- What I find in negotiations in real life
is the absolute failure on the part of so many people
to not anticipate what you will be asked.
I'm Joe Navarro, former FBI agent and body language expert.
Asking for a raise, haggling in a market,
deciding where to go for dinner, interviewing a suspect,
all of these are a form of negotiation.
Every successful negotiation follows a pattern.
There's the assessment phase, the engagement phase,
and the transactional phase.
If any one of these fail, at worse you have a disaster,
at best this process takes forever.
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So if you were to ask me, "When you were in the bureau,
"what things did you do to negotiate effectively?"
Right off the top I would tell you planning,
sitting down with, you know, yellow legal pads
and writing out what is my objective.
Clearly define what is the objective here.
What words am I gonna use with this individual?
If you're talking to a CEO that has two degrees,
what are you gonna use, fourth-grade words?
You have to think of the audience.
You have to think of what potentially
they're gonna throw at you.
And not just what they may throw at you,
how quickly they will throw it at you.
Somebody that thinks fast, speaks fast,
you're gonna have to be able
to throw that arrow back immediately.
So it's planning, it's coordinating, it's rehearsing,
sitting down with fellow agents and saying,
"Okay, you're gonna play the part of the bad guy."
And yet I've been to, you know, observer
of many a negotiation where there's this absolute failure
to think about what will be asked.
And this all goes to, you know, winging it,
thinking that negotiations is just about the transaction.
Showing up and saying what maybe you thought about
when in fact the front end
should be what takes up the most time.
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One of the jobs of the FBI was to recruit individuals
who were working for hostile intelligence services.
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They would often be in the United States
under different cover,
as students working with companies and so forth.
But it's not like you can walk up to somebody and say,
"Hey, hi, 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 agent of the FBI
and how can we begin to at least talk to each other.
And what I found useful always was
I would find them on the street
and I would just begin to walk with them.
And if they carried the newspaper and the left-hand,
I carried the newspaper and the left hand.
By mirroring their behavior, they don't feel threatened,
but then next time when they see me again
walking next to them, they're saying, "Wait a minute.
"There are no coincidences in counterintelligence work."
And then I can begin a process of engagement that is benign.
So one of the things that I found as an FBI agent
in just trying to get people to either confess
or cooperate with us was what came to be known
as the empathic model of social interaction.
And the empathic model basically looks at
human communications and says in every effective negotiation
you have the assessment phase, the engagement phase,
and then the transactional phase.
We look at assessment as all the information
that we can gather ahead of time,
plus what we can read from this person
the minute we come into visual contact
and then throughout the process.
And so subconsciously, by approaching this individual
and just mirroring their behaviors,
they're thinking this is a pro.
This guy knows how to do it.
This guy knows that I may be under surveillance,
but this looks natural.
The engagement phase is thinking about, well,
where's the best place to meet him?
How? How many people?
Look, I'd like to meet you at this bar,
but if that's gonna cause you problems
or it's gonna force you to have to report it,
then you tell me where you wanna meet.
And then lastly, it's the transactional phase
where at some point we now cross over
into what is our goal and objective.
I want this person to cooperate,
but that's not gonna take place
until I can coordinate the assessment and the engagement.
Then it allows us to move into the transactional phase,
much more easier.
I'm always assessing.
I'm always trying to figure out the best way to engage.
And then what is the best way to transact?
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One of the things that I always looked at
is a term we coined called chronicity,
and that is how we use time.
We know that, for instance, for doctors,
surgical accidents increase after the lunch hour.
Parole boards are more willing to be lenient
in the morning hours, less so in the afternoon.
So a lot of that has to do with both the circadian rhythm
and blood sugars.
And so, as I look at negotiations in law enforcement,
I need to factor when is this person
the most able to resist me versus, okay, at this point,
there's gonna be less resistance.
Negotiations are temporal.
Whoever dominates time is in charge.
So you call a little time out, let's go talk.
That changes the rhythm.
That changes where this is going.
When do I remain silent?
There's a client I've worked with and he said,
"Joe, I can't tell you how many times I've used silence.
"In fact, I was negotiating for a building
"with a father and a daughter,
"and they made 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 gonna throw in another million dollars.'"
And he wasn't expecting that.
He was just expecting them to say, "This is it."
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One of the things that I learned as an agent,
especially dealing with extremists,
is that you just let them vent.
And not just let them vent once,
but let them vent over and over and over and over.
And just when you think they're shutting down, you say,
"Well, tell me about that again.
"Or would you cover that again?"
And what happens is second law thermodynamics: entropy.
After awhile, they've grown so tired.
They've got so much negative emotion poured into this
that eventually they wear out,
and it leaves you in a better position to then negotiate.
I've talked with a lot of airlines over the years.
And one of the things that we say is
that when you have a customer, especially at the gate,
and they're being very vociferous, let them vent,
let them vent, let them vent.
And then eventually all that energy is just dissipated,
entropy takes over, and then you can say,
"Look, this is what we can do for you and that's all."
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One of the most difficult cases that I ever had
involved a man, he was in his late 30s
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 a lot more.
And the question was, number one, where was it?
Number two, would he cooperate with us?
And number three, would he confess to all these crimes?
And the difficulty was when we assessed this individual,
he seemed like a nice guy
in the sense that if you ran into them on the street
you wouldn't perceive him as being a pedophile.
But at the same time, I was assessing myself
and that was how angry I was
that I was sitting with this individual.
So I had my emotions to deal with.
But I have to negotiate with him.
I have to get this information out of him somehow.
And to do so, I had to go through that process
of assessing him.
He says he's a churchgoer. Okay.
He says that he studied and graduated from high school
and so forth.
So I'm building up all these things
that I can at least attach some humanity to.
How to we engage him became immensely difficult.
I have to remain even and get the information out of him.
And then, I have to be careful about what language I use
because if I say the wrong word, such as girl or child,
he may just all of a sudden rear up and shut 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 he looked at me.
Where his hands flat palm down on his knees
or where his fingers gathered up?
And after an hour, I'm understanding him better.
We're now establishing communications more effectively.
And I said, "Let me tell you about my situation.
"I'm a father. I'm also agent.
"I'm not gonna go away.
"I have people that I report to."
And finally I said to him, "Look, I'm probably the only guy
"in this town that doesn't hate you right now.
"There's a thousand people out here
"that would string you up right now, but I'm talking to you.
"I'm listening to you."
And then doing that, he understood where I was coming 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 gonna lose my job. I'm gonna 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 could do
"is be helpful, you know, be helpful to me.
"Forget the U.S. attorney, forget the prosecutors.
"I need this."
And now it's personal.
And so, he immediately told me
where the rest of material was.
Now, is this earth shattering?
Does it save a nation state? No.
But I look at that as one of the most important cases
I ever worked,
and I attribute that success really not to myself,
but to this model that in some ways it's really perfect.