A quick word first
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Embracing uncertainty
Negotiation is a dynamic process, often laden with uncertainty. Sometimes a little. Sometimes a lot. That’s why it calls for strategic agility and being quick on your feet moment-to-moment. That’s my central premise, as you've likely gathered from my other articles.
To learn what that means in negotiation I’ve tapped concepts and practices from other fields that require agile thinking and nimble moves. Jazz is one of them, witness the name of this publication.1 I’ve also explored improv comedy, medical diagnosis, fast-moving sports like hockey, and slow motion games like chess. (Of that, the late U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke once said, “negotiation is like playing chess while mountain climbing.”)
I’ve also learned a lot about improvising from military doctrine. At first blush that may seem miles away from negotiation theory, as the objectives are light years apart. Yet some of the best thinking about combat is more supple than you might expect.
Consider this excerpt from the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Manual. I’ve only substituted the word “negotiation” in places where it uses belligerent terms like “war” or “enemy.”
All actions in negotiation take place in an atmosphere of uncertainty, “the fog of negotiation.” Uncertainty pervades negotiation in the form of unknowns about counterparts, about the environment, and even about the friendly situation. While we try to reduce these unknowns by gathering information, we must realize we cannot eliminate them – or even come close. The very nature of negotiation makes certainty impossible; all actions in negotiation will be based on incomplete, inaccurate, or even contradictory information.
That statement resonates with many negotiators. (For me the reference to uncertainty about the “friendly situation” connects with the challenge of getting members of your own negotiation team to agree on strategy for dealing with outside parties.)
The ideas trace back to Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz two centuries ago and two and more than two millenia earlier, to the Chinese general/philosopher Sun Tzu. I’ll come back to them in a later post to see what we can learn from military doctrine about preparing to improvise. (As you’ll see, that’s not an oxymoron.)
But here I want to highlight a powerful practice you should use when negotiation is underway.
Observe/Orient/Decide/Act
In the early 1950s John Boyd was a fighter pilot in the Korean Conflict. He flew an American F-86 and was up against seemingly superior MiG-15s. The Russian-built planes were faster, could fly higher, and were more heavily armed. Nevertheless, the Americans still had a whopping five-to-one advantage in aerial combat. It took the maverick intelligence of Boyd to recognize what was going on.
The American F-86 had two advantages. First, it had hydraulic controls that enabled it to transition from one activity—climbing, banking, and accelerating—more rapidly than the MiG. Second, the F-86 had a bubble canopy that gave its pilots superior “situational awareness,” which allowed them to process information and make decisions more quickly. Each maneuver by the F-86 compounded its edge over its opponent until it achieved dominance.
From this experience, Boyd formulated a general model of dynamic decision-making. He called it the OODA loop—a recurring process of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting.
Boyd’s model differs starkly from a conventional linear framework in which facts are gathered and analyzed, and then a choice is made. By contrast, actions in his OODA loop stimulate reactions from other parties, which then constitute new data to observe, digest, and further act upon. You can think of his rapid-decision-making process as a wheel within a wheel, running inside a larger strategic cycle of learning, adapting, and influencing.
Observing means having a clear-eyed view of what is unfolding. Avoiding the trap of seeing only evidence that confirms your assumptions and instead being alert for information that challenges them. Orienting involves calibration, spotting those “mismatches” between your prior expectations, no matter how well founded, with what’s really happening.
Those insights then inform deciding what to do next. You may have to tweak your approach just a bit or do something entirely different. Acting in the midst of a negotiation can be asking a question, making a different offer, or maybe even issuing a threat. They respond, maybe the way you expected, maybe not. Either way observe the person’s response and then you orient, decide, and act again, again, and again.
Boyd called this fluid process of action-reaction-recalibration situational awareness. In other settings, it’s called sense-making. By either name, it’s a must in negotiation. Even in collaborative ventures, you don’t want to be the least aware, least agile party at the table.
Housekeeping
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Please share the piece with people in your network who want to expand their knowledge of negotiation. Thanks! Mike
See Frank Barrett’s, Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz