Former FBI Agent Explains How to Negotiate | WIRED

What I find in real life negotiations is the utter failure on the part of so many people to not anticipate what will be asked of them. I'm Joe Navarro,

former

FBI

agent

and body language expert, asking for a raise, haggling in a market, deciding where to go to dinner, interviewing a suspect, these are all a form of negotiation, every successful negotiation follows a pattern, there's the evaluation phase. , the commit phase and the transactional phase if any of these fail, at worst a disaster occurs, at best this process takes forever, so If you asked me right, when you were in the office, what things did you do to

negotiate

effectively from the beginning, I would say: plan, sit down with your familiar yellow notepads and write down what my objective is, clearly define what the objective is here, what words am I going to use with this individual?

If you're talking to a CEO who has two titles. What are you going to use fourth grade words? You have to think about the audience, you have to think about what they potentially are. they're going to throw at you and not just what they can throw at you how fast they're going to throw it at you someone who thinks fast talks fast you're going to have to be able to throw that arrow back immediately so it's planning, it's coordinating, it's rehearsing sit down with other

agent

s and tell them " okay, you're going to play the bad guy" and yet I've been an observer of many negotiations where there's an absolute inability to think about what's going to be asked and all of this goes towards you know, improvising thinking that negotiations are about just for the transaction to appear and say what you may have thought, when in reality the front end should be what takes up most of the time.

One of the FBI's jobs was to recruit people who were working for hostile intelligence services, often they would be in the states under different cover as students working with companies and such, but it's not like you could walk up to someone and say hello. , I'm joe and we know you're spying and please tell us everything so it was a matter of letting them know that I was an FBI agent and how can we start at least talking to each other and what I always found useful was I would find them on the street and he just starts walking with them and if they were carrying the newspaper in their left hand, I was carrying the newspaper in my left hand reflecting their behavior, they don't feel threatened, but the next time, when they see me walking next to them again, they they feel threatened.

Saying, "Wait a minute, there are no coincidences in counterintelligence work and then I can start an engagement process that is benign, so one of the things that I found as an FBI agent was just trying to get people to confess or cooperate." ". For us it was what became known as the empathic model of social interaction and the empathic model basically looks at human communications and says that in every effective negotiation you have the evaluation phase, the commitment phase and then the transactional phase, we consider the evaluation like all the information. that we can gather in advance plus what we can read from this person at the moment we come into eye contact and then throughout the entire process and subconsciously, as you approach this individual and simply mirror their behaviors, they think this is a professional that this guy knows. how to do it this guy knows I may be under surveillance but this seems natural the commitment phase is thinking about the best place to meet him how many people seem like I would like to meet you in this bar, but if that is going to get you in trouble or force you to inform it, then you tell me where you want to meet and, finally, it is the transactional phase where at some point we cross over to what our goal and objective is.

I love this person. cooperate, but that won't happen until he can coordinate the evaluation and commitment, then that will allow us to move to the transactional phase much more easily. I'm always evaluating, I'm always trying to figure out the best way to engage and So what's the best way to do a transaction? One of the things I've always considered is a term we coined called chronicity and that's how we use time. We know that, for example, for doctors, surgical accidents increase after lunchtime. Parole boards are more willing. be lenient in the morning hours except in the afternoon, so a lot of that has to do with both the circadian rhythm and blood sugar levels, so when looking at negotiations and law enforcement , I must take into account when this person is the most capable. resist versus okay at this point there is going to be less resistance negotiations are temporary whoever dominates the time is in charge so you ask for a little time let's talk that changes the pace that changes where this is going when I stay silent there is a client I worked with and he said to me Joe, I can't tell you how many times I've used silence.

I was actually negotiating a building with a father and daughter and they made me an offer that was supposed to be like their final offer and I just sat there and lowered my eyes and it drove them crazy and finally the daughter said, okay. , we're going to put up another million dollars and he didn't expect that he just expected them to say, this is the one. One of the things I learned as an officer, especially when dealing with extremists, is that you just let them vent and you don't just let them vent once but you let them vent over and over again and just when you think they're shutting down you say Well, tell me. about that again or you could cover that again and what happens is the entropy of second law thermodynamics, after a while they get so tired that they have so many negative emotions poured into it that eventually they wear out and it leaves you in a better position and then

negotiate

.

I've talked to a lot of airlines over the years and one of the things we say is that when you have a customer, especially at the gate, and they're being very loud, let them vent, let them vent. let them vent and then eventually all that energy dissipates, entropy takes over and then you can say look, this is what we can do for you and that's all one of the hardest cases I've ever had involving a man. He was around 30 years old and he was a pedophile, we knew there were at least two photographs of what he had done, but we knew that these individuals collected many more and the question was number one, where was he?

Number two, would he cooperate? with us?, and number one. three would confess to all these crimes and the difficulty was that when we evaluated this individual he seemed like a good guy in the sense that if you met him on the street you would not perceive him as a pedophile, but at the same time I was evaluating myself and so I was so angry that I was sitting with this guy, so I had to deal with my emotions, but I have to negotiate with him. I have to get this information out of him somehow and to do it. go through that process of evaluating him, he says he goes to church, okay, he says he studied and graduated from high school, etc., so I'm building all these things where I can at least give some humanity to how to involve him.

It's hard, I have to stand my ground and get the information out of him and then I have to be careful with the language I use, because if I say the wrong word, like a girl or a boy, he can suddenly rear up and shut up. down, so it's about proceeding incrementally, constantly assessing him, watching his breathing rate, watching his blink rate, watching how often he touched his neck or looked at me, whether his hands were flat with palms down on knees or if he had his fingers tucked in and after an hour. I'm understanding it better, we're establishing more effective communications now, and I said, let me tell you about my situation.

I am a father. I'm also an agent. I'm not going to leave. I have people that I report to and finally. I said, Look, I'm probably the only guy in this town who doesn't hate you right now. There are thousands of people here that would hang you right now but I'm talking to you I'm listening to you and by doing that he understood where I come from no badge no gun no authority figure just this is who I am and then he explained his position my life is ruined I'm going to lose my job I'm going to go to prison blah blah blah yeah most likely now we've established who we are as humans and then I said well the first thing you can do is be useful to, you know, be useful to me, forget the US attorney, forget the prosecutors, I need this and now it's personal and so he immediately told me where the rest of the material was now.

Is this transcendental? Save a nation state? No, but I see it as one of the most important cases I've ever worked on and I really attribute that success not to myself but to this model that in some ways is really perfect