A quick word first
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The silent treatment
The lead negotiators in the armistice talks to end the Korean Conflict in the early 1950s were General Nam Il for North Korea and its allies, and Admiral Turner Joy for the American-led UN coalition. The two met nearly 200 times over a span of two years, 17 days. In one of those sessions, the two men entered a tent followed by their respective teams. Nam and Joy sat down at the table directly opposite each other. They stared at each other eye-to-eye, neither of them saying a word, not even a simple hello.
Their silence lasted two hours and eleven minutes. Nobody blinked, but at last one of them nodded ever so slightly. The other returned that gesture. In unison, first those two men and then their teams, slowly stood up. They wordlessly left the tent, heading in opposite directions. The stalemate dragged on for months after that, costing the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians.
The sounds of silence.
Silence in negotiation is often thought of as an intimidation technique, a power move to demonstrate that you’re not going to budge or compromise—ever. When both parties go silent, others can suffer greatly, as in Korea. That’s the negative side of silence. But it turns out that in everyday encounters, periodic silence can foster collaboration beneficial to both parties.
That’s the compelling conclusion of a team of researchers led by MIT’s Jared Curhan.1 Some of their findings confirmed my hunches. But other results opened my eyes to different ways that silence can be positive. Here's a quick summary of the team’s four studies, with an emphasis of what they teach us.
In the first study they used an algorithm to “listen” to recordings of unscripted negotiations. Think of it as a CAT-scan that picks up the content of what is said and how that is expressed. It was programed to spot three things:
Silences that lasted three seconds or longer;
Shifts from zero-sum, win-lose thinking to a win-win approach; and
How successful the parties were in creating value.
The punchline? Where there were silences, parties were more likely to expand the proverbial pie. And that was true whether it was just one person who periodically paused, or it was both of them. That means that you benefit when your counterpart takes a breath now and then, even if you’re talking nonstop. Those breaks apparently give both of you time to step back and see the bigger picture more creatively.
The authors of the paper caution, though, that while they found that silence, reflection, and better results were correlated, that didn’t answer the question of causation, why that happens.
To get at that, the team did a second study where subjects in Group A were told to be silent from time to time. Even those silences weren’t spontaneous, again there was a shift from win-lose negotiation to win-win, significantly greater than did those in Group B who got no instruction. Silence clearly was the catalyst for better agreements.
In a third study, the team tweaked another factor, the status or relative power of the parties. Here they found that there were positive effects when the higher status person sometimes was silent. But strangely (to me at least), there was no shift to win-win when it was the lower status party stopped who stopped talking or paused before responding to something that the counterpart just had said.
This finding surprised me. I was under the impression that other research suggests that weaker parties in negotiation tend to talk too much. They oversell, maybe from a lack of confidence. I would have thought that not talking so much would keep them from looking desperate. Perhaps Jared’s team will dig into this more deeply.
The fourth finding surprised me, too. This time the team asked subjects in Group X to engage in problem-solving during their negotiations. Those in Group Y instead were told instead to be silent now and then. Here’s the surprise: The ones told to be silent were the more effective problem solvers, more so than the people who had been told to do exactly that!
My take-away? It’s one thing to tell people what to do, but far better to tell them how to do it. Silence begets reflection and that, in turn, prompts more creative thinking.
Delivery
Just as with a spoken word, the impact of silence depends on how it’s delivered. Facial expressions frame the meaning of a pause. If someone who’s being silent looks inquisitive, that’s an invitation for you either to respond or to reflect for a moment yourself. If instead, silence is delivered with a sneer, then it’s hostile.
Beware of silence on the telephone people don’t get the facial signal. If you go quiet, the other party can’t tell if you’re being reflective or stonewalling (or if the call has been dropped). They will likely assume the worst. So if you’re on the receiving end, don’t jump to conclusions about what they mean.
When you need to reflect, say so. You might even share what you want to think about. “It feels like were stuck on this point, “ you might say. “There has to be some way we can figure out a solution.” The key words there are “we” and “solution.”
Be proactive with silence. Look for moments when you should take a pause. As jazz great Miles Davis said (more than once), “Sometimes it’s the notes you don’t play.”
Staying with jazz references (it’s part of this publication’s title, after all), there’s a great segment in the HBO series, Master Class, with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.2 He tells a teenage sax player:
“After an event wait. Why do you wait? Because the emotion is in the silence. I come over to you and I want to tell you something. I put my hand on you [which
Wynton does in real time]. I say ‘Man, that was a beautiful phrase you played. When I stop talking you feel the emotion of it. And that’s when you assess what I’m going to tell you.”
Silence doesn’t have to be aggressive. It can be respectful and express a willingness to listen. Silence also invites a response. It gets others talking. You’ll probably learn more about what’s needed to reach agreement by dialing back a bit on how much you’re doing the talking.
Housekeeping
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Jared R. Curhan et al, “Silence is Golden: Extended silence, deliberative mindset, and value creation, in negotiation,” Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming.
Wynton’s whole Master class is currently on YouTube. All of it is wonderful, but to see the interlude about the importance of silence, jump to the 9:58 mark.