Carey Nieuwhof:

The Art of Leadership Network.

William Ury:

And what we tend to do in a negotiation is we take a position. In other words, we take a concrete stance. We say, I want it for that amount of money. I want that office with a corner view.

I want this concrete thing for my church or whatever it is. It’s very concrete. Positions are the concrete things we say we want. Interests are the underlying motivations. Interests are the underlying needs or desires or aspirations or fears or concerns that people have that drive us, the drivers, that drive us to take a certain position.

And in negotiation, we tend to, you know, like, okay, we want the Sinai back. You know, that’s a position. We’re going to keep the Sinai. You know, that’s a position. And you can just bump heads.

You pressure the other side to accept your position. The more you push, the more they push back. You get nowhere. Or you kind of give up your position and no one likes to give in. But actually, if you ask the magical question, why?

Why is it you want that? You know, why do you want the Sinai? Well, security. I need to be safe. You know, tanks have rolled across.

Why do you want to keep it? Well, sovereignty. You know, it’s been since then. Suddenly, you’re at a level where it’s different. And then you can ask the question, well, how do we meet your interests and meet mine?

Carey Nieuwhof:

In the world than William Ury to help you with this. He’s one of the world’s most influential negotiators. And he’s on the podcast today…

And I take some of your problems to him. How do you fire underperforming staff? How do you handle angry church members? Plus, we look at the big issues like de-escalating nuclear conflict with Donald Trump and negotiating peace in the Middle East. He has done all of the above.

He is the co-founder of the Harvard Program of Negotiation and the author of Getting to Yes, the world’s all-time bestselling book on negotiation. With more than 15 million copies sold, he’s got a new book which we go into called Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. So William is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation. And he’s devoted his life to helping people, organizations, and nations transform conflicts around the world. And he has served the presidents of the United States in various capacities as a negotiator in the toughest disputes of our time.

And he’s consulted for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon. He has served as an advisor and mediator in conflicts ranging from wildcat coal mine strikes to family feuds, from US partisan battles to wars in the Middle East, Colombia, Korea, Ukraine, and a whole lot more. So man, fasten your seat belts. This one is going to be great. Let me ask you this question before we jump into the interview.

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Welcome.

William Ury:

Oh, it’s a huge pleasure, Carey.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Yeah, yeah. So I got introduced to your work back in the late 80s, early 90s in law school, where Getting to Yes was already a standard textbook, I think, across every law school and certainly at ours. And I’d love to start at the beginning of your university career.

We got a lot of young listeners, young leaders listening. And it’s a rare case of a university paper you wrote actually having utility in the real world. Is that true? I mean, I don’t think my papers made a hint of difference for all that I wrote for all those years.

William Ury:

Yeah, that was my lucky shot, Carey.

I was 23. I was a graduate student in social anthropology at Harvard. And it was one cold January night. I had a little rental room on the third floor of one of those triple-deckers in Cambridge. And I was grading my own students’ exams, and I was preparing for my own exams.

And suddenly, 10 o’clock at night, I got a call. And in those days, you never got a call from a professor. But this was 10 o’clock at night. This is Professor Roger Fisher. And I’ve just read your paper about taking an anthropological view of the Middle East peace negotiations.

And I really liked it. So I sent the central chart in it to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, because he’s working on peace negotiations. And I thought he might find it interesting. And would you come work with me? And I was just speechless.

I was like floored. I didn’t know what to say. And so I took a moment to go recover, and I stammered out a yes. But it never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that an idea that I’d come up with for my paper, my little attic room there under the eaves, that that could be of actually practical use to a practitioner working on what was widely perceived even then as the world’s most difficult, challenging conflict. So I got hooked.

Carey Nieuwhof:

So just to date this, this is the 70s, right?

William Ury:

This is the 70s. This was 1977, January 1977.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Peace in the Middle East was a huge issue then, as it unfortunately is now again. And so 1977, was that around the time of the Camp David Accord under President Carter?

William Ury:

It was. It was about a year and a half before that. And that was amazing because I’d just gotten back from the Middle East as a student of international conflict. That’s the kind of place you go. I was in Jerusalem.

I was working on the issue of the holy places in Jerusalem and writing a paper about that too at that point. And it looked like it looks today. There had just been a surprise attack in 73 on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. Surprise attack by Egypt. There had been four wars in the previous 25 years, and everyone expected there to be a fifth.

And President Carter, to his credit, had this belief, and it was grounded in his Christian faith, that you could find a way to bring these sworn adversaries together. And he did that at Camp David. And I actually had a little bit role in that, which I talk about in my book. But that was like, wow, that’s a possibility. You can take sworn enemies who look like they’re going to go to war, and sometimes you can get an unexpected peace accord of it.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Yeah, that was historic. I’m just old enough. I was born, I think, a decade after you, 1965. And so I have memories of seeing that in the news, knowing that it was historic. You know, not really as a 12-year-old having 13-year-old having any idea how far back those hostilities went, but it was every bit or perhaps more miraculous than what you see today.

If there was to be a peace accord in the Middle East, it was that intractable. What was the idea in your paper that caught his attention?

William Ury:

You know, the idea in my paper was pretty simple. I can’t even say it was like, oh, wow, that’s a real… I did a thought experiment.

I like to do thought experiments. You know, I did a thought experiment. I said, what if I were a fly on the wall, an anthropological fly on the wall in a Middle East peace negotiation there? Supposed to take place then in Geneva. What would I see?

What would I hear? How would I know if the negotiations were going well or going poorly? And as I thought about it from my perspective as a fly in the wall, I thought, well, things are going poorly. People are going to be stuck in the blame game. They’re going to be vilifying their opponents.

They’re going to be demeaning their opponents. They’re going to be talking… They’re going to be admired in the past. If things are going well, people will be talking about each other with a little bit of respect. They’ll be focused on the future, on concretely what can we do tomorrow morning that could actually, you know, start a path out of this mess.

So it was, you know, a shift from the focus on the past to the future, from the blame game to what we can do about it.

Carey Nieuwhof:

And that was revolutionary.

William Ury:

I don’t know. It didn’t seem like it was revolutionary. I don’t know.

It doesn’t seem like it’s revolutionary, but it is actually. Because if you think about it, a lot of this is common sense, but I would call it… Carey, I would call it uncommon sense. Common sense that’s uncommonly practiced. But how often…

Look around today. How often do we get… Just we’re back in the same trap. The blame game. They’re at fault.

Where is self-responsibility? Where is the spirit of, okay, what can we do about this? What can we actually practically do? How can we make the world a better world for our children, our grandchildren, everything that we care about?

Carey Nieuwhof:

Yeah, it’s a very good point.

And, you know, I wanted to talk about this at some point. This might be as good a point as any, but we do. And we live in this. We’ve seen this over the last decade really escalate. We vilify our opponents.

Everything is us versus them, right? So I don’t like the way they think. I don’t like the way they vote. I don’t like the way, you know, whatever they do. I just don’t like them.

And they become a them. And we turn them into a caricature. What is it? Why is that such a common tendency? And then what are some keys to starting to break that down?

William Ury:

Well, you know, Kerry, I’ve noticed that conflict can sometimes bring out the worst in us. But I’ve also seen, you know, Camp David being an example, how it sometimes can bring out the best in us. That actually, you know, there is this potential in us. And we have a choice. That’s the key thing.

We have agency here. We have a choice. We get admired in the blame game, which is, you know, age old. We all know it. And there’s the old saying, as you point a finger, you got three fingers pointing back at you.

And it’s so easy to ignore, you know, going back to, I think maybe it’s in the Bible here. Ignore the moat in your eye and see the other end, you know. That’s a Jesus teaching. Totally. Right.

Jesus. Exactly. So it’s like, just, if we could just take some of those ancient teachings, which are eternal and universal, and apply them to the immediate situations facing us, you know, where’s turn the other cheek? Where’s forbearance? Where’s, you know, that wisdom?

And so I find actually in negotiation, I mean, this is an age old human activity, this problem of how do we deal with our differences? I mean, that was the problem. That’s been my lifelong question. That’s why I said yes to Roger Fisher was because, even as a boy, you know, it’s interesting. When I was five, my family moved to Europe for a year, and it was 1959.

You could still feel the waves of trauma of World War II, World War I. Even as a kid, you felt it. Even as a kid. Oh, yeah. I mean, among the students, and you could see ruins.

In France, and Germany, and England, and whatever, you could still see the ruins. And there was every expectation that there would be a third World War. I mean, our school in Switzerland had a nuclear bomb shelter with a big steel blast door. So, you know, it’s like, wow, is this the best humanity can do? Can’t we do better in dealing with our differences than blowing everything that we hold precious to smithereens?

Carey Nieuwhof:

You know, that’s so funny. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Europe and was there just a few months ago by the time this airs. And one of my earliest memories of Europe, I went when I was 12 because my grandfather was dying, and we went to my ancestral hometown where my father grew up to meet my grandfather. And I remember wanting to go across the street to play in this big open field, and I had an uncle who said, no, no, no, you can’t go there. This is 1977.

There are still shells there from the second World War from the Nazis that haven’t exploded. And as a Canadian North American kid, you just don’t have a category for that, right? But the memory of that kind of conflict is deep in people. When you studied anthropology, so tell me why you picked anthropology and how that came in handy when you built a whole career on negotiation?

William Ury:

Well, yeah, even as a boy, I had this question of how do we deal with our differences?

There must be a better way. And I thought, okay, anthropology is about human beings trying to understand us, who we are, where we came from, what we’re here for, how do we interact with each other? And so anthropology is also just an excuse to be curious, which is, I think, critical in all of this. It’s an excuse to, it’s also the premise of anthropology is can we put ourselves in the shoes of another? Can we put ourselves in another culture’s shoes, a society?

And not just judge them, but actually understand them from the inside. And actually, the essential practice of anthropology is what’s called participant observation. It’s the ability to participate in another culture and observe it at the same time without judging. Just observe and participate. And that’s the essential competence that we need today as leaders, as negotiators, is the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of our flock, or put our shoes in the shoes of our others, of our opponents, or whatever it is, put ourselves in their shoes.

Because after all, you’re trying to, negotiations about influence, you’re trying to change someone’s mind. How can you possibly change someone’s mind unless you know where that mind is, unless you know where their hearts are? And so, so there was a, so anthropology led me naturally into the field of negotiation, because also I wanted to get my hands dirty. I wanted to not just reflect in the academy, but actually participate and get involved and learn from some of the hardest conflicts around, whether it’s deep in coal mines or in boardroom battles or in civil wars, but really understand what works. Where’s the better way here that works for not only the two parties, but for the larger society, the larger community for the world in the end.

Carey Nieuwhof:

So I’m wondering if you can take us into the Camp David framework, which you had a role in to some extent, even as somebody in your early to mid 20s. I think there’s so many principles there. I mean, you talk about it in your book, Possible. It was just, it was really what happened there was a miracle. And I’d love to talk about North Korea as well, because you had a role in that.

And, and, you know, almost everybody listening would remember the nuclear showdown between Trump and the leader of North Korea. And, you know, this idea that we were going to blow the world to smithereens. But I mean, literally, there has hardly been a global conflict where you haven’t been involved in some way in trying to bring peace over the last 50 years. And why don’t we start at Camp David? Because I think that’s a great case study for how a lot of your tactic strategies see the real light of day.

And what I want leaders, by the way, leaders, what I want you to walk away with by the time we’re done is some tools for your toolkit. And there’s nobody better, I think, in the world to talk to about that than you, William. So take us back to Camp David, maybe set the stage. And then what happened?

William Ury:

Yeah, thank you, Kerry.

Camp David was a great teacher for me. It was, it seemed like an impossible negotiation. I mean, you’re a business leader, you’re a church leader, whatever. You face these impossible negotiations. And then nothing seemed to be more impossible than the Middle East at that point.

The two principal adversaries, the two strongest powers at the time were Egypt and Israel. And Israel had occupied in a previous war, the Sinai Peninsula, where Mount Sinai is. And they seem to be implacable enemies. Egypt had attacked Israel, as I mentioned, on Yom Kippur, the 1973 war, attacked into the Sinai and so on. Thousands of people dead on both sides.

It seemed impossible. There seemed to be a psychological barrier. President Carter had tried to bring the leader of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, together. And everyone said, this is impossible. Forget it.

Don’t waste your political capital. Don’t waste your time. But he went out one weekend with Rosalind to Camp David, the presidential retreat, where there’s just some cabins. And she said to him, you know, why don’t you just try bringing them here, to a place of nature, away from everything, what I call a balcony. It’s a place of calm and perspective.

Place has power.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Now, you’ve been there. I haven’t. If I can just interrupt you. I think I read a book on presidents at some point.

Thank you, Jeff Henderson, for the recommendation. It described Camp David. We are not talking five-star luxury here. We’re talking like it’s a camp, right? Wooden cabins.

William Ury:

It’s an old camp. That’s it. Small cabins in the woods, in the hills there of Maryland. Exactly. It’s very rural.

It’s rustic. Gotcha. And everyone gets their own little cabin. Imagine Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. That’s the kind of thing.

I mean, maybe-

Carey Nieuwhof:

This is where world leaders go when they’re trying to broker peace.

William Ury:

Yeah. But it’s like, and it’s great. It was, I think, set up originally by President Eisenhower. He named it after his son, David. And Rosalind, to her credit, said, why don’t you give it one last chance?

So Carter invited Sadat and Begin. No one expected anything. They maybe come for three days. They came with their leaders. He said, let’s just get away from the media, get away from everything, get away from the Middle East and get some perspective.

And it turned out that Begin and Sadat, they didn’t get along. There wasn’t good chemistry. Sadat wanted the entire Sinai back. Begin said, I’d rather pluck up my right eye rather than give up one settlement. There were these Jewish settlements in the Sinai.

And they were just implacable. I mean, just fixed positions. And after three days, everyone, they were just about to pack their bags and go home. And Carter thought he would give it one last shot. So he turned to Cy Vance, who was the Secretary of State, and said, Cy, you got any ideas?

And just by coincidence, Cy Vance had been in Martha’s Vineyard vacationing, I don’t know, a few weeks earlier. And my colleague, Roger Fisher, they played tennis together. And Cy and Roger knew each other. And Cy said, you know, I’ve got this Camp David thing coming up. You got any ideas for me?

And Roger took him back afterwards and gave him a little, kind of little privately published book that Roger and I had just worked on called International Mediation, a Working Guide. And it was, we’d just come up with it. And by interviewing other medias, we’re trying to get, what are best practices here for, how do you deal with these impossible conflicts? And in it, we had one idea that we had particularly, you know, underlined was the idea of what’s called a single negotiating text. And this is something that all of you can use.

It’s like, it was like, instead of having two rigid positions.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Right. The Egyptian paper and the Israeli paper.

William Ury:

Israeli paper. So it was a single negotiating text.

In fact, I’ll talk about how it was used there. So in any case, Vance suggested to Carter, why don’t we use this? And so this is how it went. Egypt and Israel have their fixed positions. You know, the opponents are in their fixed positions.

Egypt says, we demand the entire Sinai back. Israel says, you know, we’re going to keep a third of it. And those are the positions, the things that people say they want, the terms and conditions, the dollars and cents and whatever it is. The Americans went to them and said to them, as the third party said, keep your positions. We’re not asking you to make anything.

We’re not even going to start there. We’re not even going to start there. Keep your positions. Just tell us a little bit about what your underlying interests are. And that distinction between positions and interests may be the key distinction in successful negotiation, which is to go behind the position to find out what is it people that really want?

You know, what are their underlying needs or desires or aspirations or fears or concerns? Those are the interests. In this case, the Egyptian interest behind wanting the entire Sinai back was sovereignty. The land had been theirs since the time of the pharaohs, and they wanted it back. Israel’s interest was in security.

Egyptian tanks had crossed the Sinai four times in the previous 30 years, and they didn’t want that happening again, and to attack Israel. So then the question became not, how do we draw a line in the sand between the Egyptian position and the Israeli position? You know, the typical thing in a negotiation, okay, you give a little bit, which would have led nowhere, nowhere. But how do we reconcile? How do we satisfy both sides’ essential interests, sovereignty and security?

And then that actually allows us to bring our creativity. And there was a creative idea out there that actually the Egyptians had actually mentioned, which was a demilitarized Sinai. In other words, a Sinai where Egyptian tanks could go, I mean, Egyptian flag could fly everywhere. Egypt would get the entire Sinai back, but Egyptian tanks could go nowhere. In other words, so Egypt would get sovereignty and Israel would get security.

Because if you think about the interests, then there’s a both-hand possibility. If you think about positions, it’s only either or. And, you know, who’s going to win? Who’s going to lose? No.

How do we satisfy the interests of both parties? And that was a hard thing to do. But the Americans, this goes back to the single negotiating text. The Americans then drew up a paper, and they described this idea of a demilitarized Sinai, and what could happen, you know, a paper. But it wasn’t an American, they went to the parties and they said, this is not an American proposal.

We don’t want you to accept it. We’re not asking you to make any decisions. All we want you to do is criticize it. Well, no one likes to make a painful concession. You know, I don’t want to give it to the other side.

But everybody loves to criticize. So the Egyptians criticized it. The Israelis criticized it. The Americans then went back. It’s a low status paper.

You know, there’s no, there’s no letterhead. There’s no, it’s just a proposal. You might have coffee stains on it and whatever it is. And the Americans went back and they said, okay, how do we address the Egyptian concerns, the Israeli concerns? How do we make it better for one without making it worse for the other?

They then went back and said, we’ve worked on it a little bit. Can you give us more criticism? And they got more criticism. They went through that process 23 times over the course of the next 10 days. 23 times, never asking for any decision until there was no way they could improve on the idea.

And it was only at that point that Carter took it to Begin and Sadat and said, look, this is the best we can do. Would you like it or not? And then Sadat and Begin are faced with a very different decision. Instead of having to make, you know, dozens of painful political concessions, they only had to make one decision. And only at the end when they could see exactly what they were going to get in return.

Sadat could see he was going to get the entire peninsula back. Begin could see he was going to get an unprecedented peace with Egypt. And so they agreed. And that was the essence of the deal that has lasted to this day, 45 years later, through wars, revolutions, coup d’etats, assassinations. Israel and Egypt remain.

They transform the conflict. They remain partners. I wouldn’t call them close friends in any way, but they remain partners and they’re not at war. And that was a huge breakthrough. And it showed me just what was possible when you have that spirit of possibility that President Carter and his team brought to that negotiation.

That even seemingly impossible situations, if you bring the right approach, if you’re creative about it, if you’re innovative about it, you can find a way through often.

Carey Nieuwhof:

There’s a powerful ending to the story, too, that really speaks to human emotion. So if I understand this right, I’ve read the book, and you can correct my storytelling. They had the agreement. Arafat said yes.

Menachem Begin said yes. And then there was something else that came up. The Egyptians are like, well, or Menachem Begin is like, well, if that’s the case, I’m out. And they were literally packing up to go home. And President Carter had made out some pictures for Menachem Begin and his grandchildren.

Do you want to pick up the story from there?

William Ury:

Sure. Absolutely. So this is in shambles. It’s all gone downhill.

It’s all in shambles. There’s no peace accord. Yeah. That’s it.

It was about a side letter that Carter had promised Sadat around the city of Jerusalem, which is saying that the American position, which had been, you know, the American policy wasn’t changing.

And that really, you know, we all in conflicts, we all get triggered by things. And that really triggered Begin and whatever, because, you know, Jerusalem, you know. So he’s at a that’s it moment. That’s it, we’re leaving. We’re leaving.

And that often happens, if you notice, at the end of a difficult negotiation, there’s this last minute blow up, you know, which threatens to blow everything up. So Carter was very sad, but he remembered that Begin had asked for these, you know, he remembered that Begin had asked for these photographs of him together with Sadat, together with Carter, you know, there at Camp David and for his grandchildren. And Carter usually just signed it, you know, Jimmy Carter, whatever. But this time he’s, you know, he made it out for each person. Edith, he remembered that he got the names of, I think there were maybe eight grandchildren, each one of them. And he signed it with love, Jimmy Carter.

And just a personal touch. He went over there and he walked over from his cabin to Begin’s cabin. And Begin was, they’re kind of cool with each other, of course. And Carter was feeling very sad because the whole thing had collapsed, you know, and thinking, okay, maybe there’s gonna be war. I mean, this is not just a collapse of an agreement.

It might mean going back to war very shortly. So just very heavy hearted. And he handed, he said, you know, Mr. Prime Minister, you’d asked me for these photographs. So I brought them over to say goodbye to you. And Begin looked at one and he sees the name of his grandchild, you know, Edith Merav.

And his eyes start to water. He’s thinking about his grandchildren. And Carter says, you know, I was hoping that we could tell your grandchildren that their grandfather and I had brought peace to the Middle East. And so then, you know, they were both tearing up. And that human shift, that human reframe of the situation of saying, what’s this really about?

You know, it’s about the longer term. It’s about the grandchildren. It’s about the future. It’s about your legacy. That changed things.

And even though Begin didn’t immediately change his mind on that moment, just changed the tone of the conversation. And Carter mentioned at the very end, you know, Begin said, couldn’t you just withdraw that letter? He said, Carter said, look, I gave my word to Sadat. I’m not going to, I can’t, I can’t do that. You know, I’d like to be able to do it, but I can’t.

It’s my, it’s my, I gave my word to him. He trusts me. He trusts me. But what I can do is I can maybe reframe the letter, rephrase the lettering. So I’m not, I don’t mention exactly what the American policy is on Jerusalem, which is a, but I just say the American policy as it was articulated by the U.S. ambassador to the UN, whose name was Arthur Goldberg at the time, you know, on this date, whatever.

Just so it’s not so, um, it’s not so explicit. Anyway, then he walks back and he’s about to go over to Sadat to explain that the whole thing is over. And he’s at his cabin and the phone rings in his cabin and it’s Menachem Begin saying, Mr. President, I’ve decided after much deliberation to accept your letter. And that was, and then they go to the White House and announce it to the world. And, and to this day we, we benefit from it, but it just shows you how, even in these very big, you know, negotiations between states and so on, that human connection, that human touch, the heart, the human heart, one heart to another, you know, just softening really can make a huge difference at the right moment.

Carey Nieuwhof:

There were so many, are so many principles foundational to your approach, but in getting the yes, and you share it again in other books, is positions versus interests. And I’m wondering if you could break that down, because that’s something I’ve shared so many times with leaders over the years. And it was so transformative in my thinking. What is the difference between an interest and a position? And why do you say focus on interests, not positions?

William Ury:

Because when there’s ever a negotiation or a conflict, and I must say, you know, I define negotiation very broadly as back and forth communication, trying to reach agreement. In that broad sense of the term, when I ask, you know, leaders, who do, you know, who do you negotiate with the course of your day? It starts with their families, their coworkers, everybody, everybody, including yourself. And then I ask them, well, how much of your time do you spend negotiating? And when they think about it, it’s 25%, it’s 50%, 75% of their time.

So in that broad sense of the term, so this is like every day. And what we tend to do in a negotiation is we take a position. In other words, we take a concrete stance. We say, I want it for that amount of money. I want that office with a corner view.

I want this concrete thing for my church or whatever it is. It’s very concrete. Positions are the concrete things we say we want. Interests are the underlying motivations. Interests are the underlying needs or desires or aspirations or fears or concerns that people have that drive us, the drivers that drive us to take a certain position.

And in negotiation, we tend to, you know, like, okay, we want the Sinai back. You know, that’s a position. We’re going to keep the Sinai. You know, that’s a position. And you can just, you can just bump heads.

You pressure the other side to accept your position. Then the more you push, the more they push back. You get nowhere. Or you kind of give up your position and no one likes to give in. But actually, if you ask the magical question, why?

Why is it you want that? You know, why do you want the Sinai? Well, security. We need to be safe. You know, tanks have rolled across.

Why do you want to keep it? Well, sovereignty. You know, it’s been since then, suddenly you’re at a level where it’s different. And then you can ask the question, well, how do we meet your interests and meet mine? How do we meet everyone’s interests in this?

And so it’s a reframe. It’s a magical shift that unlocks the potential for creativity to explore options for mutual gain. And it’s funny how it’s just a mindset. We just approach things as positions. And then you look behind the position’s interest and suddenly possibilities emerge that you might not have imagined before.

Carey Nieuwhof:

So let’s go with that in mind to 2017 with Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump and probably the most credible threat of nuclear war that we’ve had in a generation as the two strong-willed leaders start to spar off and call each other names and threaten to blow each other up. You got involved with that. Can you explain how?

William Ury:

I did. Because back in the 80s, I was working not just on the Middle East.

The thing that was like, how do we avert a nuclear war between the United States and the then Soviet Union? And so I worked with the White House and senators and so on on how we kind of create and with the Soviets about how we can reduce the risk of an inadvertent or accidental nuclear war. And so when 2017, I felt a little bit like Rip Van Winkle, pulled out like 30, 40 years later, here we go again. We thought we had kind of prevented nuclear war, the end of the Soviet Union and all that. And suddenly, here we are back with a situation that experts were saying could be as high as a 50% chance of a nuclear war as Kim Jong-un was busily testing nuclear missiles that could reach the United States.

Trump said this will not happen. Trump threatened fire and fury and will destroy the whole country. Kim, the rhetoric got high. And so I thought, okay, I’m not an expert here on North Korea, but someone needs to do something. And so I thought, okay.

And what I like to do is I like to begin with an exercise, which I think is an exercise any leader can do in an impossible situation, which is I like to begin by writing the victory speeches. You know, begin at the end. And it’s again, it’s a thought experiment where you write the other side’s victory speech in which they accept what you want them to do. But then they have to go in front of their constituency, their flock, the people they care about, their board of directors, their voters, and explain why accepting your proposal was a victory for them. Yeah.

And, you know, it’s an exercise to kind of in imagination. And so in this case, I sat down and I tried to write Trump’s victory speech. And, you know, what are the three key talking points of it would be? And, you know, I researched and I knew quite a little bit, quite a bit about, you know, Donald Trump. And I researched and I thought, okay, well, it’s three things, basically.

One is I got the greatest deal ever. You know, this was the deal that saved the world. You know, Obama couldn’t do this. Bush couldn’t do this. No one could do this.

But I was able to do this because Obama had actually in, had told Trump, this is the hardest, this is the most dangerous situation I’m leaving you as a situation with North Korea. And so Trump had needed to be, say, this was the greatest deal. He really prides himself on being a great dealmaker. Second thing is, you know, I kept America safe, of course. You know, that’s the interest, right?

And the third is he really cared about money, says, and I didn’t spend a penny. But Kim was harder. He was kind of a little bit of a black box at the time. No one really knew him. He was a new leader.

He was young. No one knew about him. So I went on the web, Google, and I said, who knows anything about Kim Jong-un? And the only person who seemed to know anything about Kim Jong-un was a retired American basketball player by the name of Dennis Rodman. Right, right.

And Dennis Rodman had gone over there for an exhibition game. And it turned out Kim loved, you know, basketball. And he loved the Chicago Bulls that Dennis Rodman and Michael Jordan had played on back in the 90s championship games. And so they struck up a friendship. So I thought, OK, I got to find Dennis Rodman.

It’s not so easy. You know, like, how do you get to Dennis Rodman, you know? And so it’s, you know, like, who do you know? Who do you know? Who do you know?

Who do you know? It didn’t work out. One, it didn’t work out. Finally, I was able to get in touch with someone who was a friend of Dennis Rodman who said, he comes to visit me sometimes. And you can come.

So I, you know, we have pizza together. So I flew out to have pizza in LA there. And the guy was there, but Dennis Rodman didn’t show up. He was out partying. And he said, wow, he likes to party at night.

And he called him up. And Dennis Rodman didn’t even kind of recognize him at that moment. So, but he said, don’t worry. Maybe you can change your plans. Stay here overnight.

And maybe he’ll come back in the middle of night and you can catch him then. And I thought, oh, okay. But I thought, you know, stakes are high. No one knows anything about Kim. We might go to nuclear war.

So I did that. I changed my whole schedule around. I missed him in the middle of the night, but I got up in the early in the morning. I went out to, you know, to see the housekeeper. She said, well, you’re in luck.

Dennis came back. The trouble is he often sleeps in for three days. Do you want me to wake him up? So I said, yeah. And so about an hour later, he comes out, you know, he’s got his tattoos and his earrings and his nose ring and all that, you know, it’s just bad day, man, bad day.

What do you want? You know, he was kind of grumpy, very grumpy. But we sat down and I’d learned a lot from that hour and a half I had with him. He told me about, I said, look, you know, what, what do you want? I said, well, you’re the only man who seems to know Kim Jong-un.

We got to stop the, we got to prevent a nuclear war here. He said, well, you know, I met him. We got friends. He took me out drinking. We, I held his baby.

You know, he told me about him and, and, but, and there was one thing he told, he said, and I really believe that he doesn’t really want war. I believe he really wants, you know, to find a way out of this, which no one else believed. Everyone at that point thought this guy’s a kind of a, you know, kind of a, he was painted as some kind of almost like a lunatic or something in, in, in, in, in people’s eyes. And, uh, and then he said to me, something that’s really critical for any of us in, in where you’re trying to understand someone. He told me a little bit about, uh, Kim Jong-un’s dream.

Kim Jong-un had a dream. He told, uh, not, not a, not a dream, but you know, what, what was his dream idea? His dream was one day to be able to walk down Fifth Avenue in New York, go to Madison Square Garden and watch the New York Knicks play the Chicago Bulls. And that was bingo. Okay.

That gives you a little bit of an insight into the other side. How do you put yourself into someone’s shoes? A little insight into that. And I thought, well, what if that could be true? What if we could make that true?

I mean, to prevent a nuclear war, that would be worth doing. So that inspired me to keep going and to be able to come back to the victory speech of what Kim would say, which would be something like, you know, I kept my regime safe. I kept my family safe. You know, safety often is number one, you know, and this, and number two is people yearn for respect. And he were finally, you know, getting the respect we deserve from the rest of the world, you know, and that’s why he could go and be in New York and so on.

And the third is, you know, and we’ll be the next Asian tiger. We’ll, we’ll be the next economic miracle, something like that. But that was a huge lesson for me of the importance of listening to the other side, figuring out what they really want, what’s there. And so everyone was shocked and surprised when, you know, a year, a year and a bit later, you know, Kim and, and Trump were meeting in Singapore for an unprecedented meeting, never before had a North Korean and an American leader met. And they actually, even though they didn’t, you know, reach a detailed agreement that actually ended the thing, their meeting, again, the personal thing, changed the atmosphere and the risk of nuclear war plunged from an estimated 50% to less than 1%.

So it just showed me that the power of, of, of writing those victory speeches, imagining that, because then they were able to give their victory speeches. Trump came back and he immediately tweeted, you know, Americans can be safe now, rest safe, there’s no threat from North Korea. So, so that ability to really work backwards from the victory speeches in those difficult situations, I find is maybe the, the key technique or the iconic technique of a possibilist.

Carey Nieuwhof:

So I’d love for you, it was Jim Collins who really challenged you to take decades of your ideas. He’s a good friend of yours. And to consolidate them into sort of one big work, right? One, one main idea. Do you want to walk us through the framework? Because so many of the leaders who listen to this, they love their jobs, hate the conflict. They hate the angry emails. They hate the people who are like, well, now I’m leaving the staff conflict. And I mean, yeah, this works at de-escalating nuclear war.

It also works on a very micro level of, you know, home and work and office and people, et cetera. So do you mind just giving us the, the overview of the possible list framework?

William Ury:

For sure. So Jim and I like to hike. We were hiking in the mountains near our home here in Colorado. And Jim is also really good at asking unexpected questions. And so we’re on this hike and he says, turns to me and he says, you know, he says, you’ve been wandering around the world right now. There’s a lot of conflict in the world, just like you’re mentioning, whether it’s at the micro to the macro, to the political, to the business. He said, you know, you’ve been dealing with some of the world’s toughest conflicts for a long time, the last 45 years. Do you think you could sum up everything you’ve learned in a single sentence? And that was the kicker, a single sentence. And I looked at him quizzically and he said, yeah, he said, you know, Charles Darwin was able to do that, you know, and the origin of species and so on. He said, do you think you could do that? And I like challenges and I like simplicity. So I went back and thought about it. And then our next hike, you know, I gave it my best shot. And then he said, now go write the book. Great. Thanks Jim. Take the sentence and make it into a book, you know, get it down to its kernel.

And the sentence had three parts. This was the framework was that actually when you’re dealing with a difficult conflict situation, be it with your staff, be it with your parishioners, be it with whoever you’re dealing with, be it, you know, at home, the first and biggest obstacle that we face is not what we think it is. We think it’s that difficult person. We think it’s that difficult organization or, and, but actually I find the most difficult person who gets in the way of us being successful in negotiation is right here. It’s me. It’s myself. It’s not the person on the other side of the table. It’s the person on this side of the table. It’s the person I look at in the mirror every morning. It’s me. It’s our own very natural, very human tendency to react. In other words, to act out of fear, act out of anger, that quick reaction that as the old saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. You will send the best email you will ever regret. And so that’s the biggest obstacle. And what I find the key to success here is the ability to pause for a single second. It’s that difference between the stimulus and the response. In the middle of that, there’s choice. There’s agency. You can pause and go to what I call the balcony, which is just a metaphor for imagining that you’re negotiating on a stage. Part of you goes to a mental and emotional, a spiritual balcony, some place of calm and perspective where you can keep your eyes on the prize. What is most important to you? What is most important in this situation to you? And see the larger picture. And if we can go to the balcony, that is the first victory. The first victory in this process is a victory with yourself because it turns out that negotiation is an inside game and we negotiate from the inside out.

Carey Nieuwhof:

So it’s getting perspective. It’s that pause. It’s reacting, not responding. It’s a little bit of delay between the stimulus and the response.

William Ury:

That’s it. It’s that tiny thing. Everyone has their favorite way of doing it. Some people take a breath or two breaths or three breaths just to bring some oxygen to your brain.

You ask for a break. I like to go for walks even before a difficult situation or just pause, walk in nature, pray. Prayer is a way of going to the balcony. Meditation is a way of going to the balcony. We all have our favorite ways. Camp David was a giant balcony. There are places that have balcony. The church itself might be a balcony. In other words, it’s any place, any methodology that helps you go to your higher self, your better self that brings out the best in you so that you can actually have that clarity and that perspective because conflict, you can’t see anything. It’s like all this dust and dirt in the air and just a place where you can ask yourself, what’s truly important here? You can prevent yourself from reacting in a way that, as Gandhi once said, an eye for an eye and we all go blind.

Carey Nieuwhof:

True. Okay, so that’s part one. Go to the balcony.

William Ury:

That’s part one. That’s the ability to negotiate with yourself, to get to yes with yourself. Then that sets the stage for the second thing, which is getting to yes with others, which we’ve been talking about, which is, okay, how do you get to yes with someone who doesn’t seem to be? Their answer is no. They’re not interested in yes. You may be open, but they’re taking a very fixed position and they’re dug in and they’re making threats and they’re emotional and so they’re not on the balcony. What can you do in that situation, having gone to the balcony?

Well, to me, it’s like your mind is over here. Their mind is way over here. They’re in a different place. It’s almost like when I was walking with Jim, there’s like a giant valley between us and another thing. It’s like a chasm. It’s like a Grand Canyon. It’s between where you are and where they are, and that’s filled with doubt, anxiety, fear. How am I going to look to someone? Unmet needs, baggage. They did this to me in the past. All that stuff, right? So our job, which is not easy, is to, for a moment, leave where your mind is and start the conversation where they are. Move over to their place and then proceed to build them a bridge over that chasm. In other words, a golden bridge. Make it as attractive as possible because our job is to try to make it as easy as possible for the other side to move in the direction we’d like them to move. It’s not how to make it hard for them because sometimes in conflict, we think, okay, how do I make it harder for them? No. Our job is to make it easier for them to make the decision we want them to make, to deliver that victory speech that actually accepts what we want them to do. That’s the key. So you want to build them a golden bridge. So instead of pushing, it’s the opposite. It’s attracting. And it starts with the process of listening, which is maybe, we think of negotiation as talking, but it’s actually much more about listening. They say God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason, which is to listen twice as much as we talk. Because by listening, not just listening the way we often listen, which is, I’m going to listen to you so that I can refute what you just said. Right. Yeah. It’s listening from within their frame of reference, listening, putting yourself in their shoes, listening with empathy, listening with your heart, not just your head. Listening not just for what’s being said, but for what’s not being said. That’s the key to building them that bridge.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Okay. So that’s number two. And then take us to the third element of the framework.

William Ury:

The third element, balcony unlocks the potential that exists within us. It’s the inside part. It’s the inside negotiation. Bridge unlocks the potential between the parties, right? Where’s the potential for mutual gain? Where’s that demilitarized Sinai? Where are those options for mutual gain? Where’s the creative possibilities? The truth is in today’s world, it’s hard for people to go to the balcony. We live in such a reactive, stressful world.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Well, and it’s instant now. I mean, you can just pick up your phone and you’ve just blown it up, right? Immediately.

William Ury:

That’s it. That’s exactly it, Kerry. And it’s hard for people to build a golden bridge. I mean, people are burning bridges, they’re not building bridges. People are not going to the balcony, they’re going to the gutter. And so how do you go to the balcony yourself? How do you help the other side go to the balcony? How do you build that bridge in these arduous circumstances that we face today, whether it’s in the micro or whether it’s in the macro? And that’s where we’re going to need some help. We’re going to need some help. And normally speaking, when we’re in a conflict situation, we tend to reduce everything to two sides, us versus them. It’s the Democrats versus the Republicans, it’s progressives versus conservatives, it’s labor versus management. It’s always us versus them, which blinds us to the fact that no conflict is two-sided. There’s always a third side. And that third side is the larger whole. It’s the side of the whole. It’s the people around us, the larger community to which we both belong. It might be the community of churches, it might be the community of the neighborhood community, it might be the family, it might be the work organization. It’s the larger whole, that third side that we forget. That’s an untapped potential that if we can organize and engage that third side, it can create a container, like a safe space within which the most difficult conflict can gradually be transformed, within which the people around us who can help us go to the balcony, the people around us who can help build those bridges. And it’s not just mediators. Mediators, of course, are classic third-siders, but it’s our friends, it’s our neighbors, it’s our colleagues. It’s that outside perspective. It’s that outside perspective. And we need more and more in this world to engage that third side.

And my suggestion to those of you who are listening who are church leaders or business leaders, for that matter, is, guess what? You can be that third side. You are often that third side. All of us, any of us, can be the third side and encourage people to take the third side, because that’s the missing ingredient often in these situations that allows even the most difficult conflicts to be transformed, is the remembrance of the whole.

Carey Nieuwhof:

So who was that third side in the Trump and Kim Jong-un conflict? I mean, I guess you were part of that. Who else?

William Ury:

I was there. I mean, it was anyone who was concerned about, you know, reducing the risk of nuclear war. But in the end, it’s the world, it’s humanity. I mean, who’s going to suffer? I mean, it’s the people around who are going to suffer. It’s like, everyone in the world would be impacted by war. There would be…

Carey Nieuwhof:

Is that sort of like in Getting to Yes, you talk about the BATNA, something I’ve used over and over again, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. But then in your new book, you talk about the WHATNA, which is the worst alternative to a negotiated agreement. If we can’t work this thing out with North Korea and the U.S., we have no planet left, right? There’s no Madison Square Gardens to go to. Right. We blow up the Middle East, etc., etc.

William Ury:

That’s what motivates the third side. But the third side could be even like, for example, I reached out eventually, and I reached out to Ivanka Trump. She’s the president’s daughter, right? He trusts her. He doesn’t trust many people, but he trusts his own flesh and blood and trusts her. She’s a third sider. She’s a potential third sider. She wants her father to succeed. She wants her father to have a legacy and so on. So it’s the people around us. It’s the people on our side. It doesn’t have to be neutrals. So it’s everybody. The third side, the truth is, it’s all of us. All of us are the third side. Even the parties themselves are part of the larger third side. They may not realize it, but they are. They’re part of the larger community.

And I saw that happen in South Africa. I was there during the time of apartheid. Yeah. And it looked like there was going to be race war in Southern Africa for generations. And I watched over five years as that situation was transformed. It was transformed by the engagement of the third side, starting often with the church.

Actually, it was interesting. Church leaders, the people of faith said, there’s got to be a better way. Look at the Bible and so on. And the business community also said, this can’t go on. This is terrible for business. We can’t, whatever it is, because we’ve got all these sanctions and we can’t work here. So the people of faith, the business leaders created a third side where they brought together the government leaders, the white nationalists and the black nationalists together. People like Mandela, they brought them together and created a container, a space within which let’s find a way to go behind the positions for what are the real interests here, long-term economic well-being, long-term safety, dignity for everybody. And I saw a remarkable political transformation of that conflict that seemed almost impossible to everyone. And this is the key thing is that you take a leader like Nelson Mandela. He’d been in jail for 27 years. What did he do? He was very reactive. He was kind of a boxer. He learned in jail to go to the balcony. He learned to meditate. He said, it’s so important to observe yourself. He then learned the language of his adversaries, of his enemies. Yeah, he studied Afrikaans. He studied Afrikaans. He studied their history so he could speak to them in their language. He helped build that golden bridge. And he was a third side leader. He was a leader for his own side, but he always said, I’m fighting not just for the freedom of the blacks. I’m fighting for the freedom of the whites too. I’m fighting for the freedom of everyone. And that’s what’s needed is balcony, bridge, third side. That’s what he so eloquently, articulately demonstrated with his life and his leadership.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Well, I’d love to go through and I want to open up, I want to zoom out again before we wrap up. But if you’ve got lots of time today, which I’m so thankful for, I want to go through some real world scenarios. So most of us are probably not getting called to the White House, although you’ve been there for 45 years now on a regular basis. But we are leading organizations and I want to pick a case. So we’ll talk about staff conflict, but I want to start with congregational conflict.

So, you know, you don’t even need a pandemic to have congregational conflict. I remember when I was starting out, the church is very small, dying. I came in 30 year old upstart. I’m like, all right, let’s go reach the community and let’s change everything. Change the governance, change the music, change the preaching, the style, and quote, modernized it. And believe it or not, not everybody stood up and applauded William. There were people who were opposed to the change. And this is still rippling through the church today. There are some leaders listening who are still fighting what we affectionately or not affectionately call the worship wars in church, you know, traditional versus contemporary. So for me, that was a five-year blend. But there was about at any given time, 10 to 25% of people who were upset in our church. I would love for you to just walk through some of the principles, positions, not interest, and I’ll give the spoiler alert away. What so many people tried, I didn’t do that because I just saw it never end in success, is they say, well, you know what we’ll do? We’ll compromise. So we’ll have a traditional service and a contemporary service. We’ll have some songs that are newer, some songs that are older. We’ll do some on guitar. We’ll do some, you know, that’s almost gone in a lot of churches, but I know that there are thousands of listeners listening now who are still fighting that battle. So it’s something where a lot of listeners are familiar with. How do you handle that using your principles?

William Ury:

Right. Well, actually, let me begin by just giving a story from, actually comes from getting, yes, but it comes from a woman whom Peter Drucker once called the mother of modern management, Mary Parker Follett. She was once in a library, the university library, I think it was a Harvard library. There were two students quarreling and one wanted the window open. The other one, the window closed. They got into a big quarrel about it. Bothered everyone in the library. So a fine librarian comes over and she asked the first one, why do you want the window open? Says, I want some fresh air. So she goes the other one, why do you want the window closed? He says, well, the draft is blowing my papers around.

So then she says, how do we get you fresh air without you a draft? And then you think about it for a moment. One says, I’ve got an idea. And he goes into the room next door and opens a window there, thereby providing fresh air for the first person without a draft for the second. Now think about that simple situation for a moment and apply it to your question, which is, you know, what you find successful negotiators doing is going behind the positions, open window, closed window. The librarian asked the magical question, why, why is it you want that? What’s really going on? Fresh or no draft. And then they’re able to come up with the, you know, people were able to come up with the equivalent of an open window in the next room. Note that it’s not a split the difference compromise. I have open window in this case would have provided too much draft and not enough fresh air. It’s a creative solution that actually meets the interests of both sides. And that’s what we’re looking for those days is those these days is those open windows in the next room. And what it, what, what, what’s the essential thing is it’s the ability to it’s the ability to probe, to listen. Cause it’s, you know, what do you do with those 10 or 20% of the people? If you listen to people, even if they don’t get what they want, if they feel heard, if they feel seen, if they don’t feel excluded, if they don’t feel left behind, that’s they can, they can adapt. They can start to change every and people change at different rates and everyone changes. But so sometimes people are going, no, we’re going to change right away. And right now it’s too much. People freeze up, shut down, they go into opposition. But if you listen to them, I mean, like, for example, I remember this with my, when my daughter was very young, you know, let’s imagine you have a small child who doesn’t want to go to school and they take, they take a, they take, um, they, you know, they’ll, they’ll, you know, you’re trying to wake them up and try to get them to school and out the door and all this stuff. And they’re, they’re making all this thing. Well, if you try to force that, then of course, you know, they just do that more. But if you just slow down for a moment, you go at their own pace, just slow down, meet them where they are, meet the congregation where they are, those people where they are, stay with them for a while, see them. The best model I know in this situation is you want to go fast, go slow, start where they are. People’s minds don’t change overnight. Start where they are, really listen, have them explain what they loved about the things in the past, what it brought for them, their childhood memories, everything, their parents, just really go deep into that. Then in a different state, then you might be able to kind of get them to go because that’s the key thing. If you start slow, you end up going faster. But if you start fast, people immediately put on the brakes and you got a real conflict on your head.

Carey Nieuwhof:

I should have had you on speed dial in those early years because I was a bit of a bull in a China shop, but I did, I did slow down. I would say, you know, it’s interesting to revisit this now, 25 years later, I would say probably 70, like everybody, I have this theory, everybody in your church right now likes it the way it is because if they didn’t like it the way it was, they wouldn’t be there. It’s a voluntary choice, right? Oh, I like this. I like this restaurant the way it is. I like what’s on the menu. I don’t need it to change. All right. So everybody in your church likes it the way it is right now. Otherwise they wouldn’t be there. And the problem was that there were like six people, 15 people, 20 people left at these three little churches I started with and they kind of knew the writing was on the wall, but I did spend a lot of time. I think initially, if it was like, how many people are in favor of like totally different music, totally different this everybody, 90% would have said thumbs down. But I listened to them and I said, how many of you are interested in reaching your children? And when I got beyond positions to interests and what about your grandkids? Like could together, could we build a church that your children and grandchildren would love to attend? Well, if that’s the case, then what would it require? Yeah, probably some change along the way. And when it got really intense, you know, and we were selling the buildings and moving to an elementary school and amalgamating the churches, and we’d had quite a bit of growth and already some change underway, William, there was one member in particular. He’s not with us anymore. I think I can use his name. His name was Hugh, and I went to see Hugh and he was just opposed to everything. And he was in his late seventies and I could see I’m not, I’m not going to win this one. And I said, you know what? You know what the good news is Hugh? There’s 20 other churches within a 10 minute, 20 minute drive of here, 30 minute drive of here that do church exactly the way you want. You should go make yourself at home there. Like you’ll love it. And he goes, you know what? I think I’m going to do that. And I’m like, yeah, that’s okay. You go with my blessing, man. Like enjoy it. And he died a few years later and they did his funeral just the way they wanted him to do his funeral. He got to sing the songs he wanted. But at the end, about 90% of the people came with us, which was, great. Anyway, any thoughts on that?

William Ury:

Well, yeah, for sure. That’s the power of going to the balcony and looking at your BATNA. His BATNA, his best alternative to negotiate agreement was to go to another church. You helped him see that he had a BATNA there and his BATNA was actually better than any agreement he could make with you. And so the purpose of negotiation, this is the key thing, Carey, is that the purpose of negotiation is always to reach agreement. The purpose of negotiation is to satisfy your interests. He had an interest in staying the same. Yeah. You had an interest in doing things differently. So that was a perfectly successful negotiation because he went off, exercised his BATNA with your blessing, and it was consensual. You both wish each other well, and you go off. That to me is a successful negotiation. You didn’t have to reach agreement on how the sessions are. No, you agreed to disagree.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Yeah, we did. I never thought of that as a BATNA, but you’re right. That’s exactly what it was. And the good news is, you know, it’s not like a nuclear negotiation where, oh, the future of the world is here. It’s like, there’s 10 other churches. Just go to one of them. They’ll welcome you there. And now, you know, it turned out to be quite successful. Our biggest challenge is space. We’re always out of room. I love that problem. That’s a great problem. So that makes me feel good about those early conversations. Another common issue that comes up with so many leaders, I get DMs on this all the time, and I want to give you a specific. There’s high conflict staff where, you know, you got two driven leaders who are clashing. That happens once in a while, but you know what happens a lot in churches? Because pastors have good hearts. We hire people we like. We hire people we enjoy, but they’re not very good performers. Or the new leader comes in. You know, there’s a big generational shift going on. The boomers are moving out. Millennials are moving in. And you’ve got highly paid staff who really haven’t contributed much and maybe don’t fit the new mold. And then the DM inevitably comes to me. I know what I need to do. I need to let, like, two people go, or I got to let this person go. They’re just not working out. What do I do?

How do I do it? Would you give us your take on that difficult situation? And these are good-hearted people. They’ve not, no moral breach. They’re not, you know, haven’t done anything illegal. They’re just like, not very good team. They’re just not very good at what they do. And it’s time to move them off of staff. So what do you do in a situation like that?

William Ury:

That’s hard. First of all, it’s hard. Go to the balcony. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Yeah. You know, try and understand what your interest is, which is, you have to give what I would call, I wrote a book about this called The Power of a Positive No.

Yep.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Oh, no, I got getting past no here. Sorry, wrong book. The next one was The Power of a Positive No.

William Ury:

So The Power of a Positive No was precisely about the situation is, The Power of a Positive No takes three parts to it. It’s a yes, followed by no, followed by yes. It’s a sandwich, the no sandwich in between two yes. We hate to say no, pastors, I’m sure, because you want to please people. You want to keep people happy. You don’t like to say no.

People don’t like to hear the word no from you, right? True. So we tend to be no avoidant. So this is why it’s like we have a yes arm, but we also need to have a no arm, right? Yes and no, we need both. We need the yeses to reach peace and agreement, and we need the no to kind of get standards and move. No is the word of strategy. It’s like the way to get to a strategy to be focused, you got to say no to a lot of other things, right? So in this case, you may be faced with having to say no to these employees who’ve been there for a long time and whatever. So a positive no begins with a yes, and that yes is both the respect, to really respect and honor them and acknowledge everything that they’ve contributed. Okay, you might get that. But the yes fundamentally is to what’s most important right now. The church is moving in a certain direction. You’re trying to satisfy the needs of the congregation and so on, and this person, they’re not with the program. So if you just say, it’s like for the sake of what’s going on here, what our purpose is in our present, it’s not a rejection of them personally. The yes means you’re not rejecting them, you’re just saying yes to its change, the new changes that need to be brought about that are necessary for this thing to grow. So that yes, so you gave them their chance, then there’s a no, which as a matter of fact, we’re not going to be able to retain you because the fit isn’t there anymore, right? Whatever it is, but it’s very calm matter of fact, no, it’s not angry, no, it’s not a weak, no, it’s not a hesitant, no. It’s just like, because of this situation and whatever it is, the fit isn’t there or whatever the phrase you come up with, but it’s a yes. You’re not saying no to them, you’re saying yes to something that’s larger, for the sake of the church or whatever it is. I’ll give you an example of it. I had a fellow in my class once who had the job of, he was an internet company, and then there was a bust in the internet market at one point, and he had to lay off 500 engineers. And most people like in this situation don’t want to lay off something. His name was Jacques, and he lived in Seattle, he was French though. And most people would just, okay, that’s human resources, let them deal with it. And the human resources, well, let’s put a pink slip on someone.

No, he thought, realized saying no is one of the most important decisions you can make. Just like saying any agreement, he insisted on doing it personally. He brought in every one of those 500, he met with them face to face, and he showed them respect. He said, look, we really appreciate everything you’re doing, everything you’re doing, but for the sake of the company that we built up here, we can’t pay you anymore. It doesn’t work anymore, so we’re going to have to let you go. That’s the no. And then there’s a yes on the other side, which was, what can I do to help? Can we get you a referral? Can we get you a reference? Can we find you like you did with the person you got to go find in the church? I referred him to other churches. How can we help you? So it began with a yes, a yes to everything that we built up here and whatever, a yes to the higher good, whatever it is. And the no is, it’s not working out anymore here, I can’t pay you. And there’s a yes on the other side, now what can we do? It’s the yes, no, yes. Well, anyway, Jacques did that. A year later, the money came into the internet market again. Everyone’s scrambling for the best talent. Guess who had first pick? Jacques, why? Because he had treated people with basic respect. He’d given them their respect and he said to this day, when he told the story, he gets stopped by people we hardly recognize on the streets of Seattle and they thanked him for the way in which they’d been fired.

Carey Nieuwhof:

My goodness. Well, and that’s the other thing. I’ve been in this area for 29 years, same church, and I say to my successor, if he’s upset because somebody is leaving, it’s rare, but it happens these days, I’m like, they’ll probably be back. And that’s one thing, if you do it well, they often come back, which is fascinating.

William Ury:

I just want to say one thing. The cheapest concession you can make in negotiation is to give the other person a little respect. It costs you nothing and their dignity means everything to them. So I’ve seen that so often. I know you’re dealing with a hostage taker, you’re dealing with a criminal, you’re dealing with a, I don’t know, show them, we’re talking about basic dignity that is every human being’s innate gift, gift from above, from the divine. You know, in that sense, dignity is indivisible. So if you can respect, and Mandela respected his adversaries, you can respect people, go so far. And the easiest way to behaviorally show respect is to listen, to really listen to them, give them a hearing. How does it feel to be let go after all these years you’ve devoted all this time? Give them all the time they need. Let them be heard, be seen, be acknowledged, be respected. It’ll be a lot easier for them to accept something that’s uncomfortable for them to accept.

Carey Nieuwhof:

I want to know how you prepare yourself to be in very emotionally charged situations. You were in South America, there was a prime minister or president, I forget exactly because it’s Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela. He yelled at you for 30 minutes, like in a room, just screamed at you for 30 minutes. Or, you know, you’re nervous, like you’re human. You’re going into the Oval Office to advise the president of the United States, or you’re negotiating with coal miners who are angry and ready to kill you, right?

The stories you tell are just incredible. What do you do? Because I know so many leaders who are just like, I’m not sleeping at night. I don’t know. They get nervous. They don’t know how to, and it’s hard for me too, still, to regulate my emotions in a charged situation. What are some tips?

William Ury:

Well, it’s hard for anyone. It’s hard for me too. I just want to say that. It doesn’t get easier. Okay, that’s good to know. No, it’s just, I mean, and we’re lifelong learners. This is lifelong learning. Yeah, yeah. You know, like listening, you know. You think you’re not listening, dad, and then you come home and your daughter says, hey, dad, you’re not listening to me. It’s humbling, and it’s great. They’re our best teachers. So that story was maybe a time when I really, really appreciated the importance of the balcony. Former President Jimmy Carter had asked me to go down to Venezuela. It was in a huge political crisis. There were a million people on the streets of the capital, Caracas, demanding the immediate resignation of the president, Hugo Chavez. There were a million people on the streets supporting him. There was violence breaking out. International observers were worried this was going to break out into a civil war. And so I had a number of meetings with Chavez, and one of them, as you mentioned, he liked to meet at night, and so I showed up at nine o’clock with my colleague Francisco at the Presidential Palace, and at 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock, midnight, we’re expecting to find the president alone. In fact, we find his entire cabinet arrayed behind him, and he motions me to a chair, and he says, oh, Yuri, you’ve been talking to the people here. What do you think of the situation? I said, well, Mr. President, I’ve been talking to some of your government ministers here. I’ve been talking to some of the leaders of the opposition, and I believe they’re making some progress. He said, progress? That wasn’t the word he wanted to hear. Are you a fool? Are you naive?

Are you not seeing the dirty tricks those traitors on the other side are up to? And he leaned in very close to my face. I could feel his hot breath, and he shouted at me for approximately 30 minutes. Well, you’re in that situation. Imagine you’re in the situation. Someone important to you is shouting at you like that. What do you do? In that moment, I talked to a friend some months before who said, you know, he said, William, when you’re in a tough situation, pinch the palm of your hand. I said, Ernan, why would I pinch the palm of my hand? He said, because it’ll give you a temporary pain to keep you alert. Whatever reason, that was my technique for going to the balcony. And it was like, you first look inside, and I could see, okay, I was feeling embarrassed. It’s a host of emotions. I was feeling all my work down the drain. You see your life flash before your eyes for a moment, and I could just feel the feelings of sensations, the emotions of sensations. But by listening and paying attention, by listening to that, the nervous system starts to calm down a little bit. It feels seen. You’re a little bit detached. It’s not about suppressing your emotions. It’s about noticing them, observing them, and that gives you a little bit of distance. And then I was able to ask myself the question, which is the key question, what do you really want here? So I’m trying to calm the situation down. So then I said to myself, well, is it really, this is all very quick, but is it really going to do you any good if you get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? Is that really going to advance things? No. Okay. So bite your tongue, listen. And so I listened, and just with that little bit of being on the balcony, pinching upon my hand, breathing, I was able to listen, just take it, don’t respond, because I was thinking defensively, what am I going to say, and this and that. No, I’m not naive, whatever. But you get into an argument. This president, he could give a speech that was seven hours long. We would have been there all night, but 30 minutes of not reacting, I watched him and he was going on and on and on. And then he slowly started to wind down a little bit. I watched his body language, his shoulders slowly sank. And in a weary tone of voice, he asked me, he said, so Yuri, what should I do? Well, that, Jerry, is the faint sound of a human mind beginning to open. That’s your opportunity. That’s your chance. Because before that, if I’d used reason, tried to reason with someone who’s in an angry state of mind, it’s like banging your head against the wall. And at that moment, there was a little bit of an opening. So I said, you know, Mr. President, it’s almost Christmas. Last year, the festivities were canceled because of the conflict. It looks like the same thing is going to happen this year. Why not give everyone a break, a truce, a tregua in Spanish, you know? Why not, like three weeks, whatever. In January, maybe they’ll be in a better mood to listen. Let them enjoy the holidays with their families, you know, the sacred holidays. He said, he looked at me for a moment, he stopped. He said, you know what? That’s an excellent idea. I’m going to put that in my next speech. And he claps me on the back. His mood had completely shifted. And what I learned then and there was maybe the greatest power you have in negotiation is the power not to react. It’s to pause for a moment, it’s to go to the balcony, it’s to listen.

Carey Nieuwhof:

That story takes me back to a congregational meeting in the early days when we were looking at selling the buildings and we had to have a congregational meeting. It was just church constitution. And I remember one gentleman at the back just screamed at me for about what seemed like 10 minutes, just yelling, calling me all kinds of names. And for whatever reason, you know, I’m 32, 33. I’m just standing there at the front and I’m listening. I got my hands folded in front of me and I’m kind of nodding. And for some reason I was very detached, like you described. And at the end he finished. And I said, is there anything else? No, no. Thank you. And that was it. And afterwards I had so many people, how did you keep it together? I’m like, well, what was I going to win at? Like you don’t win those conversations. And inevitably he came along with us. He was quite happy at the end, but he got that off his chest.

William Ury:

That’s it, Cary. That’s absolutely, that’s the secret right there. I’ve blown it too. I’ve blown it too. I know, me too. Not reacting in that moment, just listening, asking him that magic question of, is there anything else? That’s the surprise question. That’s the last thing someone expects. Is there anything else? And just giving them more time, gets it off his chest and then he’s okay. It’s like it’s gone. It’s gone.

Carey Nieuwhof:

I have a theory and I’m willing to have you blow it to smithereens. That’s fine. But I’ve said this for years.

And I’ll tell you what it is and I’ll explain it a little bit. And I tell church leaders sometimes, 95% of the problems in the church have nothing to do with the church. And what I mean by that is somebody has a bad day. Their marriage is falling apart. It’s financially tough. They’ve got a kid that they can’t connect with. Their job’s on the line. And the church is supposed to be a place of stability, right? Even if it’s a growing, dynamic, modern type church, it’s supposed to be a place of stability. And often what I’ve discovered is that people will take whatever is going on in their lives and they’ll be really upset about, I just hate that song. I don’t know why you’re doing that song. Or that message just completely missed. And then when you really listen to them, underneath that is a broken heart. And yeah, maybe it was a bad song or maybe it was a bad message or whatever, or somebody did something. But if you really, as you say, listen and empathize, you’ll often discover there’s a story beneath the story. Any thoughts on that at all, William?

William Ury:

That’s absolutely true. That’s been my experience, Cary. Wow. Exactly. Oftentimes, when people get really angry, it’s got nothing to do with what seems to be the issue. And then if you address the issue, you’re missing the point. Because they’ll be mad about another song tomorrow.

You got it. And if you just listen to them, really, people yearn in this world. People don’t feel heard. They don’t feel seen. They don’t feel appreciated. They don’t feel acknowledged. They don’t feel recognized. And that’s a basic human need, increasingly threatened in today’s era, where there’s so much change happening. There’s so many problems. There’s this and that. The other thing, people are stressed out. So just a little bit of compassion goes a long way. The other thing I’ll say, just deeply in these conflicts, is we’re learning more and more about trauma. So many of these conflicts that we face today, whether they’re in small or they’re bigger, at the bottom of it, there’s trauma. There’s childhood trauma, whether it’s collective trauma, whether it’s ancestral trauma, whatever it is. But some part of them got frozen because it’s just an intelligent response to the overwhelm of our nervous systems. There’s just too much pain. We don’t know how to deal with it. And then we hold it within us. And then at these trigger points, it explodes. But it may have nothing to do with it. And the only thing that works with trauma is listening, is compassion. Actually, there’s even some science about these days. It just settles the nervous system a little bit. So people can then, like that gentleman who was yelling at you, okay, yeah, fine. I was heard. I was seen. Yeah. That’s what he said. I was heard. I was seen. And now I can accept.

I don’t know if you remember, there was a distinguished Swiss psychiatrist, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Do you know? Stages of grief? Yeah. Stages of grief. Well, that happens in negotiation often, or as a church leader, you’re delivering bad news to people, news that they don’t want to hear. It may not be the news that they’re dying, but it’s just news that they don’t want to hear. They go through those same stages, which are they avoid it for a while. It’s not going to happen. They deny it actively. This will not happen. Then they go through anxiety. What are you talking about? Then they go through anger. And you’re the one that they fire the anger at, even though it’s not really about you. But if they can go through their anger, like that gentleman, they go through depression, sadness on the other side, and then acceptance, and now you can solve a problem. Just understand that people are like that. We are all faced with a lot of things we don’t want to hear. Your job is just to help them through that process. It’s not to fix it.

Carey Nieuwhof:

This is so good for my soul, just to hear you sort of affirm that and see that, because it’s always been suspected. So I want to take that, because we’re in an election year as we record this. I think a lot of people are quite nervous about what might happen this fall. If you look at the 2020 election, you look at masks, no masks. Do you think that that 95% of the problems in the church have nothing to do with the church could also somewhat explain the extreme reactions we saw in culture? And I wish the church was an exemption or not, but it was probably amplified in the church, where literally most of the church leaders I know lost a third of their congregation, just stormed out because they did too much, they did too little, it was too online, it was not enough in person. But do you think some of that might have been misdirected trauma, anger, whatever? I do. I absolutely do.

William Ury:

Okay. Can you say more about that? Well, yeah. The stress levels are going up. Just like people feel like their lives are out of control and the pandemic was like, wow. So if you just look at what human beings need, we need some, we need safety. People are feeling increasingly unsafe, not just physically unsafe, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually unsafe even. And so if you just understand, and we want, we also, there’s a human need for recognition, as I mentioned, for being seen. And when you’re in a pandemic, you’re not being seen, you’re not being acknowledged, you’re almost like you’re anonymous, right? So that need, right? Then there’s a need for autonomy, which is a human need, which is having a little bit of control over the things that really matter to you. People feel like they’re losing that. So the church can be a place, ideally, even in these really tough, tumultuous times, this is why I wrote the book, is we’re not gonna end conflict because we’re going through turbulent, tumultuous times. There’s even more conflict coming along our way, but we can learn to transform it. It doesn’t have to be destructive. It doesn’t have to be fighting each other and where everybody loses. We can go to the balcony, we can build those bridges instead of burning them. We can go to the balcony instead of going to the gutter, and we can take the third side instead of just dividing everything into two sides. And that, to me, is the role of a church leader, is to be a third side. I mean, what is God? What is a church if not a third side?

Hopefully, right? It’s a third side. It’s the larger whole. Call people to remembrance and create spaces that become places of safety for people, places where they feel seen and heard, places of acknowledgement, places where they feel they have a little bit of control in this. It’s like a Noah’s Ark in the time of flood. It’s like a place to be that. And it requires us to have done that work ourselves. We can’t help people go to the balcony unless we go to the balcony ourselves.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Right. If we’re vehemently side A or side B, we’re in a trap.

William Ury:

Right, unless we build bridges. And it’s like, okay, which side are you on? I’m on the third side, which is not just the in-between side. I’m on the side of the whole that includes you and includes the other side, includes everyone. There’s space here for everybody.

Carey Nieuwhof:

That’s the message of Jesus, after all. It is. So a posture you could take then, theoretically, is, hey, we’re a church where people don’t all vote the same way. We’re a church where people have differing opinions in a time of a lockdown, etc., etc. And that’s all right, because it’s not about this kingdom, it’s about another kingdom. And I just want you to know you’re welcome here. And we want to create the kind of place where maybe we disagree with each other, but we find that what unites us is greater than what divides us. Would it be language like that that could be helpful?

William Ury:

Very. Yeah, that’s it. No matter what divides us, what unites us is far, far greater.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Yeah. One more word about positions and interests, because when we’re talking about the 95% rule, you know, 95% of the conflict has nothing to do with people in the church. I’m reminded of that big negotiation you did. I think it was between two people who were two business leaders who were warring over, was it a supermarket chain or something? And there was the guy in Brazil. Yeah. And, you know, it was an impasse. It was two people who were going to fight to the death and the whole thing could blow up. And I take it there were hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. And this gentleman was older too, but he shouted, Libertado? Is that it? Liberty? Yeah. Can you tell us some of that story? Because I thought that was so helpful, William, in what you discovered in that negotiation.

William Ury:

Yeah. I learned so much from that negotiation. His name was Abelio. He just passed away, actually, last month. And this was about 11, 12 years ago. And it was a battle royal, you know, boardroom battle control over a company, you know, between, and it was Latin America’s largest retailer. And the Financial Times called it maybe the biggest cross-continental boardroom showdown in recent history. And it was like, you know, it’d gone on for two and a half years over control of this company between the guy who was my client and friend who helped founded it with his father and the largest shareholder, which was a French company, a Frenchman. And these two tycoons going at it using lawsuits, arbitrations, got into the press, character assassinations, 150,000 employees with divided loyalties, suffering not just for the parties, but for their families. And even, you know, the president of Brazil had to get on the phone with the president of France because it was affecting their commercial relations. And I was called in. It seemed like an impossible mission. And my friend, Abelio, was going to be chairman for another seven years. I was like, another seven years of this. And he said to me, you know, it feels like, you know, this is my fate. To the day I die, I’m going to be fighting this. So I met with him, not in his office, but in a more of a balcony space in his home, surrounded by his children. He had a second family with young children. And, and I asked him, you know, my favorite balcony questions was, tell me what do you want? You know, what, you know, that’s the interest question. And he gave me, he had the best answer, you know, very, you know, I want, you know, a huge sum of stock. You know, I want the elimination of the three or non-compete clause. I want the company headquarters. I want the company sports team. He had his list, like a good intelligent businessman. Those were his positions.

So I said to him, Abelio, what do you really want? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, you’re a man who seems to have everything in your life. Uh, you know, he’s not poor, everything in your life and whatever. What do you really want most in your life right now? Right now? That was a question he hadn’t been asked before and thought about it. And then he said to me, liberdade, which in Portuguese means freedom. I want my freedom. And the way, the tonality with which he pronounced it, I knew, wow, it’s not just coming from his head. It’s coming from his heart, you know, coming from his soul. He was a man of faith, deep, deep faith. And, uh, he wanted to freedom. And I knew freedom actually had deep resonance for him because I’d done my homework and 30 years before he’d been kidnapped as he left his home by a group of urban guerrillas and held for a week. And he thought he wouldn’t survive held in a coffin. So I said to him, what does freedom actually mean to you? I mean, concretely, he said, well, it’s freedom to spend time with my family, pointed to his kids and his wife. He said, they’re the most important thing in my life. And it’s freedom to make the deals I love to make in the world as a businessman. So I said, Abelio, and this is the BATNA question. Um, you know, you might be in this conflict for a long time. Who, who can give you the freedom that you must want? Is it only your adversary, your former business partner, you know, or is it you what’s stopping you from spending time with your family right now? What’s stopping you from making those business deals right now? And he suddenly realized, Oh, he had a BATNA. He had an alternative. He didn’t have to wait. And psychologically, emotionally, that freed him up so that he could actually, we could actually negotiate more effectively. And then when it came to the actual negotiation, you know, I, I got an appointment with his, not just his business rival, but his business rivals mentor as a potential third sider. You know, someone who was his mentor. It was a banker, very distinguished French banker by the name of David de Rothschild. And, uh, and he invited me to have lunch with him at his rest at a restaurant in Paris. And so I flew over there and this was the key thing was I like to go for a walk before I went for a walk in the streets of Paris. And I came across an art installation of these from China, these giant, uh, I don’t know what they were, giant, um, like silver gold Buddhas. It was just the kind of like, they were just flying in the air, dancing like angels or something in here overlooking the square. And I, and the, and the thought came to me is, you know, that’s what it’s about. Why are we fighting? So when I sat down with David, he said, why are you here? And he’s expecting to say, okay, I’m here to represent my client, whatever. I said, I’m here for only one reason. Life is too short. La vie est trop courte. Which is like, it’s too short for these giant battles where everybody loses. My friend’s losing, your friend’s losing, their families are suffering, the employees are suffering, the society is suffering. Who needs it? And, and that was like a shift. And it was like, suddenly it shifted. It reframed the situation from, okay, I’m rep, I’m the gladiator representing my client.

You’re the gladiator representing your client. No, we’re helping our friends out of a mess that they’re in. Right. And, and he said, so how would you, how would you, how would you approach it? I said, well, if we could just agree that both of our friends and clients, they want freedom. They want freedom to move on their lives. And they also want their dignity. They can’t afford to be seen to lose. This thing has gone too public. It can’t be a winner and a loser here. We have to figure out a way in which neither side loses. In fact, both sides can win. So, well, that’s interesting. And he said, when are you leaving? I said, I’m leaving tomorrow morning. He said, well, give me your number. Anyway, I went for a walk afterwards. I got a phone call from him and said, could you stay on an extra day and come in and talk? We went and talked and in 45 minutes, we just took this very complex, you know, thing. And I just said, what would freedom and dignity mean concretely? You know, elimination of the non-compete clause.

What does it mean that, how do we make sure that no one can win and lose? And it just, we just sketched out some terms of agreement, just, you know, a few like six or seven on a piece of paper. And that was a Tuesday. You know, I’d met, the lunch was on a Monday. By Friday, we had both men in a law office in Sao Paulo, signing an agreement, putting an end to the dispute, statement, joint statement, wishing each other very well. I took both men to meet, both leaders to meet with the executives of the company, explain the deal, explain what was going on, wish each other well, and it was over. And I was like, what? No one could believe it. But, and the thing was, it wasn’t magic. It was just like going behind positions for interests, looking for something, building a bridge, you know, going to the balcony, building a little bridge, a golden bridge there. Me as a third side, you know, the guy’s mentor, the banker, David as a third side, the family as a third side, kind of creating a space in which these two could find an agreement. And I asked Abelio, I said, later, I said, Abelio, how do you feel? He said, well, he said, you know, I got everything I wanted. I mean, really concretely, even on his list, I got everything I wanted. But the most important thing he said was, I got my life back. And his little son said to Abelio’s wife, to Geisy, Papi is not on the phone anymore. Wow.

And, and, you know, I went to Abelio’s 85th birthday party the year before last. And he said the last 10 years of his life had been the best years of his life, because over the years of freedom where he really got to know. And so that to me is like, that’s it. That, you know, it was a win for him. It was a win for the other side, too. It was a win for the communities, for the society. It’s a win, win, win, not just a win, win, but a win for the whole. And you know, what’s interesting? They were bitter adversaries, but I kept at it. And like within a year or two, I brought them both together for a lunch in Paris with David to talk about their families and their thing in the old times when they’d actually been business partners together. And, you know, they remained friends. They became friends. I mean, not close friends, but they remained on a friendly basis. And it was unimaginable because they saw the other as the archdevil. And it just shows you the power of peace, of just the same principles, balcony, bridge, third side, transforming these conflicts. And I think if they could do it, any of us could do it.

Carey Nieuwhof:

This is why I’m so grateful for your work, too, story after story, decade after decade. I know we’re pushing two hours here, so I want to be respectful of time. Couple more questions for you. This idea of a third space, like when we get locked in beige boardrooms or, you know, corporate offices, it seems adversarial. You’re a big fan of the balcony often involves a change of pace. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go to a restaurant. Let’s go stand by the lake. Do you find breakthroughs often happen in the non-formal settings?

William Ury:

Absolutely. In the room itself, there’s all kinds of things playing out. People make speeches, and they’re not talking to each other. They’re talking to the other people in the room. The real breakthroughs come, you know, proverbial in negotiations and the walks in the woods.

You know, you take a walk. I’m a big fan of walking. Even in the Middle East, years ago, I had a crazy idea of helping to inspire a long-distance walking path across the Middle East that follows the footsteps of Abraham and his family. Abraham is a reminder that no matter what divides us, there’s something greater that unites us because, you know, that message that there’s only one, you know, and that we’re all brothers and sisters and that our duty to others is to show hospitality. That’s what he’s known for in that region. And he unites the three great Abrahamic faiths. But walking, I’ve noticed when you go for a walk, you walk side by side in a common direction. And so even physiologically, physically, you’re going side by side, whoever fights while they walk, you know?

Carey Nieuwhof:

It’s hard. You have to work at it.

William Ury:

It’s really hard to do that. So yeah, so those modalities really, really help. Go for a walk, go for a walk together. You know, when you’re walking, you have to actually, unconsciously, you have to like go at the same pace as the other one. You have to, you know, your breathing gets co-regulated. You’re moving in a common direction.

And that metaphor, it just helps. It helps. It helps. And that’s why, you know, this walk. And now there are hundreds or thousands of people who are walking parts of this path across the Middle East, even in this crazy time, just, you know, in the places of Jesus, the places of Mary, the places of all those, you know, one of the places is the place where Jesus healed the lepers, you know, just they’re all, all these places are on the path where you walk very humbly. You don’t just go in your big buses and show up there. You walk and you walk into these little villages and guess what? People show you hospitality because that’s the, that’s what they know Abraham for is the spirit of Abraham is he had a tent open in all four directions to welcome the angels. Remember the angels that come in. I do. So it’s like, yeah. And so it’s, and again, it’s a long-term project, but it’s like, just to rediscover what unites us, which is for people to appreciate that, again, no matter what divides us in today’s world, you know, there’s something greater that unites us. And to remember that to me, to bring that spirit, which is a third side spirit can help transform the difficult conflicts may take time. It’s hard. This is the hardest work you can do, but it’s like step-by-step we can start to see possibilities.

Carey Nieuwhof:

One of the things reading between the lines of your life’s work is you seem to have an incredibly flexible schedule. You know, it’s not like, well, I’ll do this one hour lunch and we’ll resolve this. You’re dropping what you’re doing, you know, flying to meet Dennis Rodman. You’re being summoned to the White House. You’re, there seems to be a level of spontaneity and then a good measure of time involved in that. Number one, is that accurate? Number two, any advice for leaders who just want to get everything done right away?

William Ury:

For sure. Yeah, I do. I try to build in some spaciousness and flexibility of like, if you can, you know, I go for, I live on a lake and I go for a walk around the lake and I think, what’s truly important here? And then, yeah, be flexible. Look for what’s the highest purpose that you’re here for. For me, I encapsulate that in peace of some kind and it’s an outer piece, but it’s actually very linked to obviously inner peace, but it’s like, that’s the higher prerogative. Then everything else has to make space for that. So I think it does require listening for where those opportunities are and that requires a little bit of spaciousness, time on the balcony, which is that larger sense of what’s life all about, you know? And why are we here? And if not, to kind of learn these things and, you know, to practice. I mean, to me, negotiation and all of the things we’re talking about, Kerry, is, I mean, it’s the same principles that are found in the teachings of Jesus, but it’s applied practically to the situations around us.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Yeah, and Jesus was very much like not on a super tight schedule. There was a space, there was busyness, but a spaciousness and a grace in the way he did that. I want more and more of that in the decades ahead. I guess my last question, William, and I’m quite amazed at this, like, you know, an entire life so far, four and a half decades, literally helping to solve the world’s biggest problems and challenges that humanity existentially faces. This whole interview, you’re smiling. When I’m reading your book, it’s positive. You’re an optimist. Well, you’re a possiblist, but there’s an optimism under that. It would be so easy having seen, you know, world leader after world leader, the worst of human nature. If you were a cynic now, I’d be like, I get it. But you’re not. What’s keeping you hopeful and optimistic after multiple decades of doing this?

William Ury:

That’s a good question. That’s why when people ask me if I’m an optimist or a pessimist, I say, actually, I’m a possiblist. I believe in human possibility. I believe in why? Because I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes. You know, I’ve seen situations after, one situation after another, where it seemed to be absolutely impossible. I gave the example of South Africa, Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants were, you know, killing each other for centuries and generations. And yet, you know, they’re able, people, I’ve watched people do it. You know, I’ve been working in Colombia most recently for seven years as an advisor to the president. You know, a civil war had gone on there for 50 years, hundreds of thousands dead, millions of victims. And yet, that got transformed over seven years. So, I’ve seen it happen. And I’ve seen it happen in the micro too, as you know, like, you know, my friend Abelio and his, or in families. So, I know what human beings are capable of. These are things that we have inside of us. It’s our own, it’s our birthright, it’s our human potential. And so, I’ve seen it enough happen that I just, I know it can happen with my own eyes. And, you know, now I have a grandson who’s just about to turn two, Diego. And I call him my new boss. I’m working for his generation. Now, on the day he was born, I was able to hold him in my arms for an hour. And I was just like, feel the pure potentiality of a human being. And just ask, you know, when he turns 21, for his generation, what kind of world are they going to have? And what would they like us to do right now to help create that world? And so, that’s why, you know, that keeps me going. And he’s a, you know, every child is born as a possibleist. They’re always open. They’re exploring the new. And we all have that. So, if we could just bring all of us, and the leaders of the church, you know, I’d say have a special role as kind of leaders of the third side, to be third-side leaders. If we can all just bring that to the conflicts that are immediately around us, with our congregations, with our staff, and then with our communities, with the larger world, then if we can transform our conflicts, you know, there’s nothing, the world right now, we have so much. We can deal with hunger. We can deal with disease. We can deal with everything. We’ve got the technology to do it. The only thing that’s blocking us is our habit of falling into conflict. So, if we can transform our conflicts, we can transform our lives. We can transform our world. We can create the world we want for our children and grandchildren. That’s what keeps me going.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Well, William, we need more of you. And I just want to encourage every leader. I was telling you beforehand, my wife’s a lawyer and a mediator. She says it’s the best book she’s ever read, hands down, on that topic of bringing peace. It’s called Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. You’ve got a huge library, Getting to Yes, Getting Past No, Power of a Positive No, so many other books. I just love what you’ve devoted your life to, and I just want to say what a tremendous joy, honor, and privilege it’s been to spend a couple hours with you on behalf of so many tens of thousands of church leaders listening to this. So, thank you. It’s a real privilege for me to be able to do this, William.

William Ury:

It has been my sheer joy and privilege, Cary, and I just want to wish you and everyone who’s listening to this every success in doing this, because this is God’s work, really.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Hey, the church should be good at this. Let’s be honest. We shouldn’t be the drivers of conflict and division. We should be the people who are figuring out how to bring that third view into all of this. He was called the Prince of Peace for a reason. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, William. That’s great. Well, thank you. You’re going on a big sabbatical, right?

William Ury:

I am, I am. I’m going to go on walks. I’m going to just take some time to really listen for what’s next and what’s now here in the world, yeah.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Brilliant. Thank you for being so generous with your time before that sabbatical. I appreciate it.

William Ury:

You’re so welcome, Cary.

Carey Nieuwhof:

Man, I hope you loved that as much as I did. I have learned so much. My wife, who specializes in mediation and helping couples through really difficult situations, just finished Possible and says it’s the, hands down, the best book on conflict resolution she’s ever read. I would agree with that. You want to check that out.