In coaching thousands of negotiators over the years, I’ve observed that the most difficult skill for people to master is the ability to simply see what’s happening in the negotiation, rather than applying logic, thinking, reasoning, analysis, or judgment.
We need to see the realities driving the negotiation. Without seeing what’s happening now, it’s difficult to see what’s standing in the way of the negotiation moving forward. It is also impossible to see what must happen next. Without seeing what must happen next, it’s difficult to see how to make it happen. To do this, one must make the difficult transition from the thinking-cognitive mindset to what I call the “Discovery-Vision-Insight” mindset. More simply, it’s the transition from “thinking” to “seeing.”
Why Thinking Is Dangerous To Negotiating
The thinking-cognitive mindset is a mine field that’s pervasive in business today. Critical thinking, analysis, using and mastering elaborate and sophisticated models and tools such as scenario planning, SWOT analysis, cost-benefit analysis, financial modeling etc. has gained the upper hand in business. We’ve come to see these as essential to reducing risk, and they drive and shape our every effort. Business people have been conditioned to rely, more and more, on their cognitive/intellectual abilities. In turn, this ends up altering, shaping, and impeding the way they perceive, judge, and respond to reality.
Thinking over seeing is dangerous because the thoughts we think bring with them a host of enemies to effective negotiating: assumptions, expectations, guesses, and seemingly logical reasoning, analyses, and hypotheses of all kinds. These have a legitimate place in strategic planning, scenario planning, sales forecasting, budgeting, and product design and development, for example. But they don’t have a role in negotiation.
How To Use Seeing In A Negotiation
When one is negotiating, just see, now. Don’t judge. To judge is to react. Start by asking three simple questions:
1) What problem(s) am I trying to solve in this negotiation event/engagement?
2) What do I see now?
3) Who must see what, now?
To see requires stilling the movements of our restless minds, memories, imaginations, and emotions. It requires that we perceive without judging, evaluating, assuming, guessing, hypothesizing, or expecting anything. If we receive a call asking for large order, we have only received a call, from XYZ person, asking for this order. Nothing more, nothing less. If our customer is demanding certain terms in the contract, that’s exactly what’s happening. Nothing more.
Two Prerequisites For Insight
The ability to see without judging, evaluating, or responding has two prerequisites in order for the Discovery-Vision-Insight mindset is to blossom and flourish:
1) Emptying the mind. Emptying the mind of any and every assumption and expectation, positive or negative. This is a key behavior we refer to as blank-slating. As the mind is blank-slated, the imagination and memory are stilled, and the emotions are calmed. We become ready to discover, see, and gain insight.
2) Embracing discovery. Embrace the mindset, habit, and attitude of discovery. To see and gain insight into the vision driving the other party, and to see the other’s vision as the other sees it, we must discover it without our judgments, biases, prejudices, preconceptions etc. getting in the way.
When we don’t see in a negotiation, we are left negotiating against our assumptions, guesses, rationalizations, and expectations. Given how all these impact our emotions, and in turn are impacted by our emotions, we end up negotiating against our fear, excitement, anxiety, worry, and indeed the entire spectrum of emotions that can be brought into play during a negotiation. We lose our ability to be, and to remain, emotionally calm.
When we are no longer emotionally calm, we fail to see, or we see less, or we see what’s not there. A lack of emotional calm produces a special kind of blindness that, when joined with that produced by the thinking-cognitive mindset, causes a near complete detachment from the realities that are actually driving the negotiation. It creates its own vicious cycle.
To NOT Know Is Powerful
For those who prize experience, knowledge, expertise, know-how, and the like, here’s a wrench in your cogs: the greatest power of a negotiator is to NOT know. The information we gain in our critical research must be validated through the seeing-discovery process. Everything we see by looking at our respected opponent’s world from the outside must be validated. You just don’t know what you don’t know. And that is a very safe place to be. So, go ahead and make the transition, demanding as it is. If you do, you won’t see a negotiation, or life, in the same way.
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