The Naked Negotiator

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California examined twenty-thousand forecasts made by three hundred experts, from sixty countries, delivered over fifteen years.

He found it was “impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms, less still sophisticated, statistical ones”.

Tetlock’s research however shows there are a group of experts who are much better than their peers.

So, what distinguishes the best experts from the rest? What distinguishes an expert’s ability to forecast or predict well is how they think.

Tetlock split experts into two groups; hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs know one big thing to try to explain everything through that lens. Foxes tend to know a little about a lot of things and are not married to a single explanation for complex problems.

Foxes are consistently better forecasters because they use “diverse sources of information”.

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Hermut Kormann, CEO of Voith, the world leader for water turbines doesn’t believe you need to be blindingly bright to be successful. It is sometimes enough o avoid the stupid mistakes others make or correct errors earlier.

Kormann’s theory “In order to be successful, you don’t have to be clever, it is sufficient not to be stupid.”

Mistakes can’t be avoided writes Hermann Simon in his insightful book, “Hidden Champions in the 21^st Century” but they can be corrected fast.”

I never fail to be amazed by the number of companies that keep making the same mistakes. All deals: the successful and the not so successful must be reviewed.

If the deal you have settled for is a Barely Acceptable Deal (BAD) ask why you didn’t achieve your Best Possible Agreement (BPA).

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Have you watched the drama ‘Lie to Me’ where actor Tom Roth plays the super-confident, abrasive Cal Lightman intuitively solving crimes and saving lives by his canny ability to read body language and ‘micro expressions’.

The role of Cal Lightman is actually based on a real character Professor Paul Ekman - a human lie detector who boasts a 95% accuracy rate.Most people, even police, customs officials, judges perform little better than they would by guessing. Picking liars for most of us is a game of chance.

So what makes Ekman so good? Ekman has spent most of his career studying faces and micro expressions. Ekman started with tracking monkey’s facial expressions and their links to behaviours that followed. Years of practice watching slow motion tapes of known truth tellers and liars followed.

By critiquing his performance, author Sheena Iyengar tells us in The Art of Choosing, “Ekman developed the ability to automatically detect and focus only on micro expressions, filtering out irrelevant body language and what the person was actually saying”. Ekman’s method ‘informed intuition’ captures the best of reflex thinking and the benefits that come from careful analysis.

Many of the hero’s featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink use informed intuition. The best poker players combine game strategy, knowledge of the cards in play and skilful watching of opponent’s body language to calculate whether an opponent is bluffing.

If you are serious about becoming an expert like Paul Ekman you must be prepared to put in years of practice and to continually critique your performance.

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In negotiations, emotions too often overwhelm our best intentions, and what was a resolvable dispute turns into a bitter feud.

In a remarkable insightful book, The Power of Pause, (2010), author Nance Guilmartin reminds us that we spend too much time driving in automatic.

Automatic decision making causes us to:

• Have knee-jerk reactions - emotions drive is to act before we reflect.

• Go with our gut - we follow the instant ‘go or no go’ feeling.

• Persuade or delude ourselves - “I’m the boss: It’s my call”.

• Take it personally - “I can’t believe they did that to me”.

Instead of driving on automatic Guilmartin says we should use a mental shortcut - similar to the process we use to drive a manual car - to jumpstart a pause.

Unlike an automatic transmission - where all you do is turn on the ignition, step on the gas and do - a stick shift requires you to:

1. Briefly ease your foot off the gas
2. Momentarily disengage the gears by pushing down the clutch
3. Move the gear - shift lever through neutral
4. Engage the correct gear
5. Smoothly re-engage the clutch by lifting your foot
6. Accelerate

The pause takes only a split second and when you do it expertly, you are able to apply maximum engine power to the wheels.

The Power of Pause is full of insightful comments and examples. All negotiators - in fact anyone who works in conflict resolution should read this book.

The Power of Pause helps you to prevent misunderstandings and resolve disputes.

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Research into the social nature of the brain by David Rock, the founding president of the Neuro Leadership Institute and the author of Your Brain at Work (Harper Business, 2009) has coined a couple of useful models encapsulated by the acronym SCARF which can help negotiators anticipate some of the problems caused by the toxic or negative emotions that too often overwhelm negotiators and prevent collaborative agreements.

SCARF itemizes the particular qualities that the brain perceives as threats.

Threat One: Status problems

Anything that fundamentally threatens the status of the other side will trigger a negative response.

Threat Two: Certainty Challenges

Humans like certainty. It allows us to operate on automatic pilot. Create huge uncertainty and you will trigger a primal threat response.

Threat Three: Lack of Autonomy

A perception of reduced autonomy - for example - can easily generate a threat response.

Threat Four: Relatedness Problems

When humans are cut off from social interaction with their friends and colleagues, threat levels escalate.

Threat Five: Problems of Fairness

Hostility and trust diminishes when a person’s perception of fairness is undermined.

Putting on the SCARF

If you are a negotiator you need to be conscious of offers or positions that undermine perceived levels of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.

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