36 pages • 1 hour read
Chris VossNever Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Don’t Feel Their Pain, Label It”
Voss describes another negotiation, this one with a set of armed fugitives hiding in a flat on a high rise in New York City. Lacking other communication, Voss and two other negotiators take turns addressing the fugitives through the door. Speaking with a calm voice, he vocalizes the fugitives’ concerns, including their fear of arrest and going to jail. After six hours without any response, the fugitives emerge and are handcuffed, explaining that the negotiators calmed them down.
From this experience, Voss highlights his strategy of “tactical empathy,” which involves empathizing with a counterpart’s point of view and then vocalizing the counterpart’s feelings. Labeling a counterpart’s feelings out loud and without judgment validates them and provides a “shortcut to intimacy” (55). Voss cites a study that suggests labeling emotions lessens their impact. He acknowledges the risk of mislabeling others’ emotions but suggests that, in most negotiations, there are plenty of clues to predict what your counterpart is feeling, including body language, tone, and word choice. After identifying an emotion, Voss suggests identifying it without using the pronoun “I”; instead, start with a neutral phrase, such as “it seems like” (56). Then, leave a few seconds of silence. Labeling can both reinforce positive feelings and weaken negative ones.
Several anecdotes highlight the importance of labeling negatives directly. On one occasion, Voss apologizes immediately and repeatedly at the beginning of a phone call with a high-ranking FBI official after breaking protocol and avoids disciplinary action. Similarly, one of Voss’s students rewrites a telephone script designed to bring back sports fans who are behind on ticket payments, making the script more personable and empathetic, with good results. Another student secures a large donation for the Girl Scouts after helping a donor feel that her concerns are understood.
One way to preempt concerns is to create what Voss calls an accusation audit, a list of all the bad things your counterpart might say about you. You can then acknowledge those things up front. Using this process, one of Voss’s students saves a contract between her firm and a smaller company, despite facing cutbacks from the governmental agency that hired them to work together on the project.
A final story demonstrates that Voss’s principles work best when used together. When a student’s flight is cancelled, threatening his ability to make an important deal that weekend, he secures a seat on an already booked connecting flight with a combination of labeling, tactical empathy, and mirroring.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Beware ‘Yes’—Master ‘No’”
Although traditional sales techniques view “yes” as a goal and “no” as a red flag, a “no” response can be a starting point for negotiation. To illustrate, Voss shares how he started as a negotiator. When he first shows up at the office of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Team wanting to be trained as a hostage negotiator, he is turned down for lacking experience. Only after accepting the officer’s suggestion that he volunteer on a suicide hotline for several months does he manage to land the position. Voss suggests that protecting a counterpart’s right to say “no,” and then seeking to understand what is driving that response, drives meaningful negotiation.
Voss identifies three types of “yes” used in negotiation: “Counterfeit, Confirmation, and Commitment” (80). The latter, which leads to real action, is the goal of negotiation, but it is also the rarest. A negative review from a supervisor at the suicide hotline where Voss volunteers helps him realize that putting on a performance to earn a “yes” is not the point. Instead, an effective negotiator helps a counterpart recognize a shared goal naturally.
Getting counterparts to say “no” can make them more comfortable and open. When one of Voss’s colleagues is selected for a board position over her superior, that superior threatens to fire her. At the start of their interview, she asks whether he would want “the FBI to be embarrassed” (87). After responding with a “no,” he allows her to keep her position. Saying “no” can also set someone up to commit, as one of Voss’s students discovers when he rewrites a telephone script to elicit “no”s from potential donors, only to see donations increase.
Voss concludes with a few tips. To force a “no” from a counterpart, you can intentionally mislabel an emotion or ask them to talk about what they don’t want. Emailing a question designed to elicit a negative response, such as “Have you given up on this project?”, can get a response from otherwise uncommunicative contacts.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
These chapters continue to lay out foundational skills and concepts in Voss’s emotionally intelligent—but rationally conceived—negotiation strategy. Both labeling emotion and eliciting a “no” response enable a counterpart to sort through and express concerns in a way that builds empathy. Both strategies may be considered counterintuitive, as they run counter to the traditional negotiation methods and received wisdom that Voss references in Chapter 1 and elsewhere. Voss thus takes on an iconoclastic role.
In terms of structure, Voss does not provide any explicit rationale for ordering these chapters as he does, but the order in which he introduces concepts does seem to proceed from the most commonly applicable and foundational resources to those that are more useful in niche situations. His order also seems to mirror, to some extent, the order in which these skills are likely to be used in a real negotiation: mirroring a counterpart, which is described in Chapter 2, naturally uncovers information that prepares a counterpart to label emotions as described in Chapter 3. While Chapter 4’s main idea—dealing with “yes” and “no” responses—does not follow as directly from Chapter 3’s, it does consider “no” as the beginning of the negotiation proper, which may well follow some mirroring and labeling to build rapport.
Rhetorically, these chapters demonstrate Voss and Raz’s tendency to balance anecdotes with academic research in support of claims. They cite two neuroscientific studies in Chapter 3 as well as a book by negotiation coach Jim Camp in Chapter 4. These citations seem suited to the material: Whereas Chapter 3 deals with an observable psychological pattern, Chapter 4 centers on Voss’s practical experience as a negotiator. Thus, the tips and concepts he offers in that chapter are supported primarily by anecdotes. Readers must decide for themselves whether to accept the seemingly universal principles Voss intersperses while recounting these stories, but he remains an experienced and authoritative figure.
Stylistically, these chapters demonstrate a commitment to engaging storytelling. Anecdotes are told in detail, including dialogue. Some are broken up or told nonchronologically to maximize their impact. Striking, colloquial imagery enlivens the narration, as when Voss describes the economy as being “in the toilet” while recounting one story (60). Each anecdote reinforces and illustrates associated principles, as Voss frequently pauses to comment on events.
