William Ury:
The single greatest power we have in a conflict, in a negotiation, is the power not to react. It’s to go to the balcony, to take that step back and ask ourselves what our real purpose is, what’s our deepest purpose in this.
Chip Richards:
William Ury has mediated some of the world’s most intractable conflicts. He’s helped end a civil war in Indonesia and assisted preventing one in Venezuela. With former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, he co-founded the International Negotiation Network, and he is the author of several revered books on this subject.
In this episode of the Uplift podcast, William shares what he’s learned about negotiation, conflict resolution, and harnessing the power of a dream. Hello and welcome. I’m your host, Chip Richards. Uplift, weaving a new story for humanity. When we consider all the regions and pockets and places in the world where there is some level of conflict or war, it’s easy to get ourselves overwhelmed and to think that the solution, that the peace must start at some great political level or with some massive uprising. But our guest who is here with us today is really a living demonstration that the pathways to peace and new possibility, not only in the world but within ourselves, can start in the most unlikely places.
He’s the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and one of the world’s leading experts in negotiation and mediation and a very, very dear member of Uplift. William Ury, thanks for being here with us. My great, great pleasure, Chip. So let’s dive in. So, you know, your research on negotiation and mediation and conflict resolution has kind of woven its way into boardrooms, into the Oval Office, into tribal grounds, you know, many different pockets and places and into many households and families and hearts.
Could you just peel back the layers and just let us know what got you into this work? Why is this work your calling?
William Ury:
Yeah, this is my passion actually. And ever since I was a boy growing up between the United States and Europe and Switzerland in school with kids from around the world, many different cultures and faiths, I had this question of how can we human beings get along? How can we deal with our deepest differences in a constructive way rather than a destructive way?
Particularly since when I was growing up, you know, the shadow of the atomic bomb sort of sat heavy on us and I could never understand as a boy why we were prepared to risk the entire human experiment for conflict. And so I really resolved to try and understand that. And I just had an inkling there must be a better way.
Chip Richards:
So your path wound its way into many different places and steps along the road. And along that, you know, one of the things, and you kind of hinted towards it there, but it was a realization that conflict in itself isn’t bad necessarily.
William Ury:
Right. No, in fact, conflict is – I think actually paradoxically I think the world actually needs more conflict right now, not less. And what do I mean by that? First of all, conflict’s in the nature of things, you know, to deal with injustice. And so we need to surface the injustices. The question is not whether to have conflict or have no conflict.
The question is what kind of conflict. It’s not to eliminate conflict. It’s to transform conflict, to change the form of conflict from destructive methods like, you know, vicious arguments that destroy a family, like, you know, labor management conflict, you know, all the way up to violence and war or even nuclear war. How do we find a better way through listening to each other, through dialogue, through cooperative negotiation, through democracy, through nonviolent means? To me, that’s the great shift we need to make.
Chip Richards:
And to be able to embrace the conflict as it rises within that context. That’s it. As an opportunity.
William Ury:
Yeah, conflict’s part of life.
Chip Richards:
So can you give us maybe one of your early, you know, an early story, just a brief example of how you found your way into – because, you know, now you’re called upon by leaders of many different countries and places to come and help and sort – help find a way through.
But in the beginning, you found your way into these places. You know, give an example of how you’ve unraveled, you know, a conflicting situation, you know, in a way that our listener might not realize is possible.
William Ury:
Well, let’s see. From early on. Oh, any time.
Any time. Well, I’ll give you just – Recent is fine. Yeah. One example that comes to mind is about 15 years ago I was called into the country of Venezuela, which at that point, as it is now actually, was intensely polarized. And there were a million people on the streets of the capital, Caracas, calling for the downfall, the resignation, the downfall of the president, President Hugo Chavez at the time.
And there were a million people on the streets supporting him. And there was some violence and there was widespread concern in the international community that this could tip into widespread civil violence, even a civil war like bedevils its neighbor, Colombia. And I was invited in by the UN to kind of give a conference about what I call the third side, which is kind of the community, the community trying to heal its own conflict. But at one point, I actually had a chance to meet with – I had a number of chances to meet with the president, Hugo Chavez. One particular meeting, I recall, he liked to meet at night.
And the appointment was made for 9 o’clock at night. And I was there with my colleague Francisco. And we waited very patiently, 9, 9.30, 10, 10.30, 11, 9.30, midnight.
Chip Richards:
Were you at his house or –
William Ury:
No, in the palace. In the palace. In the palace, yeah.
And his quarters. And finally, we were ushered in to see the president. And I’m expecting him to find him alone, of course, at that time of night. But in fact, he had his entire cabinet arrayed behind him. And he said, oh, so, Yuri, he said, have a seat here and tell me what you think.
How’s the situation from your point of view? And I said, well, I think, Mr. President, I’ve been talking to some of your government ministers here. I’ve been talking to the leaders of the opposition. And I believe there’s a little bit of progress. Well, that was not the word he wanted to hear.
When he heard progress, he flipped out. He said, what do you mean progress? Are you blind? Are you not seeing the dirty tricks those traitors on the other side are up to? And, you know, what kind of third party are you?
And he proceeded to lean very close into my face, very close, and shout at me with his full force for, I would say, approximately 30 minutes. And here I am, I’m kind of thinking, OK, I’ve been involved here for a year and a half. I’m seeing all my work go down the drain, you know, thinking, OK, I lost the president here. I’m feeling a little embarrassed in front of the whole cabinet getting this dressing down. You’re thinking of kind of counterarguments and so on.
And then I remembered something that an old friend had told me, a shaman, actually, from South America. He said, you know, William, if you’re ever in a difficult spot, he said, pinch the palm of your hand. And I said, Hernan, why would I do that? He said, because that will give you momentary pain and it will keep you alert. And that’s a way for me to – I always teach in my negotiation classes that the foundation of successful negotiation is the ability to go to the balcony.
It’s the step back for a moment. Imagine that you’re negotiating on a stage and you go to a mental, emotional kind of balcony above that stage. It’s a place of perspective, a place of calm, a place of clarity. So at that moment, I remembered Hernan and I pinched the palm of my hand to kind of go to the balcony.
Chip Richards:
Yeah, just to pull yourself up.
William Ury:
Yeah, pull myself up and ask myself the all-important question, which was, what’s my deepest purpose here? And my deepest purpose was to try to help cultivate peace and calm. And so I realized – then I could ask myself, is it really going to be in my interest to get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? And so then I just kind of like, okay, from a balcony perspective, I’ll just listen. And so I just kind of focused.
I was able to kind of watch my own inner process, watch the own emotions and thoughts from the balcony. Just let them subside and just focus on trying to understand why he was so irate, why he was so angry. Study him. Really try to get it from his side. Yeah, from his side.
What’s going on here in this play right now? Watch the play from the balcony.
Chip Richards:
Look at that angry guy on the stage there.
William Ury:
Yeah, exactly. And kind of like name the game, recognize what’s going on, and be inquiring, curious.
And sure enough, he was known to – he could give speeches for eight hours. And I’m sure if I had reacted, we would have just gone to town until dawn. But half an hour of no reaction and just kind of smiling at him and listening or just taking him seriously. And then I watched his body language and his shoulders sank slightly. And then in a slightly weary tone of voice, he said, So, Yuri, what should I do?
And that is the moment. That’s like one of those key moments like in an argument, in a negotiation, when it’s the faint sound of a human mind opening. It’s kind of like there’s a little crack there. Before that, if I tried to get into – you try to get into reason with someone who’s in a very angry state of mind, it’s like banging your head against the wall. But that was a little crack.
So I said, You know, Mr. President, I think the entire country needs to go to the balcony. Because I’d used that metaphor with him before in a previous conversation. Because it was December. It was almost Christmas. The previous Christmas, all the festivities had been canceled because of the conflict, the crisis.
So I said, Why don’t we call – why don’t you just call a truce, a tregua? You know, why not just a truce and give everyone a chance to enjoy the holidays with their families? And when we come back in January, maybe everybody will be in a better mood to listen. He said, That’s an excellent idea. I’m going to propose that in my next speech.
And his mood had completely shifted. In fact, he said to me, In fact, over Christmas, I’m going to travel around the country. And I’d like you to come with me, in fact. And then he thought for a moment. You know, you’re a neutral.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so good for you to have always seen in my company. He said, But no problem. I’ll give you a disguise. Ah, really? His mood had completely shifted.
And what I learned from that was that maybe the single greatest power we have in a conflict, in a negotiation, is the power not to react. It’s to go to the balcony, to take that step back and ask ourselves what our real purpose is. What’s our deepest purpose in this? And that was an important lesson for me. And it was an important lesson to realize that unless I could somehow get to yes with myself, with my own kind of emotions and thoughts and everything that was being reactive, I wouldn’t have much chance to get to yes with him.
So the key to getting to yes with others is to get to yes first with yourself. Yeah.
Chip Richards:
Wow. Wow. So much in what you just shared.
I love that story. I’ve got so many questions, which we’ll have to take offline. But here, this phrase, which is also the title of, you’ve just said the title of two of your books, getting to yes and getting to yes with yourself is very fascinating. I might have you unpack that a little bit more. In particular, this notion of the fact that when we’re in conflict with someone else, we often think it’s about them or it’s about getting them somewhere.
But one of the things you’ve discovered is actually it has to start with what’s going on here inside ourselves. And that there’s a key to unlocking the whole situation oftentimes by getting to a place within ourselves. Tell us a little bit more about that.
William Ury:
Yeah. So when I – Getting to Yes was my – which I co-authored with Roger Fisher and later on with Bruce Patton was a – how do we human beings – how can we change the game from an adversarial contest where one side wins and the other side loses to kind of let’s approach this jointly as if we’re both on the same side of the table, not opposite sides of the table and we’re facing the problem jointly. How do we find a solution that works for both sides?
And I would say in the years after I wrote that book, maybe the most common question I received was, okay, that’s fine. But how do you do that with people who don’t want to get to yes? It’s difficult people. People are kind of angry with you or using tricks or stubborn and inflexible and so on. So about 10 years after that, I decided to tackle that and I wrote a book called Getting Past No.
It’s a good step. It’s kind of negotiating with difficult people or negotiating in difficult situations and I kind of made a specialty of that in difficult situations in families, in businesses, in organizations, in communities all the way up to war situations. But over the years, it dawned on me actually that the most difficult person we ever have to negotiate with is not the person on the other side of the table. It’s the person on this side of the table right here. It’s me.
Wow. It’s the one who most gets in my own way. And if I can get out of my own way, if I can get to yes with myself, if I can resolve my own inner issues, then I’m going to be much more effective at trying to persuade someone else. And so that was the genesis of getting to yes with yourself and other worthy opponents.
Chip Richards:
Yeah, nice. And at a basic level, what stops us? What gets in the way of us actually being able to address a challenging situation? What is the thing that gets in the way of our own internal yes?
William Ury:
Well, I think it’s human beings, we’re reaction machines. It’s extremely natural, very human, particularly in a conflict situation where something sets you off, you get triggered.
And as the old saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you’ll ever regret. And that happens more often than not.
Chip Richards:
And when you say triggered, we’re triggering something that’s dormant inside of us, a wound or some trauma from the past or some memory that kind of might not even have to do with this situation, but it gets like sparked.
William Ury:
That’s it.
And there’s fear, anxiety, anger. There’s nothing wrong with any emotions. It’s just that the question is, are you in control of your emotions? Are your emotions in control of you? That’s the only question.
And because your emotions are really important resources for us to truly understand what we need and what’s our concern, what’s our traumas and so on. So from a balcony perspective, we can learn to pay attention to our emotions and to really read them and try to understand what’s going on for us to listen. And it’s interesting. What I found is that maybe if there was a key skill in negotiation that maybe is more central. I mean, there are a number of skills, but the one that always comes to mind is what makes a good negotiator in a cooperative sense is someone who can put himself or herself in the other person’s shoes.
It’s the ability which takes the form of the behavior of listening. To me, negotiation, even though we think of it as talking, is actually much more about listening than it’s about talking. Because in listening, you can put yourself in their shoes. You can understand what’s concerning the other person. You can figure out what they need.
And you’re much more likely to get to a solution that works because, after all, negotiation is an exercise in influence. You’re trying to change someone else’s mind. How can we possibly change someone else’s mind if we don’t know where their mind is? Yeah. So listening is key.
But what I found is that actually it’s hard for us to listen. It’s not easy because there’s so much going on in our minds.
Chip Richards:
We’re thinking about what we’re going to respond to or what’s wrong with what that guy said or how I could have thought that better. Or, you know, we get this whole extra dialogue.
William Ury:
That’s it. So there’s all this going on. And what I found is that the secret to be able to listen to others is first to be able to listen to yourself. So if you go back to that Chavez story, what was I doing by going to the balcony? I was listening to myself first. You know, my feelings of embarrassment, my feelings like, oh, everything’s gone.
You know, what I wanted to say, I listened to myself first. And I was able to clear my head, as it were, so that I could then have some space to take in President Chavez and to me. So it’s like for every step in negotiation, there’s an inner step that we don’t see. It’s kind of like an iceberg. You just see the surface, but you don’t see what’s underneath the surface.
And that’s the key to me is like that’s why that inner yes comes before the outer yes.
Chip Richards:
Wow, that’s so cool. And as you were describing the Chavez story, it’s almost like as he was expressing and venting to you, your own mind was also venting to you in a different way. And both had to get clear.
William Ury:
That’s it. Wow. I had to get out of my own way to be able to really understand, you know, because in negotiation, it’s goal-oriented behavior trying to get in a certain direction. But we’re the ones who probably are the principal ones for frustrating our own goals. You know, we get in our own way.
And to me, that’s kind of the foundation of successful negotiation is to start inside.
Chip Richards:
I love that so much. In some of the conversations we’ve had, one of the other surprising elements that you’ve shared, which I’d love to have you share a little bit about, is the notion of actually navigating yourself to the dream of the other. And kind of not only allowing the triggered things to release, but actually how do I, you know, what’s the power of a dream inside of a conflict or a war or a very sticky situation? Share a little bit about that.
William Ury:
Yeah. That’s it. Because the dream, someone else’s dream, is their most powerful motivator, motivation. And it’s the most positive motivation, really. So if you can kind of listen, not just to the words, but to what’s underneath the words.
Not just to what’s being said, but to what’s not being said. Because when we listen, we usually listen from our perspective. And so we’re there and we’re hearing the words and we’re saying, I don’t agree. There’s a little voice in our saying, I don’t agree with that. I agree with that.
Whatever it is. And we’re getting ready to respond, as you were saying. To me, the kind of listening I think that’s being called for is the listening from the other side’s frame of reference. As if we were them. You know, what’s motivating us?
What’s concerning us? And what’s our dream? Just to give a situation, a business situation, for example. I was once called into a situation where there was a conflict between two business leaders over control of a very large company. A very large company.
And they’d been fighting for two years. Courts, lawyers, all over the press. The Financial Times had called it maybe the biggest cross-continental boardroom showdown in recent history. They were spending, I mean, so much money fighting each other. And it was straining not just themselves, their families, the 150,000 employees of the company.
And so when I met with one of them, the first thing I said was, what do you – which is a good question, negotiation. Tell me what you want. What do you really want here? And like a good business person, he had everything. I want the stock at a certain price.
I want the elimination of the non-compete clause. I want the company headquarters. He had a list of like six things. I said, yeah, I understand that. But what do you really want?
Because we tend to focus on our positions, which are the things that are very concrete. But if you ask – if you try to go below that level to what are the real interests, what’s the – ultimately, what’s the dream? I said, what do you really want here? You’re a man who seems to have everything. I mean, you’ve got everything you want.
What do you really want here? And finally, after a while, he said to me, you know what I really want? I want my freedom. And as soon as I heard that, the tonality of it, I knew that was his dream. And before that, I was wondering should I get involved or not.
And I said, you know, I think I can help you get your freedom. I’m not here to get you your money.
Chip Richards:
You’re not the laundry list guy.
William Ury:
I’m here to help free you because I saw his kids around and I could just see how much he was a hostage. And that’s what we are.
We’re all in conflict situations. We make ourselves hostages of the other side and freedom. And so when I met with the representative of the other side, they said, so why are you here? I said, I’ll tell you why I’m here because life is too short. That’s why I’m here.
Because life is too short for these kind of colossal fights that just cost everyone everything. And he said, so how would you resolve it? I said, well, if we could just agree on these two principles, these two interests, freedom for both sides, so that they could be free of this conflict, free to pursue their own dreams and dignity, which is also very key in negotiation is respect. Then I think we can resolve it. We met the next day for an hour.
We sketched on one piece of paper what that would look like in this particular situation. This is something where they had dozens of law firms working on this. I mean, it had been totally intractable. And two days later, three days later, we had both men signing an agreement, shaking hands, wishing each other well, and making a joint speech to the company executives together. And it was all over.
And people said, well, that’s magic. No, there’s no magic. It’s like it’s looking into seeing the dream, you know, starting with that dream and realizing it was freedom, freedom and dignity. I mean, those are things that we all want.
Chip Richards:
Yeah. And by elevating the conversation to that level and then the details that are required for that is a much different conversation than how can I get these clauses in the contract? That’s it. Wow. That is just awesome.
So we all have some conflict or some area of either our inner or outer world where we’re stuck or where things feel intractable or we’d like to make a shift. What’s one thing that we could take away as a starting place to listen deeper or to find the dream within whatever that aspect of our life or work might be in conflict to start to loosen the strands and create possibility?
William Ury:
Well, one thing to realize is that we’re all – whether we like it or not, we’re all negotiators. I mean if you think about a negotiation as simply back and forth communication, you’re trying to reach agreement with another person. We’re negotiating with our kids, our spouses, our friends, our partners, our colleagues, our clients.
We’re negotiating with everyone. When I ask that question, people say, wow, I hadn’t thought about it but maybe I’m negotiating 80 percent of my time. And then if I think about negotiating with myself at night. So one thing is to realize that so we have chances every single day to practice, to learn. So if we can become a little bit reflective negotiators, learn to go to the balcony, which is just – everyone has their favorite ways of going to the balcony.
It might be take a deep breath. It might be go for a walk. It might be have tea with a friend. It calms us down, brings us to a place of perspective. Look for your learning edge and practice one of those things.
So you might say, look, I really want to practice my listening skills. You have countless opportunities every day to practice listening. Ask yourself, am I listening truly to my child there? Am I putting myself in their shoes understanding? It’s not about like some magic thing.
It’s about daily practice and we have these opportunities every day. You can just take one thing like going to the balcony, like listening, like looking for the interest behind the positions, like being creative and seeing if you can generate three or four or five options to solutions rather than just focus on one. That’s how we gradually become better and better negotiators is by looking and saying that we are negotiators and we have that opportunity every single day to continually improve the way in which we negotiate. That could be our meditation practice. That could be our life practice.
Chip Richards:
Yeah, I love it. And because it actually ultimately comes down to our own, yes, that opening and negotiation with ourself, it is a very worthy practice. Right. Chip and Miri, I feel so enriched by this conversation and I know our wonderful community at Uplift will as well. I hope this is the first of many conversations.
Thank you for being with us and being such a wonderful part of Uplift.
William Ury:
It’s been a real pleasure, Chip, and I want to wish all of you much success in getting to yes with yourself and with others. That’s what we need for a better world.
Chip Richards:
You’re listening to Uplift. What an honor and a privilege to spend time with the wonderful William Ury.
I hope his words have left you with some gold for your own path today. If you’d like more information about William Ury’s books, his talks, workshops and experiences, you can visit him online at WilliamUry.com. And for many more courageous conversations and inspired content, come visit us at UpliftConnect.com. A big thank you as always to the wonderful team of Uplift, and of course to you for taking time to be with us today. I’m Chip Richards, and I’ll see you next time.