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- Chris Voss & Innovating Negotiation
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Open Questions Drive Communication
I wrote a review of Never Split The Difference a couple of months ago for this newsletter. Link here.
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Never Split The Difference deserves its place as one of the best selling negotiation books of all time.
It’s co-authored by the brilliant writer Tahl Raz, who turned Chris Voss’s life and lessons into the most readable and actionable prescription for good communication.
I’m stoked today to get to feature Chris Voss on this podcast, the force behind ‘Never Split The Difference’ which is a series of highest stakes negotiations broken down into their parts for examination. Chris was the FBI’s lead negotiator.
Hostage negotiation in Haiti? Terrorism in the Philippines? Egos, money and conflicting interests in a boardroom? Even walking a bank robber from the ledge.
What are the phrases and psychology Chris uses in his communication to get the outcome he wants? And where could it be relevant to you?
The podcast touches on Nassim Taleb and Khaneman’s influence on Chris’s worldview. The line between manipulation and persuasion, serendipity, traits of good communicators and a hell of a lot more.
Curious Things Mentioned During The Episode
Forward this email or share this podcast episode with a colleague in sales, a parent you want to communicate with better or anyone who want’s to dial in their negotiating.
Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…
Ryan
Mr. Voss, do you remember in your life when you started consciously paying attention to how people were communicating?
Chris Voss
Yeah, I probably first, when I first started noticing, was intrigued by it. And it was in my early days of being a cop. A little over a year into the job, Kansas City, Missouri Police Department, in my second assignment, a bunch of detectives got kicked out of the Detective Bureau and put back in uniform. There was a dispute between the detectives and the administration. And they said being promoted to detective is tantamount, or being made a detective is tantamount to promotion. You'll get assigned to the detective bureau's tantamount to promotion. And if it's tantamount to promotion, we deserve to get paid more. And you know, you gotta watch out how the bureaucracies will get you. And one of their key points was, once somebody gets assigned to become a detective, they never get rotated back out into the field, back out into uniform. Therefore, we've been promoted. And the bureaucracy said, all right, we can fix that.
We're going to put a bunch of you back in uniform right now. You know, you got to be careful. And so the upside was, you know, the new guys like me that are, you know, I'm a crime fighter, you know, I'm an adrenaline junkie. I throw bad guys in jail. I protect the innocent. Uh, in, when you're a youngster, you never really learn how to talk to people. And suddenly I'm riding in a car with somebody who's really good at talking to people in the soft power.
And this guy's using soft tones of voice and respect and solving problems faster than I ever did. And I think I've always been about, you know, what's the best way to do it? I don't care what it is. I just want to know the best way to do it. And when I saw these guys demonstrating in front of me, getting to solutions calmly and faster than I did. I'm like, I got, you know, there's something to this tone of voice thing. You know, this how do you talk to people? You know, issue and orders. Ain't the best way to do things. So I think that's when I first started to notice it and then as it popped up in little ways here and there, when I got to New York assigned to the Joint Terrorist Task Force, and it was originally on surveillance, and then I got rotated inside to be an investigator, and it was this guy named Larry Watt that made cases everybody envied. I mean, everybody envied Larry. And fortunately, I got to sit really close to Larry and among a cadre of great investigators, nearly everybody there had a book or a movie about cases they'd worked on this terrorist task force. Conversely, when I was in Pittsburgh, nobody in the whole division ever had a book or a movie about a case that they did. And in New York, they were everywhere and all these superstars admired Larry. And Larry was just a soft-spoken, quiet, and own, talk to you matter-of-factly kind of guy, or friendly, and had gotten some of the most dangerous people on Earth to bond with him and to work for him as a cooperating witness. And that was another time when I noticed that soft skills, man, there's something to this.
So when I finally volunteered on a suicide hotline and started actually getting taught the ins and outs of soft skills, I think my mind was ready to learn.
Ryan
So what you noticed in those initial detectives, but then as well, Larry was maybe controlling the tone of voice, um, a gentleness, were there some deeper insights that you were starting to pick up on, or was it until you got to the hotline that you were, you know, being taught, this is how you do it.
Chris Voss
Well, I think I really noticed more tone of voice. I remember the detective back at an uniform in Kansas City. His tone of voice really struck me. And his respect to people, leading with respect. Getting respected by leading with it, but very deferential.
And I think I probably noticed tone of voice first. And then when you, the instruction for the suicide hotline and crisis hotline was very much more the mechanics of it. Although the mechanics were a little vague by the time I got to the crisis negotiation with the FBI, started getting very specific with the mechanics. So much so that the specificity that we worked out at CNU, when I went to Harvard to teach and the Harvard guys like you guys have defined us so much more clearly than we ever thought we'd define it. And I think that was because as an FBI agent hostage negotiator, you're teaching local police officers hostage negotiation. Local cops are great crap. Like they want practical stuff. They want you to be able to define it. You know, it was Einstein thinking, I didn't realize that at the time. You know, the attribution to Einstein is if you can't explain it in plain English, you don't understand it.
and cops want you to explain stuff in plain English or they're just not gonna tolerate you. And I think that's where I really learned to just define it in very specific terms, which is how we teach it in a black swan group now and how it is, it never split the difference. Like say this, exactly like this. Don't change it, use these words, here's the very specific words, use the sequence. We'll tell you afterwards why it works, but you're not gonna believe.
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