Michael Covel:

This is Trend Following Radio, where great thinking comes alive. Nobel Prize winners, legendary traders, best-selling authors, and the pros that know what drive us irrational human beings. I am your host, Michael Kovell. Not filtered, raw, honest. That’s my passion.

My guest today is a repeat guest, William Ury. He is a negotiation expert, an anthropologist by trade. Today we discuss his new book, Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. Look, we all see it today. There is no doubt.

Conflict is on. Perhaps war is on. Look, we see war in Ukraine, we see war in Israel, Palestine. It could get bigger. Conflict is all around.

And no one wants to die. We all think we’re going to win. We all think we’re going to be on the winning side, but what if we’re not? This is where my guest today has great insights. Without any further delay from me, let’s jump right into my conversation with William Ury.

I hope you enjoy. Bill, here’s where I want to start. I’m 55. I can’t think of a time in my life where it feels like there’s more conflict. Now I know that’s not true because it’s only my perspective.

I was born in 68. There was a lot of conflict in 1968. I know that looking back over time. But we are in a unique point in time right now where conflict, at least for this moment, feels very intense. Maybe we’re not at the point of there’s conflict in terms of war, Ukraine, Israel, but the conflict seems more philosophical and entrenched.

If we use America as an example, it really feels like there’s two sides that are just seething and can’t stand each other. You start to say to yourself as an outsider that, me, I don’t have negotiation expertise, but as an outsider, I look and I say, gosh, how are these two sides, these perhaps intractable points of view, how will they make it to the table? Can they make it to the table? And if they get to the table, can anything productive happen? These are the types of questions that you love and conflict.

You want more conflict, not less.

William Ury:

I want a productive conflict, Michael. I’ll say I agree with you. It’s my feeling too. I can’t think of another time in my life when there’s been more conflict and it seems like more and more conflict is arriving.

It’s increasing, it’s intensifying, it’s polarizing, it’s sometimes poisoning our relationships, it’s paralyzing us from solving the problems that we need to solve. We live in an age of conflict, and that’s why I’ve written this book, Possible, is because a friend of mine, Jim Collins, is the author of leadership classics like Good for Great. We were out on a hike a couple of years ago, and he asked me, he said, Bill, do you think you could sum up everything you’ve learned in your 45 years of working in the world’s hotspots that might conceivably be of use to us in these challenging times? That’s the challenge I took to write this book.

Michael Covel:

I remember Good to Great.

I think it was Jim, I’m almost positive, that coined the term BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goal. To some degree, you’re on that particular journey with this effort now. I’ll give you an example that just hit me today. I was pitched a guest to come on my podcast, and the guest had written a book that was very negative to Trump. It wasn’t negative for all the stuff you might see in the paper or that people might argue about.

It was more all about policy. It was like, okay, if you elect this guy, his policies felt like he was speaking to the Republican side of the equation. If you elect this guy, his policies are not what you think, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I thought to myself, okay, he’s trying to negotiate. He wants to negotiate with perhaps the more harder right group to think to the more middle.

I thought, wow, this is just the worst tactic. No one’s going to listen. It was the worst way that I could imagine to try to reach the people that he wants to reach, which is to say, essentially, well, come on back to the middle and trust me in the middle, where all the people on the far right are thinking, hold on, I’ve trusted all the people in the middle for the last 25 years. I don’t want to be in the middle anymore. It just struck me in terms of having this conversation with you, is it’s really important when you’re trying to bring sides together to think very carefully about how that opening salvo is going to come out, isn’t it?

William Ury:

Absolutely, Michael. It’s maybe the single thing I would say that is the most important thing about negotiation is when you’re quiet, is when you’re listening. When you’re trying to hear the other side, and if you haven’t heard the other side and really listened to them and heard their arguments, heard their point of view, heard in the situation you’re suggesting, why they have come to distrust the middle, if you don’t hear them first, you cannot expect them to hear you.

Michael Covel:

It’s so simple. Going through your book, Possible, I found it’s one of those types of works where you start to, oh, okay, which sentence do I highlight?

How many sentences am I going to highlight? The way that you have structured your thought process and your sentences is very simple. I find myself, when I read what you’ve written, it keeps causing me to pause because, I don’t know, my personality probably tends to be like, hey, I’m going to take a side. This is what I believe. I will analyze the other side and I will see it.

It’s incongruent with my values, with my perspective, but then I dig into your world, it causes me to pause for a second and say, hold on, you can’t be that strident. If we’re all that strident, then we’re ultimately going to one place, which is perhaps just physical war.

William Ury:

That’s the fear. I’ve seen some polls over the years, recent years, that show that an increasing number, perhaps majority of Americans are precisely afraid that we’re in a period which is leading to civil discord of such magnitude that it might be called civil war violence. We have a chance.

We have the golden opportunity right now when the blood has not been shed to actually prevent, to head it off. I realize that it would be very different than the civil war that we have in mind where you have blue and gray, but we’re in a period a little bit could be like the 1850s.

Michael Covel:

I mentioned conflict and you said, well, you want good conflict. Why don’t you broaden it out for a second on this word conflict and go with me in the sense that conflict itself is not necessarily bad.

William Ury:

I used to think that conflict was something a little bit bad, but I’m an anthropologist by training.

I study human beings and human behavior. Conflict is natural. Conflict is normal. Conflict is part of life. Without conflict, it’d be hard to get things done.

It’d be hard to change anything without some conflict. It’d be hard to correct any injustice without conflict. If you think about it, conflict is baked into our democratic system, the separation of powers. Conflict is baked into our economic system. It’s the competition of the free market.

We need conflict, actually, to change, to make the changes and to express our differences. The question is, how do we handle that conflict? Do we handle the conflict in destructive ways, like vicious arguments, bitter lawsuits, long strikes, wars? Or do we handle it constructively through dialogue, through negotiation, through democracy, through deliberative means? If you think about it, democracy was an innovation to replace destructive conflict, which was the feudal wars going on in Europe, with a system where instead of fighting with bullets, you had ballots.

Michael Covel:

Our founding fathers in America had this concept, First Amendment, freedom of speech. And for most of your life, my life, this was a concept that was sacrosanct. Okay, you could have very different political opinions in America, but if somebody from the left wanted to interrupt a big right group to say something, or somebody from the right wanted to interrupt a big left group, everybody just tolerated and said whatever side they might be on. Well, hey, that’s America. You get to say what you want.

It didn’t seem to cause people so much internal something another. But it does seem, as you speak about expressing our differences and dialogue and speech, it does seem like we’ve reached this unique point in America, and perhaps around the world, if I’m observing carefully, where speech is causing many people, not all, but many people, the sheer act of speech. If you say something that I don’t like to hear, the fight starts there. Meaning instead of just letting someone talk and not letting it get under your skin, it’s now to the point, well, if you say the wrong thing, now the fight is on. I don’t know how this happened.

William Ury:

It’s really interesting, Michael. I think it’s right. I think everyone’s nerves are on the edge. I think it’s partly driven by the way in which we’re communicating increasingly through social media, these closed spheres of information where it’s all about talking. Things are anonymous.

There aren’t the normal norms for, okay, that’s your neighbor you’re talking with, that you’re listening to. You may disagree about them, but you meet them at the Rotary Club. The way in which we communicate is shifting. The algorithms even of social media are built in to accentuate disagreement, to accentuate fear and anger, because that’s what increases engagement.

Michael Covel:

I’ve seen some clips over the last couple of years from guys like Bill Maher and Jerry Seinfeld who I think would consider themselves more classically liberal, just, hey, I take a liberal stance on things, but I’m not, to use the term, I’m not woke.

Both of those men who would have been embraced by so many over the years are refusing to go speak or to give their shows on college campuses. That’s just fascinating. So I think not only is the issue that I just bring up with speech a big picture issue, but it also is different depending on perhaps the generation. You and I will be like, hey, okay, we’re still get this idea of free speech, but younger people might be like, well, hold on, no, free speech, that’s, or speech. Our conflict’s going to start right there.

William Ury:

It’s true. There’s a lot going on here. If we’re going to get through this and navigate these turbulent waters, we’re going to have to appreciate that we’re all in this together and that actually listening is as important as talking. It’s true. There’s a lot more sensitivity now than there was.

We’re having to figure this out. The new generation is having to figure this out. But there’s a tendency to talk first, listen, if at all, much later.

Michael Covel:

Well, your style, your way of bringing people together, this is universal techniques. It’s not something that was designed or thought through for a period of time and it goes bad.

That’s not the way it works. So as I bring up this example, I’ll put you on the spot for a second. You don’t have to be too precise, but just generally speaking, if we know we had a situation where perhaps younger people, and this is perhaps due to technology, as you say, the younger people are much more sensitive to speech that they don’t want to hear and the conflict starts there, almost the war starts there to some degree. How do you start to bring young people in that are less likely to appreciate or even care about the notion of free speech, generalizing a little here to make a hypothetical little situation. But how would you bring these young people in compared to, let’s say, our generation that perhaps would have grown up more with the fact that if the crazy person stood in the courtyard and was screaming something that was whatever, we just tolerated it and said, well, that’s America.

How do you start to get people with this conflict, as an example, to bring them into the place where you can make progress?

William Ury:

It’s a good question. I’m not even sure I’ve got the answer, Michael. The phrase that comes to me is meet animosity with curiosity. I would approach the young people with curiosity.

Why do you feel this? What’s going on for you? What is it that bothers you? I’d really try to get underneath it to figure out what is really going on that’s exciting people, that’s closing them down before they even hear the other side, or that’s making them feel less tolerant than we were in the previous generation. And then I would go from there.

Michael Covel:

Okay. We can’t really go through the entire exercise because we don’t have that group here, but this starts to be the process is to find out what becomes the next step of bringing people together. Because as you mentioned, we both say that the conflict right now seems intractable to me. That’s why it was nice going through your world. I was like, okay, I have this gut level feel that there’s going to be some type of conflict in America no matter what.

That’s my feeling. I’m not a flamethrower or anything. It just feels like there’s two sides that are just not anywhere close. And I don’t see anybody out there like you that’s attempting to bridge this who is coming at it from the standpoint of, okay, look, I’m sure you’ve, like I saw, got your biases, you’ve got your political views and everything, but when you come to the table, you can’t carry any of that. You have to get both sides to see that you are the mediator, so to speak.

You are showing people a way towards possible. It just seems we’re at that moment where we’re missing that.

William Ury:

We are. That’s the perception that we have, and there’s some truth to it. The polling I’ve seen suggests that a lot of what we’re seeing that’s creating that perception is about 10 or 15% on each side of the political spectrum, who are the ones engaging most in social media, television, radio, podcasts, and so on.

In between, there’s a segment that pollsters call the exhausted majority, which are maybe 70% of the population. There’s this invective being hurled back and forth, but actually, there is something to work with because I still think the majority of Americans basically have some of those same old values of respect for differences and so on. Actually, when you poll, there is a perceptual difference there. One of the things that struck me too is that each side tends to think the other side has very negative views of the other, much more than they actually do. There is something to work with here, and I hope there’s something to work with here because, to be fair, too, there are hundreds of organizations and initiatives.

Not many of them get much publicity, but that actually are reaching across the lines, listening to each other, neighbors to neighbors, or even in places like Congress and so on. There’s a lot more behind the scenes going on than we see, but what we see is the extremes in battle. That’s just to say, that’s not to ignore exactly everything that you’ve just said because that’s all true. It’s just to put it in perspective, to know that actually there is something to work with. If you look at American history, there’s a basic culture, institutional history that we can draw on that I hope will help tide us through these really challenging, polarizing waves that we’re experiencing and will increasingly experience.

Michael Covel:

So I got something from your new book that I liked a lot. I want you to share the story. I believe it’s from your grandfather, and as you phrase it, you’re calling yourself this a possibilist, but wanted a hard job. It’s on my wall. I just wrote it on a piece of paper and put it on the wall.

It’s so great. Wanted a hard job. We just take people that are in conflict, we just take anybody and just sit them down because most people are going to say, hold on, why do I want a hard job? What’s the point of that? But when you get a little, get some scars on your back and whatnot, you start to understand how the souffle is made.

Wanted a hard job is quite a beautiful statement.

William Ury:

It is. My grandfather came in as an immigrant to the United States at the age of 13 by himself on a boat from Europe and didn’t speak a word of English, learned English. Actually he was absolutely fluent, started washing windows and then built it into a company that was washing buildings. He got his high school equivalency and 25 years later found himself not just cleaning buildings but actually cleaning out steel mills using dynamite to clean out the inside of a steel mill.

And the motto of his company was exactly that, wanted a hard job. I was asking my 90-year-old uncle about my grandfather and I was saying, what was it about him? And he said, well, he said where others just saw obstacles, he would see opportunities. That’s the motto of a possible list. And that’s what we need nowadays.

That same kind of spirit of possibility that helped form this country that actually helps build the great businesses, that’s the dynamic. We need to apply that increasingly to this area of conflict. We need to bring that same curiosity, collaboration, creativity to bear on this problem as we’ve brought to other problems like the technology that we’re speaking through right now.

Michael Covel:

Bill, when did you first know that you were going to go down this path and you had a knack for negotiation, you had an interest in negotiation, you knew you could help two, quote, warring sides? When was the moment for you when this all just clicked and you said, this is my life’s journey?

William Ury:

That’s a good question, Michael. I think in some sense it might’ve started in a very perfect way when I was a kid. My parents quarreling at the family dinner table, me trying to distract them in a very, sometimes maybe not a very skillful way. But the other thing that struck me when I was a schoolboy, I spent some years in Europe, there were kids from all different countries. And even there I could begin to see people have very different perspectives depending on where you come from.

Then I went and studied anthropology partly because I also had a feeling I just wanted to understand human beings and the way we deal with each other and particularly even the way we conflict with each other. I think that what got me into this actually was I was in anthropology, I wanted to apply anthropology to some major problem and I thought, okay, how about the problem of war and peace? And I wrote up a paper on what would it be to be an anthropological fly on the wall in a Middle East peace negotiation, because even then, obviously, that was considered the hardest conflict in the world. I sent it to this law professor I had spoken to, Roger Fisher. And one night I was in my attic room as a graduate student on a cold January Sunday night and I got a call at 10 p.m. and said, you never got calls from professors.

This is Professor Roger Fisher, I’ve just read your paper about the anthropological perspective on the Middle East and I liked it and I took the central chart in it and I sent it to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East whom I’ve been advising because I thought he might find it interesting. I was speechless. I asked myself, was I dreaming, I was rubbing my eyes. But what inspired me was the thought that an idea that I could have might be a practical to use to someone facing a very difficult conflict. Then I wasn’t content just to stay in the library, but I really wanted to try it out.

So my first big job, actually, I was looking around still as a graduate student and I got a job working as a mediator in a coal mine in Kentucky that was divided by wildcat strikes, the men were packing guns, there were bomb threats, the workforce had been jailed for a night, management and union wouldn’t even sit together. I cut my teeth on a very hard problem there and that’s where I really got a sense that maybe I had a knack for this.

Michael Covel:

When people hear the idea, and I think your first effort with the Middle East peace talks, this is in the late 70s for you. I think if people hear that, they might think, well, okay, Middle East peace talks in the late 70s and here we are in 2023, where’s the peace? And I think media leaders, et cetera, do a bad job of explaining that we might have conflict still, but overall, the different countries in that part of the world, for example, Egypt and Israel are not having a conflict currently.

At one point in time, they did. So I think we sometimes forget when it comes to something like peace, you got to look at each victory along the way and analyze that and not just blur your eyes and say, hold on, Middle East peace talks in the 1970s, it’s 2023. There’s a lot of conflict in Israel right now. You might want to add some thought there.

William Ury:

Good thought.

One thing is we have this idea that conflicts get resolved. They end. Actually, in most of these really tough conflicts, they never end. You’re not going to end the conflict because the conflict will continue even in places like Northern Ireland between the Catholics and the Protestants or South Africa between blacks and whites. The conflict didn’t end.

What happened was the conflict got transformed. It got transformed from more violent ways of handling the conflict to more peaceful democratic ways of handling the conflict. And if you think about it, democracy is an exercise in conflict transformation. You’re absolutely right. It takes the Middle East, these are some of the hardest conflicts in the world, and you make progress bit by bit.

Back then in the 70s, the biggest conflict was between the two biggest military powers of the region, which were Egypt and Israel. They’d fought four wars in the previous 30 years. Thousands and tens of thousands of people had died in those wars, and it was widely regarded as impossible. And in fact, just as what happened recently, 50 years ago there was a surprise attack on one of the holy days, the holy Jewish holidays on Yom Kippur, the Yom Kippur War of 73. And yet out of that war began a peace process.

Sometimes out of the worst times come opportunities that you might not have seen before if you are a possibleist. Within five years, you had the breakthrough at Camp David in 1978. I was privileged to have a little bit of a window into that because my colleague Roger Fisher and I and some other Harvard colleagues had contributed some ideas for how to negotiate What would be the process for negotiation at Camp David, a process that was adopted? Most people thought it was going to be absolutely impossible because both sides arrived with very opposed positions. There seemed to be not a lot of good communication between the Egyptian leader and the Israeli leader.

Most people would have given up, but there was a breakthrough. It led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, which has endured to this moment, even right now, 45 years later, through wars, revolutions, coup d’etats, and so on. It’s been stable. That’s what you have to build on. You have to build on your successes.

Michael Covel:

I love, as you just say a few moments ago, the idea of resolving conflict. If you don’t live this world, if one is not thinking about how a conflict happens, how can we fix it? And if we do fix it, why did the fix work? If you don’t approach negotiation from that perspective, to try and really understand it holistically, your gut level feels, hold on, the conflict’s not going to get resolved? There’s still going to be conflict?

Then why was there success? I think it’s very difficult for people that are not living it in your world, just on the base human level. We all want to, okay, if we see a conflict, if we’re in the middle of a conflict, we want it to be over. But the real world just doesn’t work like that.

William Ury:

If you took it to a very family level, people expect that parties can go away and the weekend come back with an agreement and that that solves conflict.

But if there was a husband and wife who were having a lot of trouble, and they went away to a weekend workshop and came back saying, hey, conflict’s all over, everyone would laugh because everyone knows that marriage is one difference after another. It’s how you work it out that matters. If you can transform the conflict and transform the differences, but you never utterly end any conflict, marriage has always got some differences and conflict. It’s how you work it that makes it work.

Michael Covel:

There’s a phrase, a sentence that I wrote down from your work that I love.

How can we deal with our deepest differences without destroying all that we hold dear? When I think about that, when you have conflict, people tend to think there’s a way that, okay, on both sides, they see their deepest differences, but they start to think, I can win. I can win. My side won’t be destroyed. We will win.

And then we will, I don’t know if impose our will is necessarily the way to phrase it, but we will win and we won’t be destroyed. But that’s, look, life is chance. There’s no guarantee. If you go out there with the mindset that you will win and you’ll be able to get your side and pose your side’s will, you’re taking a risk. What happens if it doesn’t work out?

You could risk your whole side’s situation too.

William Ury:

That’s it. And if you bring that mindset into any relationship where there’s an ongoing relationship, maybe an ongoing personal relationship like a marriage or an ongoing business relationship like colleagues or with clients or suppliers or an ongoing international relationship, we deal with relationships. If you ask the question, who’s winning this marriage? Your marriage is probably in serious difficulty.

I think we need to really rethink what does winning mean? Winning means to me getting what you want. It means satisfying your interests. In interdependent relationships, there are often ways in which we actually have not just opposed interests, but we have shared interests. We have shared interests.

That’s a better way to think about it of how do we win by making sure that our basic interests and basic needs are met, which might be congruent with the other side also meeting their interests and needs as Israel and Egypt found out in that negotiation 50 years ago. It’s interesting just to go to that negotiation for a moment because both sides came in to win as it were. Egypt wanted to win. They wanted the Sinai back. Israel had occupied the Sinai in a previous war, the Sinai Peninsula.

Israel wanted to keep about a third of the Sinai. They could have quarreled forever about where to draw the line in the sand, but the genius of Camp David was to use, I think, a key principle in negotiation, which is to look behind people’s positions, which are the concrete things they say they want, whereas the line in the sand, for what are their underlying interests? What are they really concerned about? What do they really want? For the Egyptians, it was sovereignty.

Land had been there since the time of the pharaohs, and they wanted it back. For the Israelis, it was security. Egyptian tanks had rolled across that particular piece of real estate four times in the previous 30 years, and they didn’t want that happening again. Then you said, okay, how do we meet the Egyptian interest in sovereignty so that they can win that, and at the same time, the Israeli interest in security, so they can win that? By using creativity, they came up with an idea of a demilitarized Sinai, where the entire peninsula gets demilitarized, so Israel got a much larger buffer than a third.

Egyptian tanks could go nowhere, but Egypt got the entire peninsula back. They got the Egyptian flag to fly everywhere, but Egyptian tanks were restricted. That’s what you’re looking for, is the equivalent of the demilitarized Sinai, those creative solutions that address the basic interests or needs of both sides, and that’s the way in which they can actually, in that sense, win together, and they won a peace that has lasted until this day.

Michael Covel:

Practical question, historical question, and you will probably have an idea or an answer for how it happened. If I’m Israel, we have the war.

Israel takes the Sinai in the war. Israel was attacked during that war, so they defended themselves. They take the Sinai. They control the Sinai. Okay, I understand historically Egypt wants the Sinai back, but a real practical kind of curious question, why did Israel feel any need to give it up at all?

William Ury:

Well, there are a lot of people asking that same question. The prize for them was a peace treaty with the largest and most militarily strong Arab nation that had been their enemy, and to create stability for them so that they could build their economy and get on with their lives, and it paid off handsomely in the sense of it created stability for them on their southern flank.

Michael Covel:

How did Israel start to, as you mentioned, I think you said four times, how did Israel start to come to the point where they could believe there would not be a fifth time, regardless of a demilitarized zone, how did Israel come to the point where they could trust that there would not be a fifth time?

William Ury:

That is the key question in negotiation, Michael, is how do you build that trust when there isn’t that trust? In this particular case, that trust was partly created by the United States, which together with other nations created a multinational verification and observation force in the Sinai that would create the technology and maintain the technology so you could see even a goat crossing the desert.

That helped create the trust between the two sides. A fence, in a way, the philosophical fence. That’s right. And that’s where, to me, one of the keys and one of our birthrights, really, as human beings is to engage what I call the third side in any conflict. We often reduce conflict to two sides, Arabs versus Israelis, union versus management, one brother against another brother.

But in fact, what we often neglect to see is that there’s always a third side around the parties, which is the community to which the parties actually belong. That larger community, actually, which is our most ancestral way of dealing with conflict is to engage and mobilize, activate that larger community, because within that community, within the embrace of that community, then the two sides that are having really difficulty with each other can often find ways to transform their conflict. One of the keys, for a possibleist, is to look for where are those outside resources, where are those surrounding resources that you can activate that can help mediate, help provide resources, help build trust, help communicate, all the people around us. And it might just be our friends, our families, our neighbors. It doesn’t even have to be neutrals, it’s just the community around us has a stake in this conflict being transformed.

They engage for that reason, for the sake of the family, the sake of the community, the sake of the world.

Michael Covel:

I think what’s interesting about the Israel-Egypt issue, I should share with you, I’ve been living in Saigon, Vietnam for the last 11 years, so that’s where I am today. So I have an interesting perspective as an American looking at all these issues. But as I think about America, you give this great historical education as to what took place. People can go read more, many, many books about this negotiation for peace in that particular corner of the world with Egypt and Israel.

But when you look at the situation for how that unfolded and how complex and clever and ingenious to build these systems to essentially, as I’m listening to you, philosophical fences, it seems like America is not close to using these types of techniques yet, at least for the types of conflict that I’m witnessing in America right now, we don’t seem to be at the table. Because just doing elections every two years, every four years, people just yell and scream, so to speak, and then we get somebody else in there and it feels like we’re not getting resolution. Look, there’s no perfect resolution in the Middle East, but the situation you describe, if we just want to look at the peace between Israel and Egypt, that is quite nice and it is quite a success. It’s endured, but it feels that we’ve not yet got to the point where this type of thinking is working in America, other than to say, well, we have a democracy and we keep voting.

William Ury:

You’re right.

Democracy is a lot more than voting. If you actually look at how our democratic institutions work in Congress, it’s 90% depends on negotiation. It’s the negotiation before you vote on bills. Same thing in the executive sector. The president just doesn’t sit there and give orders.

The president negotiates all the time with different groups and different groups in Congress, different interest groups to build consensus. The same thing is true in the judicial sector is the vast majority of disputes that come before the courts are actually settled through negotiation. So negotiation is kind of the unseen, invisible glue that holds us together. You’re absolutely right. The way in which we negotiate, this is what we’re going to need to deal with these highly intractable disputes that we’re facing right now, this polarized climate, is we’re going to have to learn to apply what we already know in some ways, but we’re going to have to apply our full potential, our full creativity, full ability to collaborate, our full ability to listen.

That’s in short supply. That’s what it’s going to take for us to be able to navigate these really difficult waters we face.

Michael Covel:

I find observation these days of my home country, it seems like media and political leaders and whatnot will frame the American debate as, well, we will elect the next king and he will wave his hand. And the whole idea that we’ve got three branches of government seems to have disappeared. The average person really seems to think, perhaps not helped by media, but the average person seems to think that America elects a king and he can wave his hand and do anything.

That’s just not the way the American system works. There are three very distinct branches of government that as you point out, it’s a constant negotiation nonstop.

William Ury:

It is. And the founders actually created the separation of powers precisely to allow differences to be constructively engaged and to prevent a king, to prevent a dictatorship from arising.

Michael Covel:

Do you have any stories you’d like to share?

And the word that I’m thinking of as we have this type of conversation is ego. You don’t have to name a name. If you want to name a name, you can. Any particular negotiation or situation that you can recall, famous or not famous, something that you were involved in where one side or both sides had ego run amok, just the desire to win. But can you speak to this idea of ego?

This can be a really tough issue to deal with, a strong ego in the room when you want to negotiate, because there is a certain king mindset there.

William Ury:

Without question, Michael, I’ll just give you an example of where I encountered a large titanic ego. The question is, it’s almost like jujitsu. Rather than just confront the ego, can you turn the ego to advantage? I was involved 20 years ago in the country of Venezuela, which was paralyzed by there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets demanding the resignation of the then President Hugo Chavez.

There were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets supporting him, and there was some violence in the streets. At one point, I was asked to come down and see if I could help. And at one point, I had a meeting with Hugo Chavez. He’d like to meet at night. It was at midnight that I was ushered in to see him, expecting to find him alone.

And in fact, he had his entire cabinet arrayed behind him. And he motioned me to a chair, he said, Yuri, okay, so tell me, what do you think of the situation here in Venezuela? How are things going? And I said, Mr. President, I’ve been talking to some of your government ministers here, and I’ve been talking to some of the leaders of the opposition, and I believe they’re making some progress. Well, progress wasn’t the word he wanted to hear.

He said, progress? Are you a fool? You’re not seeing the dirty tricks, those traitors on the other side. This is full titanic ego and full rage. He leaned very close into my face, and I could feel his hot breath.

And he proceeded to shout at me for approximately 30 minutes. I went, I call this going to the balcony. I could feel myself getting reactive, all of my work going down the drain, feeling embarrassed in front of the cabinet, feeling like, what am I going to say? I’m not a fool. You know, he’s saying, you third parties, you’re just naive, you’re not seeing anything.

I could imagine my replies. And then I caught myself, I pinched the palm of my hand for a moment, give myself a momentary, and I asked myself, what am I here for? I reminded myself, am I here to get into an argument with the president of Venezuela, or am I here to try and calm the situation down? So I bit my tongue, and I just listened to him, and I paid attention to him, almost as if I was on a balcony, looking down on the stage of a drama. Why is he doing this?

And is he trying to impress us? From that slight point of detachment, I’m curious, as I watched him, his body language, his shoulders slightly sank after 30 minutes, because he could have gone on forever if I’d given him fuel for the fire, but I wasn’t feeding the fire. And after 30 minutes, in a weary tone of voice, he asked me, so, Yuri, what should I do? That, Michael, is the faint sound of a human mind opening. That was my opportunity.

I said, Mr. President, it’s December, it’s almost Christmas. Last December, all the festivities were canceled around the country. Why not give people a break for a month, just three weeks, just let them go enjoy time with their families. When they come back in January, maybe they’ll be in a better mood to listen. Well, he turned and looked at me for a moment, and he said, you know what?

That’s an excellent idea. I’m going to propose that in my next speech. And his mood had completely shifted, and what I learned from that is that maybe the greatest power that we have, particularly facing a titanic ego like that, is the power not to react. It’s the power to go to that balcony, that place of calm and perspective where you can keep your eyes on the prize, and really think about what you want to do. So that power not to react, and then to use the ego to advantage, and suddenly, that was a great lesson for me.

Michael Covel:

As we wind down, I’ll share back to you a really quick story of not responding. In Vietnam, they have an expression called sao, and it essentially is to, if I said to you sao, I’m essentially saying you’re a liar. But it’s not said with a meanness or a bad intent. However, if you don’t know that, it can sound tough. So I had a situation recently where a Vietnamese person essentially did this with me, and another American was observing it.

The other American was just in shock. But I heard it, and I didn’t even flinch, because I know. It doesn’t strike me as just cultural, it doesn’t mean anything. But the person that was unaware of the use of that language was like, well, hold on, you’re going to let that person call you a liar? See, this is part of the battle with humans in conflict and negotiation.

You really have to know how people talk, how they think, the philosophies, and if you just allow language alone, like in your situation with Chavez, if you just allow the language alone to just rile you up, too, they’re riled up, and then you get riled up from the language, well then where are we? When I saw you talking about this, going to the balcony, I was like, wow, that’s so perfect.

William Ury:

That’s it. The old saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. If we could just learn that, I think it would serve us well in these days.

And that’s a great example, Michael. So much of communication is context. We think it’s content, but it’s actually the context that helps us understand the content. And if you can listen for the context, then you can understand the content, in this case the word sow, and you don’t react. It’s fun.

Michael Covel:

Life is fun. The book, Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. Bill, cool stuff. I could probably pick your mind for stories all day long, but people will have to check out the new book. And of course, the classic, going back all those times, is how to get to yes.

That’s it. That’s it. That was 15 million copies. Wow. That’s amazing.

That’s a huge number. That was before the internet. Sometimes you must occasionally think to yourself, hmm, if I could have had a success like that before the internet, where there’s this instant communication, everybody tells somebody to go buy something. Oh, I don’t know. 15 million before the internet might’ve been, who knows what the number might be today.

William Ury:

Who knows, Michael. Anyway, I wish you very well. I really enjoyed the conversation and wish all your listeners much success in getting to yes.

Michael Covel:

Hey, Bill, the new book, Possible, on Amazon, all that fun stuff. Is there a website you would like to direct people to if they want to come check more out about you?

William Ury:

Well, if they want to know a little bit about me, I have a website. It’s just my name. It’s www.williamyury.com.

Michael Covel:

Cool. Bill, I appreciate it.

Thanks for coming on. Please keep me posted about future books.

William Ury:

Great. Thank you, Michael. Good luck.

Enjoy your life there in Saigon.

I see a time when those awake will understand how to make a difference in the world.