Evan Genest's Learning Log

These are notes to myself. If you discover them and find them useful I would love to hear from you. Most of these are related to travel I did, books I read, or tech notes for Matomo and the LAMP stack.


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What I learned from Never Split the Difference

activism

The Book

Title: Never Split the Difference
Author: Chris Voss
Summary: In spite of the title, the book is actually about listening. Listening with a goal to influencing the situation. This has already been useful to me in canvassing. I had a conversation in the Trader Joes entrance (right by the carts) with a racist MAGA voter. We talked for 15 minutes and by the end, we parted with a fist bump and her comment "you've given me a lot to think about".

Methods

The four skills

Pronouns used by the other person.

Lying people's pronouns shift away from I, me, and into they, them.
Locus of control can influence pronouns. When person you talk to is the actual decider person will (oddly) talk a lot about them and they ("I don't know if my partners will go for this"). And the opposite follows: if they have to clear with the boss, they will lean more into I, me.

Related: "I'll try" means they won't. It means they intend to fail. It's one step up from no.

Listening

Even if you are really trying to listen, you miss a LOT. Your brain lapses into a cherry-picking mode. The default of most folks is that they are listening to confirm their existing models. An expert will listen for things that break your model. Professional listeners (FBI, lawyers) will listen in teams, so they can catch more.
(Both David Brooks and Sam Harris describe the brain as less about the five senses than people think. If you are careless, you slip into a mode where your brain has an internal model of everything and just floats along, only using your five senses to lightly confirm that it's not way off base. That lazy mode misses almost everything that is actually happening during a human interaction. Buddhism teaches us to be present; it's the same thing.)
The listening during negotiating has to be to find the other person's wants and their needs (their nice-to-haves and must-haves).
Your first thing to listen for is what will establish trust. And safety.

Mirroring concept

Examples

"Copy everything double, I want paper copies."
It created conversational space for the hothead supervisor to talk himself out of the hasty orders he usually issued. The employee only responded with the last few words reflected back, repeatedly, with (important) long pause after: "...by Monday?", "...two of everything?",

"Labeling" concept

An emotion loses it's detriment when you bring it out into the open. So label it verbally. And it works in two different directions.

So weird:
Labeling a negative emotion de-fangs it.
Labeling a positive emotion reinforces it.

Research

In an experiment, volunteers viewed a series of emotional faces.
Their amygdala revved up if they silently viewed them.
The amygdala calmed down and the speech centers revved up when they simply said the emotions out loud (giving the emotions labels).

Examples

Exact wording:
"It sounds like you are afraid we will take you back to jail."
"It seems like you believe we will shoot."
Notice the lack of "I" pronoun. Notice the avoidance of leading with "you are", "you seem".

The three:
It seems like...
It sounds like...
It looks like...

Girl Scout donors office example:
I'm sensing some hesitation... (not budging)
It seems you're really passionate about the gift and want it to reflect the things the girl scouts gave you... (finally budges, gushing, even)

It will feel like the opposite of "chatting". Newbies find it awkward.

Follow it with silence. You're trying to catch a glimpse, you're on a reconnaissance mission. Don't talk over the payoff/response.

How to sense their emotions:

Examples

Cop: "It sounds like you don't want to go back to jail. It seems like you think we will come in guns blazing if you give up."
Barricaded suspects: "We came out after five hours because that's how long it took for us to calm down, and then how long for you to prove you weren't ever going to go away."

Pre-emptive audit of objections

It takes the sting out if you list all the reason's against your request, right up front. So, give an accusation audit right up front. List

Teacher: I'm going to ask for a volunteer, and you they will look quite ridiculous (all laugh), but the people who do volunteer, tend to get a lot more out of the exercise.
Asking for renegotiated B2B contract: You're going to think we are the bad guys here - we think you are going to feel like we are asking for too much.

Evan Genest Recommendeds this further reading

I'm delighted I found this book. It builds on other recent books about how to effectively have a conversation. Never Split the Difference has strong synergies with all of these: