Renee Garfinkel:

Conflict is inevitable in our marriages, our families, at work, and in our communities. More than ever, ours is an age of conflict. That’s why I’m thrilled as well as honored to welcome today’s guest to this episode in our series on healing for the Van Leer Institute series on ideas. I’m your host, Renee Garfinkel. William Ury is a master negotiator, a peacemaker, and a pioneer in the field of conflict resolution.

He’s best known as the co-author of the classic Getting to Yes, a book that’s been translated into over 35 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. He co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project and has spent decades mediating conflicts from labor disputes to ethnic wars to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies. But what happens when the rules of engagement keep shifting? When conflict becomes ambient, persistent, and even profitable? When, to quote his own words, destructive conflicts are polarizing our communities, poisoning our relationships, and paralyzing our ability to address our most critical issues?

That’s the central question of his latest book, Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. This isn’t a how-to book. It’s a book of deep reflection, personal stories, global lessons, and surprising hope. It challenges us not just to resolve conflict, but to reimagine what’s possible when we do. William Ury, welcome to the podcast.

William Ury:

It’s a great pleasure, Renee.

Renee Garfinkel:

Let’s start right at the heart of it. Why did you choose the word Possible for your title?

William Ury:

Well, for years, decades, actually, having worked in some of the world’s hardest conflicts, including wars, people often ask me, at the end of all this, are you still an optimist or are you a pessimist? And I’ve learned to give a different answer, which is, actually, I’m a possible-ist.

In other words, I believe in human possibility. I believe in the potential of human beings to transform their conflicts, whether it’s at home, at work, or in the wider world. And the reason I do is because I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes so many times in places that were, it just seemed absolutely impossible. It seemed absolutely impossible when I was a graduate student during the Cold War for the Berlin Wall to come down. And I made many trips.

I was involved in U.S.-Soviet academic dialogues, and I watched as that happened. I also was in South Africa before apartheid and right after apartheid and watched how an amazing transformation took place at that level. And I’ve seen it happen, obviously, on smaller levels, too, in family disputes, family business disputes that people thought were absolutely impossible. They got transformed. And so that’s why I’m a possible-ist, and that’s why I chose the name Possible for the book.

Renee Garfinkel:

You also write, hope is not a feeling, it’s a choice. When I read that line, it really stopped me cold. Can you elaborate on it, explain it to us?

William Ury:

Yeah, I believe that actually conflict, I’m trained as an anthropologist originally, and conflicts are pretty much inherent in human life. I mean, it’s part of everyday existence.

We have different interests. We have different views. We have different values. Conflict is on the way up, actually, because as there’s more change, there’s more conflict. So the choice isn’t really about ending conflict.

The choice is that we can actually transform conflict. We can change the form in which we do carry on our conflicts. Either we can do that destructively through vicious arguments that destroy relationships or violence that destroys lives, or we can do it constructively through dialogue, through negotiation, through collaboration. And so that’s why I believe it’s a choice because we could actually create a world that we would hope for through our own choices of how we choose to view conflict and how we choose then to handle our differences with others.

Renee Garfinkel:

You just mentioned that you started out in anthropology and the book contains a lot of interesting anthropological observations and tools, but the rest of the book also blends diplomacy and psychology.

How did you arrive at your interdisciplinary approach to conflict?

William Ury:

Well, I was a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1970s, and I was studying anthropology partly because I grew up, as many of us did, under the Cold War. And it never made sense to me why we were prepared to put at risk the fate of humanity itself for a conflict seemingly as difficult as the one then existing between the United States and the Soviet Union. And so that’s why I studied anthropology to let me understand my own tribe, the human tribe, and see why we seemingly have this self-destructive bent. And then I wanted to get my hands dirty.

I wanted to get out of the library. I wanted to actually, anthropologists, we’re participant observers. We observe the phenomena, but we also like to participate. So I thought, okay, let me see if I can participate. And I went and talked to a professor at Harvard who was then working on international negotiation, including on the Middle East at that time, Roger Fisher.

And I came out of that writing a paper for an anthropology course, imagining that I was a fly on the wall for a Middle East peace negotiation that was about to take place, imagining what would I see, what would I observe as an anthropologist? How would I know if the negotiations were going well or they were going poorly? And I made some very simple, seemingly common-sense observations, like, well, if things are going poor, they’re gonna be blaming each other. They’re gonna be talking about the past. That’s where the focus is.

If things are going better, they’re gonna be talking about the present and the future and what we’re gonna do about it. And they’re gonna be, in one case, if it’s going badly, they’ll be adversarial. In the other sense, they’ll be more kind of collaborating on how do you deal with a very difficult issue? And I sent that paper to Roger and lo and behold to my surprise, one Sunday evening, I was grading exams in my little Garrett room there in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I got a call at 10 o’clock at night and it said, this is Professor Roger Fisher.

I’ve just read your paper. And I thought it was interesting, the central chart. And I decided to send it to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East because I thought he would be interested. And I was floored. I was shocked.

I was speechless. The idea that some ideas that I’d had in my little attic room about negotiation could possibly be helpful to a practitioner in what was widely regarded then as the world’s most difficult conflict was just like electrifying. And so Roger invited me to work with him and my work has been ever since then in the field of negotiation from the point of view, the prism of anthropology, but focused practically on what are better ways to deal with our most deep protracted differences than slugging it out and a destructive fight in which everyone in the end loses.

Renee Garfinkel:

Well, that situation, trying to address the Middle East conflicts with the kinds of things that the State Department deals with. And actually, when we think about negotiation generally, we often think about it as external between two sides.

But in the book, you write a lot about the inner game. Why is negotiation with ourselves so hard?

William Ury:

Well, yes, because what I’ve found over the years being involved in negotiation and mediation is that the single biggest obstacle, us getting what we want in the negotiation is not who we think it is. We think it’s the other side, that difficult person we’re dealing with.

Renee Garfinkel:

It’s always the other guy, yeah.

William Ury:

It’s the other guy, right? And in fact, what I found is the biggest obstacle to us getting what we want is the person I look at in the mirror every morning. It’s me. It’s our own very natural, very understandable human tendency to react. In other words, to act without thinking.

We, as the old saying goes, when you’re angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. And we do that more often than not. And we end up, even though negotiation is a goal-oriented behavior, trying to persuade someone, you’re trying to get something done, you’re trying to get to an agreement, we end up getting in our own way with our own fears and anger and our own reactive qualities. And so I’ve learned to, I ended up writing a whole book about this after Getty DS called Getty DS With Yourself, which is the first and most important negotiation that any of us have to conclude, which is if we wanna influence the other, we first have to learn how to influence ourselves. Negotiation begins with self-mastery.

Renee Garfinkel:

In your own personal life, what’s been the most difficult negotiation?

William Ury:

Well, actually, I would say the negotiations in my own personal life are the most difficult, actually. As difficult as negotiations are in the outer world, you know, in coal mines or in the Middle East or wherever they be, the most difficult are the ones, and that’s because that’s where we get most reactive, where I get most reactive, where anyone does, is when the stakes are deeply personal. In the family, for example, if I’m negotiating with my daughter or my partner, you know, it’s like, those are where, you know, my buttons get pressed. And that’s where I have to learn what I call the first, the foundation of successful negotiations.

I use a metaphor that I adopted from a friend and colleague of mine, Ronnie Heifetz, called going to the balcony. And it’s the ability to see the negotiation almost as if you were in a play, you know, you’re on a stage, you know, you and the other person, and perhaps there are other people involved too, characters on the stage. And part of you goes to a balcony overlooking that stage, an imaginary balcony, a mental and emotional balcony where you can get some perspective, where you can keep your eyes on the prize and ask yourself, what’s truly important in that situation? What is truly important? What do you want?

And going to the balcony then allows you to negotiate much more effectively.

Renee Garfinkel:

And you write about several levels of what do you want. That is, tell us about that.

William Ury:

What I’ve found, and we made, Roger Fish and I made this the cornerstone of Guinea DS, is a very simple distinction between what’s your position, the things you say you want, and then what’s behind that position. What are the underlying interests?

What are the underlying wants or fears or concerns or desires or aspirations? The more intangible motivations that drive us to take certain positions. And we used a simple example of that. It came from a woman who lived in Boston about a century ago, who was really one of the founders of modern management theory. Her name was Mary Parker Follett.

And she was once in a Harvard library and she observed two students quarreling with each other. One wanted the window open and the other one wanted it closed. So they would go and open the window, the other would go and slam the window shut. And it got into a little bit of an argument and bothering all the other students in the library. So the librarian wanders over and she asks the first one, tell me, why do you want the window open?

And he says, well, he says, I need some fresh air. And then she goes to the second one, well, why do you want the window closed? He says, well, the draft, the wind is blowing my papers around, I can’t work. So then the librarian asked the two, well, how can you get fresh air without you getting a draft? And they think about it for a moment.

And one of them has an idea and he goes into the next room. The room next door opens a window there, thus providing fresh air without a draft. And both students are satisfied. So if you think about that simple situation, what happens? We go into a negotiation, we want the open window, we want the closed window, we’re focused on that position and we get into argument about it.

The librarian, by asking the magical question, why, puts the focus behind the position on the underlying interests. In this case, the interests are fresh air, no draft. And then by identifying the challenges, how do we meet the interests, not just how do we reconcile the positions, she comes up, they come up with a creative solution, an open window in the next room that solves the problem. And what I find successful negotiators doing, whether that’s in a very simple situation like that or in the Middle East conflict, is when they’re successful, it’s because they’re probing behind the positions for what are the true underlying interests and then trying to satisfy those interests in a way that satisfies the interests of both sides so you can arrive at an agreement. And a classic example of that, at the moment we were writing that book, was the Camp David Peace Agreement between Egypt and Israel, where Egypt and Israel were quarreling about the Sinai Peninsula, which had been occupied by Israel in a series of wars in which Egypt had attacked Israel.

And they were quarreling about it and it could have, in a positional bargaining, naturally you would have said, okay, where’s the line in the sand? And Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel, was demanding a third of the Sinai and Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, was saying, no, we want the entire Sinai. And they could have gone forever trying to draw the line in the sand. Instead, the Americans, in this case, the equivalent of the librarian, asked both sides, President Carter in this case, you know, what are your interests? And for the Israelis, the interest was security.

Egyptian tanks had rolled across the Sinai and attacked them. They didn’t want that happening again. For Egypt, the interest, the underlying interest was sovereignty. The Sinai had been there since the time of the pharaohs and they wanted it back. And so then the question became not how do you draw a line between the Israeli position and the Egyptian position.

The question was how do you satisfy the Israeli interests, the core interests, and the Egyptian core interests, security and sovereignty? And they came up with an idea of a creative idea of, like an open window in the next room, of a demilitarized Sinai, a Sinai where the entire Sinai would go back to Egypt. The Egyptian flag could fly everywhere. Egypt got sovereignty. And at the same time, it was demilitarized, so Egyptian tanks could go nowhere.

So Israel, instead of getting a buffer of a third, got a buffer of the entire peninsula. So both sides benefited. It was a classic win-win solution based on looking at what are the interests behind the positions, which is the key in negotiation.

Renee Garfinkel:

Is that example and the example of the open and closed windows, what you mean when you say that conflict can lead to creativity?

William Ury:

Absolutely, that’s it.

I think the thing that we underestimate is every human being is naturally creative. There’s a lot of creativity. And somehow, we keep that in the arts. It’s [??] in, I don’t know, coming up with new inventions. We need to take that same creativity and bring it into the negotiating room at the table.

And somehow, we often turn off our creative function when we arrive in conflicts. But creativity is the key to transforming conflicts. It’s coming up with those creative solutions, like an open window in the next room or a demilitarized Sinai that provide a path forward because the truth is these conflicts are really difficult oftentimes. And there seem to be limits on everything. There’s only so much land.

There’s only so much money. But there’s an infinite amount of creativity. And through creativity, instead of dividing up a fixed pie where whatever you get, I get less, we can actually expand the pie first so that everyone can get enough.

Renee Garfinkel:

Is there something that tells you as a negotiator that this is the time that the conflict is ripe for resolution?

William Ury:

That’s a really good question.

There is a kind of like a sixth sense or a kind of little tickle you get. I mean, you could do it with your head too, which is you, you know, at some point, it’s partly the people. You can tell by reading the room by the people, just their focus. They start to relax a little bit more. They start to treat each other with a little more respect.

There’s a little more listening than there’s talking. As you know, in my original paper, there’s more focus on the future than there is on the past. And you can also tell by both sides, basically, they feel their interests are starting to be addressed. Creative solutions start to emerge. People look at it in negotiation.

Roger Fish and I coined a term called your BATNA, which is an acronym standing for your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In other words, it’s your walk-away option, your plan B. When people look at their BATNAs, which might be to go to court or to go to war, and they say, you know what? The kind of options that are on the table are more attractive than that. When people see that, then people start to move in the direction of agreement.

Renee Garfinkel:

So you’re using words like you get the tickle, you read the room. It sounds like you really use your emotional intelligence, your emotional skills, as well as what you know about negotiations cognitively.

William Ury:

Absolutely.

Renee Garfinkel:

How do you prepare, especially before high-stakes negotiations like international or some others? How do you prepare emotionally before entering those kinds of negotiations?

William Ury:

Well, I like to, personally, everyone has their favorite ways of going to the balcony, which is what I think we need to do before we go into a tough negotiation. Is, in other words, go to a, get ourselves in a state of mind in which we’re calm, we can see things more clearly, where we’ve got perspective. And the way I love to do that is go for a walk, which is the simplest thing that you would have done for eons, which is go for a walk, ideally in nature. I find somehow walking opens up my perspective. You actually physically open up your perspective.

You often see farther, further when you’re walking, obviously, certainly than you do in a room. And you walk, your breath calms, you get emotionally calm, you can see things more clearly, at least I find that. And nature tends to have that calming, kind of co-regulating effect on our nervous systems. And so I’ve often recommended, actually, in negotiations that people go for a walk. It actually, there’s actually scientific studies that have been done that it actually amplifies our creativity.

And oftentimes, even in the middle of a negotiation, to take a break and go for a walk, have the parties go for a walk, whoever fights why they walk. When you walk, you’re moving side by side in a common direction. You have to pace yourself with the other side. That’s exactly what’s needed to create the right conditions for a negotiated settlement of a difficult issue.

Renee Garfinkel:

William, you’ve been to war zones and fragile democracies.

Over the course of your career, did any place shake your belief that peace is possible?

William Ury:

Rene, I’ve been in many, many really difficult situations, Chechnya, in the middle of civil wars, obviously in the Middle East, in Syria, in Korea, with the Korean conflict, in Africa, Sudan, Ethiopia. But I have to tell you that when I’m there, I’m so, I’m always touched by humanity, by people’s, even in the midst of inhumanity, you see people, you see openings, even in the worst of situations. And oftentimes, in the worst of behavior, sometimes see the best of human behavior, even in the midst of wars. And so I honestly have to tell you that after 50 years of being an anthropologist, using the world as my laboratory and going to the most difficult situations, I’ve yet to see a situation where, there are situations which make you depressed, which make you horrified, which, you know, and, but I’ve yet to see a situation where I didn’t think, wow, people here, there are openings, there are possibilities that are just waiting to be explored.

Renee Garfinkel:

Not every negotiation succeeds. So let’s talk about failure for a moment. What have you learned when a negotiation falls apart?

William Ury:

Well, in the negotiations I engage in, failure, or seeming failure, is more common than not. There are setbacks.

Negotiation takes an enormous amount of patience and persistence, particularly in the difficult situations I face. And I prefer to see failures as learning opportunities in the sense of what I notice is there are failures, but then you, the parties often, and the third parties learn from that. And then there’s another one. And every major success that I’ve ever seen is actually comes through a series of so-called failures. You know, I’ll give you an example, like in Northern Ireland, for example, the Good Friday Accords, which, you know, people thought, oh, these people are sectarian, there’s religion involved, it’s Catholics and Protestants.

There were all these stories in the textbooks that the children were drinking the hostility with their mother’s milk, and it was absolutely impossible and tractable and gone on forever. People were saying all the same things they say about the conflict going around in your neighborhood. And then there was a shift. And it wasn’t that the conflict wasn’t over, but the war was. And it took place, it took place through, it took place, it started very small, but it took place, actually, it started with a group of women, actually, on both sides, who, Catholic women and Protestant women, who had both lost their sons or their brothers or their fathers, and they got together.

And at first, anyone who talked with the other side was considered a traitor, but somehow mothers couldn’t be so easily impugned, and so it was allowed. And then they created a little space, and then people of faith on both sides, priests and ministers, they started to get together. And then the last to really get together were the politicians. And so you could sort of see that, actually, it just starts, it starts small, and it’s a thread, but it actually shows that, even in the most difficult situations, people can find a way to transform the conflict, maybe not end the conflict. They found a way in which they carry on their conflicts through democracy rather than through war.

But it shows the real possibilities for people where others have given up hope.

Renee Garfinkel:

The next question is, what’s one conflict that you would still like to help resolve if you were given the chance?

William Ury:

Well, I would say the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians would be one. Another one would be between the Ukrainians and the Russians which are two conflicts that are bedeviling the world to this day.

Renee Garfinkel:

Yes, and you think big.

They’re both very prominent and very complicated.

William Ury:

Very complicated, and yet I believe, actually, there are real, real possibilities in both. I’ve been involved, I’ve been a student of both for quite a while, and I know things are very difficult. And you have to begin, actually, by looking at all the difficulties, all the obstacles. You know, I’m reminded of a quote from Ben-Gurion, which was to the effect of, in Israel, to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.

And so the question, as we look at, say, the conflict there between the Israelis and Palestinians or the conflict between the Russians and the Ukrainians, I think everyone would agree it’s extremely difficult. It’s gonna take a miracle. Everyone would agree. Then you ask yourself, okay, do miracles ever take place? In other words, defining a miracle simply does a conflict that seemingly seems impossible to a large number of people suddenly become possible.

That would be my definition of a miracle. And then, as I’ve seen in my lifetime, the fall of the Berlin Wall, by that definition, was a miracle. The end of apartheid in Africa, South Africa, was a miracle. The end of the war between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland was a miracle. So even, you might say, recently, the release of all the hostages and the end of the fighting in Gaza for now, I mean, that seemed very impossible to most people, and it happened.

So then that leads us to the third question, which is how do these seeming miracles happen? How does the impossible become possible? And I believe that we can actually learn from, like scientists, from the number of situations where these things have happened and evolve a kind of social technology of peace whereby there’s a shift. But one thing I’ve noticed about that is it’s not just a political diplomatic process. There is a larger psychological, social, emotional process that needs to take place as well.

You can’t just reach agreement at the table. There has, the people, the public opinion needs to shift. And the question of how that happens, but there’s been a set of experiments now, if you think about it, in terms of large-scale experiments. And I think we can learn from those and apply them. And I see no reason why, if Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Blacks and Whites in South Africa, Russians and Americans could do it, I don’t see why Russians and Ukrainians couldn’t do it.

I don’t see why Israelis and Palestinians couldn’t do it. I believe in them.

Renee Garfinkel:

Well, from your mouth to God’s ears, finally, what advice would you give young people who want to become peacemakers?

William Ury:

Just start. In other words, look around you.

There’s conflicts everywhere right now, you know, in your classroom, among your classmates, your families, and actually practice. And then obviously learn. There’s a lot of, there are courses, there’s a lot to be learned online. There are books to be read, and so on. And then try it out.

Try it out, just practice. Because each one of us, whether we like it or not, every one of us is a negotiator. I mean, every one of us faces situations every single day, face conflicts every single day, and we have an enormous chance to experience. So just start doing it. A little bit like I did when I was a student, and just look for opportunities.

I looked for opportunities, including, I remember, I wanted to get some practice in the outer world, but I couldn’t, obviously, go to, immediately jump into international negotiations. So I was listening to a judge who was a small claims court judge, and he was complaining about his caseload being too big, and I said, well, would you take a chance on me, and I’ll come with another student, and we’ll try, and you can give us a couple of your cases. These are very small cases, like people quarreling about a stain on a rug, or a landlord-tenant dispute, or something like that, small cases. And give us a chance, and we’ll see if we can mediate it, and if we’re successful, then it’ll be off your back, and if we’re not successful, it just goes back to you. And we just started mediating those small cases, and got a lot of experience.

So there are those opportunities now for students to mediate. So just start, don’t wait, just start.

Renee Garfinkel:

That’s great advice. The book is, Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict, by William Ury. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your experience, and your thoughts with us today.

William Ury:

It’s been my great pleasure, Renee. I wish everyone of your listeners every success in getting to yes.