Welcome to The Negotiators, a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m your host, Jen Williams. This is our last episode of the season, and honestly, I don’t think we could have booked a better guest for our final episode. We’re talking to one of the most prominent negotiation experts in the world, William Ury. He’s the co-author of a book called Getting to Yes. He co-founded Harvard’s program on negotiation, and soon, he’s coming out with a new book called Possible. It’s full of lessons from his decades-long career mediating global conflicts. Reading the book made me really hopeful for the first time in quite a while, and it made me realize how influential Ury is. Many of the negotiators on our show over the past three seasons have described using strategies that he originated. Anyway, I don’t want to give too many spoilers, so let’s just get right into it. Here’s my conversation with William Ury about his new book, Possible. So I want to start with the title, Possible. That seems a lot more modest, maybe, than the title of the book that you’re most famous for, Getting to Yes, which is, as many people might know, and if you don’t, please go pick it up. It’s great. It’s one of the ultimate guides on negotiating. I just wonder, how have the decades of experience, have they humbled you? Because it seems like a different tone. Tell me about that. That’s a really, really good question, Jen. As I reflect on it, yes, I would say the decades are humbling. I mean, if you look around the world today, in the world of conflict, and you see all the conflict that is polarizing us, poisoning our relationships, and paralyzing us from trying to solve the problems that we face, it is humbling. And so when people ask me after more than four decades of wandering around the world, working in war zones and wildcat strikes and other conflicts, they ask me, are you an optimist or are you a pessimist? And what I like now to say is actually, I’m a possibleist, which means I believe in human possibility. I believe in the human possibility to get to yes, to transform conflicts. Why? Because I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes. And I think we need to go beyond trying to predict what’s going to happen to really spend our lives as negotiators cultivating the art of what’s possible, looking for possibilities where in the world today, we may see a lot of impossibilities. It does feel like a lot of us are looking at these conflicts, just saying it’s impossible and throwing our hands up. So I really love that concept of like, let’s look for what’s possible. So I want to talk about, you recommend first approaching a big conflict by thinking about each side’s victory speech, like the speech that they would give once everything’s over, right? Tell me more about this exercise. How does that work and why do you do that? Well, yes. I just want to emphasize possible does not mean easy. Of course. This is some of the hardest work that we humans can do. I mean, it’s hard to actually negotiate these kinds of conflicts. Possible means possible. And the ultimate possibleist exercise that I often like to begin with is the victory speech exercise. It’s about imagining for a moment that the other side has accepted your proposal. They’ve said yes. It’s amazing. They’ve said yes to what you want them to do. Now imagine that they have to go back and face the music and explain to the people they care about, their constituencies, their voters, the people they care about, their families, whatever it is, the people that they most need to report to and explain to them why they’ve decided to say yes to your proposal. In other words, what’s their victory speech? That makes so much sense because it pulls in so many different threads of things that we’ve talked about on this show, right? Trying to see from the other side’s perspective, putting yourself in their shoes, trying to understand what their constituents need, because often the people in the room themselves might actually agree with, yeah, I would love to do that, but I can’t sell that to my people back home. So it brings that piece in. And then also, like you said, kind of opens up like a roadmap of like, okay, now we can sort of reverse engineer this and figure out how to get there. That’s exactly it, Jen. It forces us to put ourselves in their shoes and in a very operational way, imagine operationally what it would take. Because imagine you can’t write that victory speech, then you know you’ve got some work to do. Yeah. That’s a great kind of litmus test for anything that we’re asking the other side to do is they’re not likely to say yes to our proposal unless they can imagine delivering at least an acceptance speech of why they’re accepting your proposal to their own constituency. Absolutely. So you talked about that your initial victory speech exercise helped deescalate the possibility of nuclear war with North Korea. That seems kind of like a huge deal. Could you maybe just tell us that story? In the beginning of 2017, when President Trump had come into the presidency and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, was busily testing nuclear weapons system after nuclear weapons system, nuclear missile after nuclear missile, and President Trump said, this will not happen on my watch. It was like a collision course. And the question was, who is going to back down? And it proceeded to escalate in that process of 2017 to the point where many experts, including people very senior in the White House, believe the chances of a war, possibly a nuclear war between the United States and North Korea, stood as high as 50 percent. I mean, 50 percent chance of the first nuclear weapons would be used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear taboo would be broken. It was unthinkable and it was hard to get your head wrapped around. These two leaders were very strong, you know, had very strong egos and were just going at it. And it looked like, OK, what’s going to happen now? And as a possible exercise, I began by, OK, let me write Donald Trump’s victory speech and let me see and write Kim Jong-un’s victory speech, just as an exercise with my colleague Liza Hester, you know, one day early in 2017, just to see if we could imagine that they could actually deliver it. And for Trump, you know, it was it was pretty easy. He wanted he needed to be able to say, you know, I’ve got the best deal ever. I, you know, I did what no other president could do and I kept America safe and I didn’t spend a penny. And it was something like that from what we knew about President Trump’s motivations. For Kim, it was harder. He was a little bit of a black box. No one knew anything about him, but it seemed like security would be number one, you know, that I kept my regime, my family, you know, safe, you know, respect actually might be number two, which is where, you know, he’d been stigmatized, the country had been stigmatized. Finally, we’re getting the respect that we deserve from the world. And maybe economics would be number three, was something like that. But I didn’t know that much about Kim. No one did, actually. The only person I could find who actually knew something about Kim was an American basketball player by the name of Dennis Rodman, who had actually, you know, had been disparaged for this, but he had actually gone to North Korea a number of times, met Kim. And I said, well, he’s the guy. I mean, you’ve got to be curious in negotiation. You’ve got to be curious. You’ve got to put yourself in his shoes. You’ve got to follow every clue. So I thought, let me see if I could find Dennis Rodman. He was a very hard man to track down. And then I, you know, found a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. And that friend of his invited me to have dinner with Dennis. And Dennis wasn’t there at the dinner. But then the friend said, why don’t you stay the night? Maybe he’ll come back in the morning. And so anyway, make a long story short, the next morning, I had an hour talking, sitting with Dennis Rodman there in L.A. And he told me about his unlikely friendship with Kim Jong-un and what he had learned. He’d gone to his home, he’d held his baby. And he said, you know, it was implausible at the time to almost anyone that he thought Kim wanted peace and not, he didn’t want war. And he might even want to engage with the West, with the United States. And he told me something, a little tidbit that just really caught my imagination. He said that Kim had told him that his dream, and it’s always, you know, when you’re trying to put yourself in someone’s shoes, always trying to understand what’s the dream, you know, what’s the dream? What do they dream about? He told Rodman that his dream one day was to walk down Fifth Avenue in New York with Dennis Rodman, go to Madison Square Garden and watch the New York Knicks play the Chicago Bulls because he’d been a big fan of the Chicago Bulls team. And that was a little clue. You know, it seemed unlikely, but I really got a sense from, again, from Dennis Rodman of something that, this is early in 2017, that it might be, it might just be possible for these two men to actually meet their core interests, deliver their victory speeches by actually meeting and beginning to pursue negotiations rather than escalating to the point where, you know, we might be on the verge as people worried about a nuclear war. So did you go to the Trump administration with that insight and then say, like… Well, I did. I actually, I, together with my colleagues, Jonathan Powell, who I know you’ve spoken to was the kind of chief negotiator for Northern Ireland and his colleague, Glyn Ford, we made dozens of trips to DC, many to Seoul, South Korea. Jonathan and Glyn, as English, were able to get into North Korea. They went to Pyongyang and talked with officials, listened to officials, what was on their mind? What were they thinking? Where was the way out here as they saw it that would actually meet their interests? And it’s interesting when I was talking with a very high level official in the White House and I asked, did you ever talk with Dennis Rodman? Obviously no one ever had because he hadn’t been taken seriously. But that to me is like, it’s important to leave no stone unturned when you’re trying to really understand who the other side is. You go after every clue you possibly can. William Ury then did another thought experiment. He wanted to think about the steps needed to get Kim and Trump in the same room. So he talked to his friend, Robert Carlin, about this, who knew a lot about the situation in North Korea. He asked him, could Kim send a high level political delegation to talk to the Trump administration in some way? And Bob Carlin was like, no, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But maybe Kim would send his sister, Kim Yo Jong. She’s maybe the only person he trusts. So if Kim sent his sister, maybe Trump could send a personal representative. And then William Ury thought, huh, maybe Trump could send Ivanka. And amazingly, to some extent, that’s kind of what happened. It’s all about trust. I mean, who did President Trump trust? He trusted his daughter. You know, he didn’t trust many people, but he trusted his daughter, his flesh and blood. Who did Kim trust? He trusted his sister. So that in the choreography of how these two men began to meet, Kim sent his sister to the Olympics, the Winter Olympics in South Korea. She actually had first conversations with the president of South Korea, Moon, out of which a North Korean invitation to meet with Trump came. So she played an intimate role. And Ivanka also played an intimate role as a kind of counselor to her father. She went to South Korea during the Olympics too. So actually, you look for, it’s not just, you know, the official actors, but who’s really trusted by the principal parties who can often play that role of helping to build a bridge. What was fascinating about the North Korea example is it was, I thought that it would take, you know, like they’d have to sign some kind of agreement, peace agreement in order to bring it down. But in fact, what happened is the power of a compelling story when they met, the narrative, and that’s really important, the theater of when they met in Singapore in June of 2018, which was really surprising. They each actually gave a version of their victory speech already. You know, Trump said, look, I came back, you know, I got the, I got a deal. And Kim also heralded it too, to his people. And so what I realized is that actually, yes, they didn’t agree in the end on denuclearization. But what they did was they changed the atmosphere, they changed the psychology, they changed the narrative. There was the power of a compelling story there where each could look like a hero to their own constituency, the people they cared about. And that was enough to bring the perceived risk of nuclear war down from 50% or 25% down to what most experts thought was like 1%. So was the conflict ended? Was it resolved? Far from it. But was it transformed in terms of, was the risk drastically diminished through the power of victory speeches or the power of narrative or the power of helping each one be a hero to their own people? So a lot of negotiation is not just about the substance. It’s about the framing. It’s about the perception. It’s about the strategic communication. That’s as important as the negotiation about the terms. You write that, quote, perhaps my biggest realization since writing Getting to Yes 40 years ago has been that building a bridge between parties in conflict, while necessary, is not sufficient, end quote. So the first part of your book is, interestingly, about the internal work that negotiators need to do with themselves first before they can be successful. That’s not something I’ve really heard, or it’s not something we’ve really talked about much on this show. So can you talk a bit about that, that internal work that you say negotiators need to do first? Sure. It’s maybe one of the, maybe the biggest lesson I think I’ve learned personally since writing Getting to Yes is that the biggest obstacle to us getting what we want in a negotiation is not what we think it is. We often think it’s that difficult party, of course, on the other side of the table, and they can be difficult for sure. But actually the biggest obstacle is right here. It’s myself. It’s us. It’s our own very human, very natural, very understandable tendency to react. In other words, to act without thinking, to act out of fear, to act out of anger, to act out of rage, to act out of kind of collective emotion. You can see a little bit of that going on in the Middle East today. There’s just so much emotion that it often clouds the part of our mind, the prefrontal cortex that can kind of like ask, what do we really want here? And you know, what’s the big picture? Maybe the greatest power that we have in negotiation is the power not to react. He calls this first personal step going to the balcony. We have to go to the balcony first, like a mental or emotional balcony, a place of calm and perspective where you can kind of see the play unfolding and really pause for a moment. Everyone has their favorite way of going to the balcony. Maybe it’s, you know, taking a break, going for a walk. I love to walk, you know, go for a walk in nature, do whatever, go for a cup of coffee with your friends, go for a workout, whatever it is. But that does that mind shift so that you can bring your fullest potential to the really tough job of negotiation. That reminds me so much of our show’s first ever interviewee, Tom Rivett Karnak. He was the deputy lead negotiator of the Paris Climate Agreement. And interestingly, he was a Buddhist monk before he became a negotiator. When you are quiet in the woods like that for a long period of time and your own mental processes and your own emotional processes become more evident to you, you find this tiny gap between things happening and you reacting. At the most critical moments of my life, that’s kind of been a superpower for me, because what it’s meant is that at these moments of reaction and chaos, I’ve been able to see what’s happening, understand it, but then chart my own course through it. And that’s been enormously helpful in all elements of my life, particularly in these years of negotiating the Paris Agreement. You mentioned a bridge. So I want to talk about the bridge idea, too. We’ve got a lot of infrastructure. We’ve got balconies, we’ve got bridges. The second part of your book is about what you call building golden bridges between the two sides in a conflict. So what is a golden bridge, as you kind of describe it, and how do you get there? Often in difficult conflicts, we unconsciously see our job as making it harder for the other side, when in fact, our job is to make it easier for them to make the decision we would like them to make. That’s the golden bridge. Let me give you an example. In the country of Colombia, where I was involved for seven years as an advisor on negotiation to the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, when he was trying to end the war with the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the largest guerrilla group in Latin America, the last major war in Latin America, which seemed impossible because the war had been going on for 50 years. And he had asked me and a couple of other advisors, a really interesting world-class group of Jonathan Powell again, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who had been the foreign minister of Israel during the Oslo peace process, Joaquin Villalobos, who’d been a guerrilla commander for 20 years in El Salvador and really knew the guerrilla mindset, you know, those kinds of people. We came down in January of 2012 to help the president think about how to conduct secret negotiations with the FARC to determine whether or not you could even have public talks. And the president wanted us to advise him and advise his team, prepare them for this negotiation. What President Santos wanted them to do was to lay down their weapons. Right. Disarm. Never, never in 50 years had they even agreed to talk about it. And so it seemed impossible. How do we build a golden bridge, you know, for the guerrilla leaders to agree to lay down their weapons and enter into politics and, you know, transform the conflict? You know, a lot of this is not about resolving conflict. It’s about transforming it. You might not be able to resolve it. You can’t end the conflict, but you can transform it, change the form, change the way in which it’s handled from destructive fighting to more constructive means like negotiation, like democracy and so on. So building them a golden bridge makes it means listening, really listening deeply to what the other side wants, because negotiation, I find, is actually, even though we think of it as talking, it’s actually more about listening than talking. And, you know, successful negotiators listen far more than they talk. You know, there’s a saying that God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason, which is to listen at least twice as much and probably 10 times as much as we talk. And listening, not just the way we normally listen, which is we normally listen, you know, within our shoes, you know, from our perspective, and we’re judging everything that they say. I agree with that. I disagree with that. It means listening from within their shoes, putting yourself in their shoes and listening to try and understand how they see the world, how they feel, what they care about, because negotiation is an exercise in influence. You’re trying to change the other side’s mind. You need to begin by understanding where their mind is. So Golden Bridge is about listening. It’s about being creative, like, how can we be creative? What kind of, you know, somehow creativity, we check creativity at the door when we go into negotiation. You know, we’re quite creative normally, you know, human beings are creative, you know, we’re creative in designing new kinds of software and hardware. We need to bring that same kind of applied creativity to these hard problems of negotiation. You know, how are we going to make it easier for the FARC to lay down their weapons? And the team, the negotiating team had the brilliant idea of saying, okay, the number one thing was that the FARC had gone to war about was a lot of injustice in the land, in the distribution of land, the allocation of land for land reform, agrarian reform. And as it turned out, the government at the time of President Santos wanted to actually engage in agrarian reform. So they could agree on that, they could start with that, they’d even drawn up some legislation, and they could give credit or share credit with the FARC for that. So that would be a kind of a building them a Golden Bridge, making it easier for them, taking an issue that allows them to have honor and dignity and saying, we’re not just surrendering, we’re getting something for what we fought for, for 50 years. And then at the very end, there were five items. The fifth item was laying down the weapons. In other words, you want to, instead of pushing the other side, you want to attract them. And I love that, that thing you said about, you know, not necessarily resolving the conflict, but transforming it, you know, into a different form. It makes me think of that old, you know, the old kind of saying we talk about a lot in international relations that war is a continuation of politics by other means. But the same thing is true in reverse, right? That politics is a continuation of war by other means. So you’re essentially trying to reverse it and get them to go from, you know, fighting it out in the streets to fighting it out in a legislature or in a conference room. It’s ballots, not bullets. How did William Ury contribute to the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel? Find out more after the break. Welcome back to The Negotiators, a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m your host, Jen Williams. Before the break, William Ury was explaining how negotiators can build golden bridges to encourage the other side toward a potential deal. His next story is an example of just that, from very early in his career, actually. Oh, and one more thing. You’ll hear Ury use the acronym BATNA, B-A-T-N-A. It stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. If one side’s BATNA is better than a negotiated agreement, then the mediator has some work to do. Okay, here’s the rest of my conversation with William Ury. One big example of this golden bridge is actually from the very beginning of your career, something you also wrote about in Getting to Yes. So you were a graduate student at Harvard. An idea that you wrote about in a paper for class ended up influencing the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. What was that idea? Tell me about that. My mentor was Roger Fisher, who was a noted international lawyer and negotiator at Harvard Law School. Fast forward a couple of years to Camp David, a couple of weeks before Camp David, Roger happened to run into, on a summer vacation, run into Cyrus Vance, who was the American Secretary of State. They were vacationing together, I think maybe it was somewhere in Martha’s Vineyard. And Vance asked Roger if he had any ideas for the upcoming summit in which President Carter, the Americans were bringing together the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, to see if they could put an end to the wars that was going on between Egypt and Israel. There’d been four wars, and it was the two largest military powers of the region at the time. And it seemed absolutely impossible. In fact, everyone had basically given up, as we know, thinking the Middle East is too impossible. So Roger had the idea, actually it was Rosalind who had the idea, of bringing them to Camp David, thinking that could be a balcony, you know, that could be, just get them out, get them away from the Middle East, get them out in the countryside and the beautiful cabins and whatever, and see if some creativity flew. And that was the idea. The idea that Roger proposed to Vance was an idea from a little book that anteceded getting DS called International Mediation, a Working Guide, something that Roger Fisher and I had worked on the year before, where we had actually cited an ingenious negotiating process that had been used in the Law of the Sea negotiations, called the Single Negotiating Tax Process. Very simple process, instead of the usual negotiating process where, you know, both sides come with their positions, in this case, you know, the Egyptians and the Israelis, and the Americans then ask them to make concessions. And no one wants to make a concession. No one wants to be the first to make a concession. It would be a sign of weakness. It’s politically painful. Each side says, I’ve got to go back, you know, you know, I can’t do that, you know, and no one wants to make a concession. The Single Negotiating Tax Process gets around that by saying, no one has to make any concessions. What the third party, in this case, the United States did at Camp David, when they adopted this process after three days of just total stalemate between the parties, they, you know, they thought, okay, maybe we’ll try this idea, was the Americans went to the Egyptians and the Israelis, and they said, don’t change your position. Keep your position. What? You can keep, yeah. And the Americans had drawn up what’s called a Single Negotiating Tax, which is a non-paper paper. It’s just a very simple paper. No letterhead. They said, this is not an American proposal. It’s just an idea. Just do us a favor. Don’t say yes, don’t say no. Just criticize it. Well, no one likes to make a painful decision, but everybody loves to criticize. So the Egyptians criticized it, the Israelis criticized it. The Americans that went back took their criticism and then tried to make the idea, which was for a demilitarized Sinai, because Egypt, Israel had occupied the entire Sinai. Egypt wanted it back. The land had been there since the time of the pharaohs. Israel didn’t want Egyptian tanks attacking them. And the brilliant idea actually was, what about a demilitarized Sinai? Because that was the essence of the text. And the Americans then improved the idea for one side without making it worse for the other. Then they went back and said, this is just a non-paper, criticize it some more. The Egyptians criticized it, the Israelis criticized it, and they went through that process 23 times in the course of those 13 days at Camp David. And only at the very end, when Sadat could see he was going to get the entire Sinai back, the Egyptian flag could fly everywhere, and Begin could see that he was going to get an unprecedented peace with Egypt and a buffer, did they then say, OK, but in this case, instead of having to make, you know, 15 or 20 very painful political concessions, they only have to make one decision at the very end when you can see exactly what you’re going to get in return. So that’s the brilliance of that single negotiating text process. And it actually helped. Vance later wrote a letter to Rogers thanking him for the process, because it’s just an idea of using creativity in the way in which we negotiate to try and redesign, re-engineer the process so it’s less painful for the parties. It builds a golden bridge. It attracts them. And that’s that’s that’s essentially what what Carter and the Americans did was they helped build a golden bridge for the Israelis and the Egyptians, which led to a peace treaty that people always think the Middle East is impossible. That was the impossible conflict at that point was between Egypt and Israel, the two largest military powers. That peace treaty has now stood the test of time for 40 years through revolutions, coup d’etats, assassinations. And, you know, it doesn’t mean that Israel and Egypt are friends, but they coexist and they’re partners. And that’s the brilliance of building a golden bridge. I mean, we’re still seeing the impacts of that literally today with Egypt and Israel having to work together to figure out how to handle, you know, even basic things like getting aid into Gaza through the Rafat border crossing. So, yeah, I mean, talk about standing the test of time. And this idea of the one text, single text process, I know it certainly influenced many of the negotiators we’ve talked to on our show, your Harvard colleague Bruno Verdini, his writings about the Mexico-U.S. negotiations over the Colorado River. And so if you keep things alive, you have a possibility to produce an outcome that is much more harmonious. We’ve seen this so many times in so many different iterations. And, you know, just what a genius idea. Now, I want to get a little bit nerdy here. This is stuff that you’ve written about in both Possible and Getting to Yes. Why do you recommend bargaining over interests rather than positions? And how do you find the other side’s true interests? Like, can you give an example of how we can, you know, what you say, bargain over interests rather than positions? What you find successful negotiators doing is constantly probing behind positions to find out what people really want behind it. You know, what are the interests, what are the desires, what are the fears, what are the basic human needs that lie even deeper? It’s almost like an iceberg. You just see the positions on the top of the water, but underneath are all the interests. So bring that back to Camp David, that example, initial positions where Egypt wanted the entire Sinai back. That was their position. Israel’s position was they wanted to keep about a third to a quarter of the Sinai. And then the whole question would have been, where do you draw a line in the desert? And it would actually not have been possible. The brilliance of Camp David and the one text process was the Americans asked the Israelis and Egyptians, OK, we know your position, but why? What are your underlying interests? And for the Egyptians, the underlying interest was sovereignty. The land had been there since the time of the Pharaohs. They wanted it back. For the Israelis, the overriding core interest was security. Egyptian tanks had rolled across that piece of real estate four times in the previous 30 years, and they didn’t want that happening again. By looking behind positions for interests and saying, OK, how do we reconcile sovereignty with security? They then were able to come up with this creative idea of a demilitarized Sinai that satisfied both the Egyptian interest in sovereignty and the Israeli interest in security. That’s what you’re trying to do by always asking that magical question. Why? Trying to dig underneath the positions for what are the real underlying interests or needs. I want to talk about the third side. So in the final part of Possible, you write a lot about how to get to what you call the third side or the outside community to help conflicted parties. Tell us exactly what that means and how you go about that. Yeah. You know, the usual thing in conflict, particularly difficult conflicts, is we tend to reduce the conflict to two sides. You know, it’s us versus them. It’s Israelis versus Palestinians. It’s union versus management. It’s us versus them. And almost like a zero sum battle. And what we fail to see is that in every conflict situation, there actually is a third side. And the third side is the rest of us. And in fact, it’s all of us. It actually includes the parties even. It’s the whole. It’s the community. It’s the surrounding community of it’s not just mediators. It’s friends, neighbors, allies, partners, colleagues. It’s that community that if that community can organize itself and engage, it actually has a lot of power. It has a lot of leverage to try and encourage the parties to come to terms. But it also has a lot of power to help the parties go to the balcony. It’s not easy to go to the balcony. But your friends, your neighbors can kind of say, hey, better to just take a breather for a moment. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s really think about what you really want. Let’s think about what your BATNA is. Let’s make sure see if there’s an agreement that’s better than your BATNA. It’s that space. So the third side helps the parties go to the balcony, helps the parties build that bridge, because that is really hard to do for the parties in a difficult conflict. The third side is the great untapped resource. It’s actually, as I learned as an anthropologist, it’s our birthright, actually. It’s our most ancient heritage for dealing with conflict is to engage, mobilize the third side, the people around the community. When I read that, my first thought is, OK, third side. So it’s the UN, it’s the international community. But it’s also Dennis Rodman, like in that example. It’s also just people who are connected in some way and may have some role to play. And it also, I mean, it just strikes me that it’s also it’s not just for the immediate solving of the conflict, but you also need that kind of infrastructure of the community to make sure that it endures. You know, holds people accountable on different sides and, you know, makes sure that everyone’s following along. It also gets to the kind of next concept I want to talk about, which is swarming. So I think the most impressive example of what you talk about, this third side, was the Colombian peace talks with the FARC that you’ve talked about earlier. Juan Manuel Santos actually studied negotiation at Harvard with your mentor, Roger Fisher, and that Santos had the wisdom to actually consult a lot of international experts like you and Jonathan Powell. So you talk about how you and others essentially swarmed that conflict. So tell us that story. Feel free to give us the whole story because it’s really interesting. Well, yeah, the term swarming I adopted from Silicon Valley, where it’s used to, you know, when you have an intractable problem, you get all of them, all the software guys, they’re all swarming the problem, you know, with different expertises and so on. They all come at it from different angles. It’s about critical mass. It’s a little bit like when a hawk is, you know, raiding a nest, all the birds swarm and drive the hawk away. And so that swarm intelligence, that swarm is that critical mass is the third side. You know, initially it hosts the conflict, it brings the convenes, it brings parties together, it facilitates, it mediates. But sometimes these things are so hard, you need a kind of collective swarm of the conflict. And so in Colombia, for example, which was such a hard conflict, it was widely regarded as impossible. It took critical mass. For example, it wasn’t just the international advisers just showing up once. Jonathan and I and the other team, we came 25 times, you know, every month or two, you know, whenever there’s a crisis, we came down. But what was really important was the president tried to create a swarm effect by recruiting allies, unlikely allies from the region. Because the biggest friends and supporters of the FARC that the FARC really relied on were Venezuela, then headed up by President Hugo Chavez, and Cuba, which was headed up by Fidel Castro. And very early on, President Santos, to his credit, you know, he’d been a defense minister, so he actually had some political capital that he could spend because, you know, peace is hard work and he was spending it. In the very first week, he went and met with Chavez and he invited him to help the peace broker, to help be a peacemaker. And Chavez was supporting the FARC, but he really loved the idea of that legacy. You know, it really appealed to him as a statesman. He saw himself as like Simon Bolivar. So Chavez, who was an enemy at the time of Colombia, suddenly became a partner and said, yes, I’ll help. I’ll help bring the FARC to the table. And Santos did the same thing with Fidel Castro. And, you know, again, very different ideologically from where Santos was, both of them. But he asked Fidel Castro if he would host the talks. He thought maybe, OK, the Cubans could then play again. So both Castro and Chavez then became third side allies of the process because they actually had a stake in it. And they persuaded the FARC to come to the table and stay at the table until the FARC finally agreed to lay down their weapons. And so that’s knitting together that third side, that external community. And Santos also reached out to Norway and Chile and the United States and the European Union and the UN and the Security Council so that essentially you had a external third side. And then within the society, he recruited an internal third side of people who could stand for the whole, you know, the business community was really important, the military. So he was building, knitting together that winning coalition that is the third side to create that container within which, you know, it’s a little bit like a pot, you know, in which you’re cooking some food. It’s got to be a strong pot if the heat gets intense in which you could kind of cook the conflict until it was, you know, until you could get to some kind of agreement. And so building the third side, swarming it was absolutely critical to the success of the Colombian peace process. That swarming idea also reminds me of another episode this season. Meredith Preston-Magee described how Kofi Annan managed to basically leverage support far and wide in mediating the Kenyan political crisis. It was many, many, many processes happening in different spaces, but all being leveraged by Annan and the panel in the same direction at the same moment. And so I think that that’s one of the biggest lessons is that when you have the force of will and the regional and international support to actually make that happen, it can work and it can be extraordinary. Yeah, I would just say this, that conflict transformation, transforming conflict is some of the hardest work we can do, and it needs to be a team sport. We often have the idea that this kind of individual mediator shows up and helps. But actually, it’s as I’ve learned, it’s a community. It’s a lot of people, you know, and that’s the shift we need. We need critical mass to swarm these major, difficult conflicts that we face in the world today. So to end the interview, I want your advice. I mean, we’re at a moment right now where there are many geopolitical conflicts, obviously, but I understand you’ve been involved somewhat with the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I wonder if I could ask, you know, what kind of counsel are you giving there? And what is your current advice on how to potentially end that conflict between Russia and Ukraine? It’s really hard. There was an opportunity. I mean, there was an opportunity before the war happened for negotiation, which unfortunately didn’t work out. There was an opportunity in the first couple of months when it was as uncertain. But once it gets locked in, both sides are showing no interest in negotiation. In fact, there’s even laws in Russia and Ukraine that you can’t even talk. It’s against the law. It’s a crime to talk about any kind of arrangement. What I would say in that situation, we tend to think of, OK, how do we resolve this? And I don’t think we’re going to resolve that issue, the issues between Russia and Ukraine. But the question is, can we transform the conflict? Can we transform the conflict from a more destructive form to a more constructive form? If you think about where the interests are of both sides, you know, it’s like you’d have to get in. You’d have to think about victory speeches, like how are the leaders on each side going to be able to speak to their peoples and say, hey, we’ve decided to talk about these issues rather than just fight about them. And, you know, interestingly, you can talk and fight at the same time. That’s what happened in Colombia. And, for example, people think that negotiating means that Ukraine would have to, for example, give up part of its territory. You know, for a lot of reasons, international legal reasons, it is not wise to change, to have the precedent of changing a border by force. So, you know, whatever the negotiation is, the talking is, that should not be in contention. The question is, can we find if both sides reach a kind of a mutually hurting stalemate where they’re both hurting and they’re about, you know, there’s some signs that they’re reaching that moment where they realize it’s become a war of attrition, they’re not moving. Are there ways to stabilize the situation? So that Ukraine can rebuild itself. Meet its fundamental interests, you know, and for example, people are looking at, for example, what happened between South Korea and North Korea, which was, you know, there’s an armistice there that has been stable for the last 75 years. It can be dangerous, of course, but it’s like the last 70 years. So it’s, in other words, is there some way to begin to prepare for a negotiation that the parties may not be ready for right now, but everyone knows is coming? Because the other thing I would say about negotiation is that there’s kind of an assumption that war takes a lot of planning, that takes a lot of effort, but negotiation can just show up and talk. In fact, I would argue that negotiation needs just as much preparation, just as much planning, just as much strategy and real resources, swarming resources as war does. And when we take negotiation and negotiation as serious as that, then I think we have a chance. And the time to prepare is now, because like, for example, with North and South Korea, from the time they sat down, it took two years of negotiations, 500 meetings. The time to prepare is right now, even if the time is not quite ready, the parties aren’t ready to negotiate. The time is to prepare thoroughly and exhaustively to catch that window when it opens, to see if there are arrangements to transform this conflict. They’re not going to resolve it, but at least to stabilize the situation so people can live their lives. And perhaps 20 years from now, you know, you can have another negotiation. You could have, for example, right now there’s negotiations on prisoner of war releases, there’s negotiations about grain trade. Could you gradually expand the scopes to negotiate an arrangement in which the costs of the conflict go drastically down in terms of lives lost, resources spent, so that people can rebuild their lives and pursue their essential needs, both countries? I guess, last thing, if there’s one thing that you want listeners to take away from our conversation, what would that be? What’s the biggest, most important thing you think people need to understand about negotiation or just how all of this works? I would say if negotiation is the art of the possible, then we have to find a way to unlock our natural human capacities. We need to be at our full potential. Full potential is ourselves, the other, and the whole, the community. And if you put all three together, then maybe we have a chance to try and take these extremely difficult, seemingly impossible situations and find new possibilities that we might not have imagined were possible in the beginning. Well, I think that’s a great place to stop. This is my third season of doing this podcast, and I feel like I learned so much in just this conversation. So thank you. Thank you, Jen. It’s a real pleasure. Keep up the good work. It’s great that you’re doing this podcast. I love it that you’re doing this. Thank you. That was William Ury, co-founder of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard and co-author of the well-known guidebook to negotiation, Getting to Yes. His new book, Possible, is coming out in February. The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.