Joe Hirsch:

Welcome back to another episode of I Wish They Knew, a show where we share big ideas that deserve more attention in about the time it takes to enjoy a cup of coffee. I’m Joe Hirsch. Today’s wish comes from William Ury. William is one of the world’s best known and most influential experts on negotiation. He is the OG, folks, if you don’t already know.

William is the co-founder of Harvard’s program on negotiation and the co-founder of Getting to Yes, one of my favorite and one of the all-time best-selling negotiation books in the world, as well as the author of Getting Past No, Negotiating in Difficult Conversations. And as someone who loves to help deal with difficult conversations and difficult feedback, this book also really touched a chord with me. His latest is Possible, How We Can Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict, something that seems tougher and timelier than ever before. William, welcome to the show.

William Ury:

It’s a huge pleasure, Joe.

Joe Hirsch:

So what do you wish more people knew?

William Ury:

I wish people knew that while we can’t end all conflict, it is almost always possible to transform conflict, in other words, to change the form from destructive fighting into constructive negotiation. And if we can transform our conflicts, we can transform our lives. We have a chance to transform the world.

Joe Hirsch:

A lot of these conflicts don’t seem like they have any possibility of being resolved and certainly don’t feel very constructive or healthy at the beginning.

In the book, you describe a path to get to possible, and you describe it in three parts, three victories, you call it, going to the balcony, building a golden bridge, and taking the third side. Did I get that right?

William Ury:

You did. You did. Let me just say, these times are tough. That’s why I wrote the book. People ask me, am I an optimist? Am I a pessimist?

I say, actually, I’m a possible-ist. I believe— A possible-ist. A possible-ist. I believe—and I believe you’re a possible-ist, too, and anyone listening to this is probably a possible-ist. In other words, I believe in the human potential. And why? Because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. In the most—in the toughest, most seemingly impossible conflicts, I’ve seen people—conflict can bring out our worst, for sure, but it can also bring out our best.

And the path to possible in the book that is— it starts off, interestingly enough, not with the other side, but with ourselves. You know, it turns out the negotiation is an inside game. It goes to the inside out. And the single biggest obstacle that we face, actually, that I face in trying to advance my interest in a negotiation, isn’t the difficult person on the other side of the table. However difficult that person can be, it’s the person sitting on this side of the table. It’s me. You’ve got to look in the mirror. You’ve got to look in the mirror. It’s our—it’s our own very human, very natural tendency to react, to act without thinking, to react out of fear, out of anger.

And as the old saying goes, when you’re angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

Joe Hirsch:

Yes.

William Ury:

You will—you’ll send the best email you’ll ever regret. And so the secret is the ability to go to the balcony. It’s just—balcony is just a metaphor for imagining you’re negotiating on a stage.

Part of you goes to a mental or an emotional balcony, kind of a place of calm and perspective, a state of calm and perspective, where you can keep your eyes on the prize, see the larger picture. And we all have our favorite ways to do that. You know, some of us, I like to go outdoors. You go for a walk. So, you know, you don’t even have a moment. You can just breathe. You know, some people breathe, take a few deep breaths, take a break, do a workout, whatever it is that shifts your state so that you can bring your best to that negotiation rather than— rather than our most—rather than our worst, let’s say.

Joe Hirsch:

So it’s really about the power of the pause, right?

William Ury:

It is. Finding that space. It’s the power of that pause. That space in between stimulus and response is where we have agency, where we have choice.

Yes. That’s that little fraction. So in a paradox, the way to start a negotiation is to stop.

Joe Hirsch:

So in order to go forward, you almost have to just stay in place.

William Ury:

You got it. The way to engage is first to disengage so that you can bring your full potential because these conflicts are really difficult.

It’s very easy to get reactive. And so that ability to go to the balcony to me is the foundation. That’s the first victory, the victory with yourself, getting to yes with yourself.

Joe Hirsch:

Okay, so once you get that sense of calm, that perspective that comes either from literally taking that walk or just taking sort of a mental break from the action, the next step, as you say, after you go to the balcony, is to focus on the other person on the other side of that conversation. You call this part the golden bridge.

Why golden?

William Ury:

Because, you know, ordinary bridges in these days might not be enough. You need to have. No, certainly not. We need to be more audacious. We need to figure out bridges that are more attractive because if they’re more attractive, they’re going to be more sustainable.

They’re not going to break it the first thing. So, you know, I grew up in San Francisco right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. For me, that was the image, the golden bridge. And but the idea basically is, you know, it’s tough. You get into a negotiation or conflict. The other side doesn’t want to, you know, they’re far away from you.

They’re digging into their position. They’re pushing. They might be intimidating. Whatever it is they’re doing, you know, it’s hard. Your mind’s right here. Their mind’s way over there. What building them a golden bridge means is you got to leave for a moment. It’s not always easy. Leave for a moment where you’re thinking is. You don’t have to give up what you want.

Just leave where you’re thinking is for a moment. Start the conversation over here where they are because there’s this huge chasm between where you are and where they are filled with unmet needs, dissatisfactions, baggage from the past, distrust, all of that. You need to build them a bridge over that chasm, a golden bridge. In other words, you need to make it as attractive as possible for them to make the decision you want them to make. It’s not about making it harder for them.

It’s about making it easier for them to do what you’d like them to do. You’ve got to, it’s the art of letting them have your way. And and so it starts with listening. Because that’s what you need to do is we need to like shift the spotlight from where our mind is to where their minds and hearts are. Understand what their interests, what their needs are.

And then we can be creative. We can say, oh, maybe there’s ways in which we can both get our interests and so on. And it’s hard, but that’s the art of building them a golden bridge. And the best way I like to do that is I like to write the other side’s victory speech.

Joe Hirsch:

I was going to say you talk about the victory speech that you write for the other side.

William Ury:

Yeah. Well, because, you know, sometimes seems impossible, but I like a little thought experiments. Just imagine for a moment, do a thought experiment, take a difficult negotiation you’re facing and imagine that the other side says yes. They’re going to do what you want them to do. I mean, it’s surprising, but they’re going to say yes. Now imagine that they have to go in front of the people they care about.

Their board of directors, their voters, their union workers, whoever it is, they have to justify and explain why they’ve accepted your proposal as a victory for them, right? And what would be their three key talking points? What kind of pushback are they going to get? What is the best? What can they say? Think about your job as helping them deliver that victory speech.

And I find that that thought experiment opens up possibilities that we might not have seen, particularly in the difficult situations we all face.

Joe Hirsch:

So it requires a healthy dose of empathy, of understanding, and a willingness to kind of do some perspective taking, right?

William Ury:

Put yourself in their place. You’ve got all of those things. Perspective taking, empathy. You know, I mean, so much of the Golden Bridge is putting yourself in the other side’s shoes. Because after all, you’re trying to influence someone. You’re trying to change their minds.

How can you possibly change someone’s mind if you don’t know where their mind is?

Joe Hirsch:

Yeah. Yeah. What if you’re unwilling to change your own mind?

William Ury:

One of the most important questions to ask is, what do I really want? What do I really, really want? Not your position, the thing that you say you want, but what’s behind that? What’s the underlying motivation? You know, I was talking to a business leader I was trying to help who was involved in a terrible business fight, you know, with his business partner over control of the company.

And I asked him what he wanted. And he said, well, you know, I want this amount of money and I want the end of the non-compete clause. And he gave me all the positions. I said, yeah, but what do you really want? And he wasn’t prepared for that because he wasn’t willing to change his mind on those things. But then he thought, you know what I really want? I want my freedom. I want my freedom. I said, what does freedom mean to you?

He says, freedom means time to spend time with my family, which is the most important thing in my life. Freedom to make the deals I want. And once we had that freedom, then suddenly we’re able to help him change his own mind, as it were, so that we could actually reach a deal that at the end of it, when we’re able to reach an agreement, he said, you know, I got everything I wanted, but the most important thing I got, I got my life back.

Joe Hirsch:

Yeah. So helping someone see what they really want and helping them understand that what they say they want is really just a couple of layers above with what lies beneath the true intent of their goal in this negotiation.

William Ury:

That’s it. So ask yourself, you know, what’s your equivalent of freedom? What really do you want here? What’s truly important to you here?

Go beyond the money, the kinds of things. What’s the real driver behind that?

Joe Hirsch:

Yeah, what’s the real victory here for you? And until you can answer that question, you can’t negotiate a solution. That’s it.

William Ury:

Well, you certainly, I mean, the whole idea of negotiation is to satisfy your interests. You got to figure out what your interests are. What do you want? And then you can get it. Right.

Joe Hirsch:

Yeah. So this third victory that you talk about, and I think this is the most provocative of all, is called taking the third side. And by third side, you’re referring to sort of the larger picture, the people around you, stakeholders, communities, family, friends, the people that have the potential to intervene and to influence these negotiations. And you tell a story in the book, and I loved it, about the time that you helped facilitate a conversation between Democrats and Republicans that were at an impasse. And this was during a particularly, you know, bitter time, maybe even more bitter than the times we’re in now during the Clinton impeachment hearings. And one of the members shows up with her baby in tow because the babysitter flaked out. What happened next?

William Ury:

Well, that was fascinating. I mean, they were all very tense, you know, there were about four members of Congress on each side, you know, sitting around and complaining and just, you know, and suddenly the babies in the middle, you know, this member of Congress showed up, no babysitter, so she laid the baby in front of them, and, you know, in the middle of the circle there, the baby’s gooing and guying and gurgling. And I just noticed everyone paid attention to the baby. And the baby became the third side, in other words, the representative of the whole. Why are we doing this? It’s for our kids, our kids.

You know, what’s all this about? Just put everything in perspective, helped everyone go to the balcony. And then surprisingly enough, people began to share openly, vulnerably about, you know, the pain that they were in, you know, that, you know, that you couldn’t go home at night because you were up late at night, the spouses were angry and so on. And they talked, and suddenly the mood shifted. And in those stories, then we were able to start to make some progress.

Joe Hirsch:

Maybe we need to bring some babies to Congress today. We do. That could help. So what I’m hearing and what I detected in the book, in many different ways, in the beautiful ways you told the story, is that the key to possibility is having empathy, is having trust. And it really does take two sides to negotiate.

Is there a possibility for progress when one side in a conflict is unwilling to act in good faith?

William Ury:

Well, those are the situations that I deal with more often than not. I mean, you know, I’m dealing with wars where people have been killing each other. And, you know, there’s very little trust. There’s the exact opposite of it. And so what I’m talking about is, and that’s why when those situations, like when you feel like the other side’s not dealing in good faith, all the more important you need to go to the balcony because you need to be able, on the balcony, to understand what is it I really want.

And you need to be able to ask yourself that question of what’s my BATNA? What’s my best alternative to a negotiated agreement? What’s my exit option? Because if I’m Native, I may not be able to reach agreement here. How am I going to satisfy my interests? So that’s why balcony is so central.

And then, of course, it makes it even more difficult to build a bridge. But I found that, you know, like, you know, I used to work, I started off working on the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviets. There was no, each side suspected the other wasn’t acting in good faith at all. The opposite. They were still able, we were still able to reach arms control agreements because we made the agreements independent of trust. We had national verification means, satellites and so on, and able to make agreement after agreement and eventually bring an end to the Cold War.

So to me, that means the balcony. It means being able to build those bridges in those dire circumstances when the chasm is great. And because it’s so hard, we need the third side. We need the people around. We need our friends, our allies, our colleagues, mediators, and so on, who can kind of create a container that when it’s hard for us to go to the balcony, they can help us go to the balcony. When it’s hard for us to build the Golden Bridge, they can help us build the Golden Bridge. And that’s why you need all three things, balcony, bridge, and third side, all together, all at once, when you’re dealing with the tough situations that we face today.

Joe Hirsch:

The book is Possible, and the author, and I’m seeing so many more possibilities now as a result of him and this conversation, is William Ury.

William, thanks for sharing your wish with us today.

William Ury:

My great pleasure, Joe.