Getting to Yes Summary

Getting to Yes, a guide to negotiation written by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton—the founders of the Harvard Negotiation Project—promotes a strategy called principled negotiation. Designed to yield optimal outcomes, save time and energy, and forge strong working relationships, principled negotiation can help people better navigate contexts ranging from work and school to politics and marriage. In all these fields, people have to negotiate on a daily basis but often end up “dissatisfied, worn out, or alienated.” Whether people are soft negotiators who give in to avoid conflict or hard negotiators who destroy relationships by pushing their views too stubbornly, most approach negotiation as a process of positional bargaining. They start by presenting a position, then try to reconcile their position with their opponents. But this leads to ineffective solutions, inefficient negotiations, and damaged relationships. Positional bargaining encourages people to take extreme positions, negotiate as stubbornly as possible to save face, and view agreements as requiring one-sided concessions. Principled negotiation is designed to avoid these problems.

Principled negotiation’s first main principle is: “separate the people from the problem.” Positional bargaining makes people choose between winning the substance of a negotiation but sacrificing their relationship with the other party, or saving their relationship but sacrificing the substance. Principled negotiators consciously separate relationships and substance. This does not mean simply ignoring personal issues and sticking to business, but rather carefully managing misperceptions, emotions, and communication in order to strengthen personal relationships. To avoid misperceptions, negotiators should fight their own biases and try to understand what motivates the other side. For instance, if one side cares intensely about an issue that does not impact the other, the latter side should build trust by investing energy in this issue. Next, negotiators should carefully account for their emotions and understand how both sides’ senses of autonomy, appreciation, affiliation, role, status, and identity might affect what they are willing to consider or accept. In addition to nonjudgmentally letting the other side vent negative emotions, effective negotiators know to build goodwill through gestures like compliments and apologies. Finally, negotiators must maintain clear and honest communication at all costs. This requires listening actively and confirming one’s understanding of the other side before mischaracterizing its concerns.

The second rule of principled negotiation is to “focus on interests, not positions.” While people often enter negotiations with positions, their real goal is to satisfy their interests. Therefore, even when two sides present opposite positions, their interests can still be aligned. Effective negotiators ask open-mindedly about the other side’s interests and then look for ways to fulfill those of both sides. Rather than thinking about a dispute’s causes (in the past), principled negotiators look for its purposes (in the future). Different parties in a negotiation should be teammates, not enemies, and everyone should take everyone else’s interests seriously.

The authors’ third rule is to “invent options for mutual gain.” Negotiations often feel like zero-sum conflicts over a “fixed pie” of benefits, but by making space and time to brainstorm, negotiators can often find creative win-win solutions. Brainstorming sessions should involve open-ended discussion, a prohibition on criticism, and an agreement to postpone actually choosing a course of action. By expanding their thinking beforehand, these sessions give negotiators more options to work with in the actual negotiation and help them figure out how to make proposals that are more acceptable to the other side.

The fourth and final rule is to “insist on using objective criteria.” When negotiations do come down to competing interests, people should look past their individual priorities and base agreements on external criteria like “fairness, efficiency, or scientific merit.” For instance, during the Law of the Sea Conference, a scientific model helped India and the United States make an agreement about deep-sea mining regulations. Along with objective standards, objective procedures can facilitate agreements. A classic example is “one cuts, the other chooses” when splitting a dessert. Ultimately, negotiating over objective principles is always easier and more effective than negotiating over positions.

The authors then go on to explain how to address common challenges through principled negotiation. First, negotiators should deal with power imbalances by understanding their BATNA, or Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. The BATNA shows the cost of making an agreement, and it actually determines a party’s power in a negotiation far more than money or influence can. However, to be useful, the BATNA must be a specific, actionable Plan B, not just an abstract idea.

Next, the authors offer two strategies that principled negotiators can use with people who insist on using the positional bargaining approach. The first is negotiation jujitsu, which means refusing to engage the other side’s positions and instead framing all discussion in terms of interests. (This can involve using open-ended questions and carefully-timed silences in a discussion.) The second strategy is the one-text procedure, in which a third party mediator creates a joint list of everybody’s interests and then develops a plan to fulfill those interests in consultation with all the parties. As a model of negotiation jujitsu, the authors analyze a real-life negotiation between a principled negotiator named Frank Turnbull and his belligerent landlord, Mrs. Jones, who has been illegally overcharging him. Turnbull cites the objective standard of fair pricing and consistently emphasizes that he is not attacking Mrs. Jones’s character, nor accusing her of misbehavior. When Mrs. Jones accuses him of extorting her, Turnbull ignores the personal attack and instead gives her the opportunity to make her case based on principles. He intentionally asks for a break to think, and the next day he proposes a reasonable solution that Mrs. Jones accepts, without feeling cheated or misunderstood.

Finally, the authors examine “dirty tricks” that people use to gain an unfair advantage in negotiations. Fortunately, these tricks only work if others refuse to fight back, and their best response is to initiate a principled negotiation about the process of negotiation itself. For instance, if one side explicitly agrees to a solution but later starts pushing for more concessions, the other side should point out what is happening and cancel the agreement rather than making one-sided concessions. Similarly, if one side holds a meeting in a freezing-cold room, the other side can insist on meeting elsewhere. Threats and pressure tactics like the “good-guy/bad-guy routine” are best answered by constantly returning to principles.

The authors conclude by emphasizing that Getting to Yes really just organizes information that most people already know intuitively but only truly learn through practice. Negotiation, they conclude, is not about winning and losing, but rather about finding the best “process for dealing with your differences.”