestle contest into a genuine negotiation exercise to deal with the interests at stake, and let the government get back to work.
Jeremy:
If you could give negotiation advice right now to President Trump, what would it be?
William Ury:
I would look to see, begin to see, write my own victory speech. What do I need to be able to say to tell my base that I won? Write the other side’s victory speech, and then try to design a process so that we can find a way out of this situation in which each side emerges intact and ready to fight another battle if it need be the next day, but let’s move on from this. Let’s really get past this imbroglio because it’s gonna hurt everyone, and it’s hurting everyone, and it’ll hurt everyone even more. And when there’s a real crisis, imagine something happens, like there’s a national security threat, something like this.
We have to wake up, come to our senses. We have to come together, and in fact, to me, this is a wake-up call for all of us. There’s a polarization, a very dangerous polarization in the country right now, which if we don’t address it and come together and speak up, the third side, the community, then things could get a lot worse.
Jeremy:
Finally, how different is it to do a negotiation like this in public, in the press, instead of just doing it behind closed doors?
William Ury:
Very difficult.
It’s really difficult to negotiate in a fishbowl where you’re in front of cameras and so on, as we’ve seen. The best way to do this to me, if I was President Trump, is I would appoint a couple of what I call wizards, people whom I really trust. Ask the speaker to appoint a couple of wizards too. They go off somewhere and they brainstorm, they look at the interests, they really try to figure out, they write those victory speeches, and they come back and make recommendations to both parties that allow for an off-ramp, allow for what I call building a golden bridge, making it easy for both sides to back down in some sense, to back away towards a solution that works for everyone.
Jeremy:
Let’s see if it happens.
William Ury, co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and author of the book, Getting to Yes. Thanks so much. It’s my pleasure, Jeremy.