Never Split the Difference
Life is communication… and what is communication but negotiation. We negotiate when buying a car or apartment, employment conditions, asking for a raise, establishing emotional relationships…
The thing is, if we’re honest, we don’t know how to communicate at all. We think communication is looking only at ourselves and our position and (aggressively) presenting that position to others. That’s precisely why we often lose “duels” in communication… because we’re not ready to hear the other side. We’re not active listeners. We don’t even try to (truly) hear the other side. And there’s a reason why they say we were “given one mouth and two ears… so we’d listen more than we speak”… we know this in practice… in theory… we don’t really apply it.
And that’s why people often wonder why they’re “defeated” in conversations, aka communication.
One thing is undeniable in today’s world. Even when we communicate something with someone, we want to “win.” And that’s okay. But we forget that we’ll have many more “defeats” than “victories” if we don’t constantly improve our communication “style.”
“Never Split the Difference” is a book whose author is Chris Voss. This man was considered one of the FBI’s best hostage crisis negotiators. In other words, he was the person who had to, with his tactical-communication skills, prevent potential tragedies that occur in kidnapping situations.
Some might think that negotiating with kidnappers/robbers/terrorists is nothing but an attempt to manipulate them into releasing hostages and voluntarily surrendering. That, in a way, is the goal, but the point isn’t to just manipulate the other side… but to communicate the situation in the right way.
That’s what Chris Voss saw during his career as an FBI negotiator. He noticed how the wrong approach in communication with kidnappers can cost lives and that if you don’t reevaluate and improve your approach to communication, tragedies will continue to happen in the future.
I think we can say Chris Voss knows something about communication. After all, he spent 24 years in the FBI, in the Crisis Negotiation Unit (CNU), and of those, he spent the last five years as the FBI’s lead international hostage negotiator. After that, in 2007, he retired from the FBI and founded the consulting agency “The Black Swan Group,” which deals with training communication/negotiation skills for both companies and individuals.
The book “Never Split the Difference” has one interesting subtitle that caught my attention when I first saw this book in a bookstore.
“Negotiate As If Your Life Depended On It.”
Quite a powerful sentence, isn’t it?
The message is that in our communication with others we must invest focus and effort, because often moments of inattention are what can cost us.
In the world of hostage situations, it can cost lives.
In our “more everyday” life, it can cost us relationships… with a colleague, friend, family member, romantic interest… or missed business opportunities, raises, more favorable purchases of some item.
That’s what the book’s author noticed in his career, and he learned that one of the key items is ACTIVELY listening to the other side.
The title “Never Split the Difference” describes very well what awaits you in this book. This is a book about communication, empathy, courtesy… but this is also where you negotiate better conditions for yourself, but don’t behave like some arrogant or selfish jerk. In other words, the book’s approach is that you should TRULY win in negotiations, but the other side shouldn’t feel like a heavy loser because of it.
The book is divided into 10 chapters:
- The New Rules – How to Become the Smartest Person… in Any Room
- Be a Mirror – How to Quickly Establish Rapport
- Don’t Feel Their Pain, Label It – How to Create Trust with Tactical Empathy
- Beware “Yes” – Master “No” – How to Generate Momentum and Make It Safe to Reveal the Real Stakes
- Trigger the Two Words That Immediately Transform Any Negotiation – How to Gain the Permission to Persuade
- Bend Their Reality – How to Shape What Is Fair
- Create the Illusion of Control – How to Calibrate Questions and Transform Conflict into Collaboration
- Guarantee Execution – How to Spot the Liars and Ensure Follow-Through from Everyone Else
- Bargain Hard – How to Get Your Price
- Find the Black Swan – How to Create Breakthroughs by Revealing the Unknown Unknowns
What’s important to know, and what’s a big plus of the book that I can immediately highlight, is that this is quite a practical book. This isn’t a memoir or biography, “old hunting stories” of a seasoned negotiator telling us his adventures from his youth.
The descriptions of hostage situations he experienced in each chapter are just dynamic overtures where the author then breaks down important elements of communication that can be transferred and quite naturally used in everyday life situations, which he’ll also present through some examples of his students, colleagues, or acquaintances.
Likewise, “Never Split the Difference” isn’t a book that just throws out quantitative “say this-say that.” Here you get WHY you should apply a certain approach in communication, what (psychological) effects it produces on the other side. When you’ll use communication to connect with another person, when to negotiate, when to (cleverly and subtly) bluff, how to turn the other side’s attempts to provoke you and throw you off balance to your advantage, how to get the amount you planned from the beginning while making it seem “hard-negotiated” with the other side… and much more useful stuff, like calibrated questions or the “Ackerman system” for making offers.
Particularly interesting is the last chapter on the concept of “Black Swan,” i.e., discovering what the author calls “unknown unknowns,” which requires you to think a bit about this chapter, but afterwards it (somewhat) crystallizes what those “factors” are that you can even quite accidentally discover (which you’d otherwise overlook) in communication, and they can be precisely what gives you the opportunity to, chess-speaking, “checkmate” your opponent in negotiations. By the way, if the term “Black Swan” is already familiar to you from somewhere (and I don’t mean the movie :D), maybe you’ve read something by Nassim Taleb.
The book also includes one mini-chapter/appendix “How to Prepare for a Negotiation,” which in a few pages in bullet points summarizes the book and key questions to pay attention to when preparing for any form of negotiation (something like a mini-script).
For me, the book “Never Split the Difference” really turned out to be a top book from the field of communication. It’s worth having a pencil/marker with you while reading, because you’ll discover many interesting information and approaches you’ll come back to. The book has about 220 pages, but you’ll want to dedicate time each day for one chapter, so you can nicely “digest” the information you read before. On top of that, the book is very nicely and clearly written and reads easily (one of the key reasons is probably the collaboration with Tahl Raz as co-author of the book, who is an award-winning journalist and researcher, so he probably contributed to the book being nicely “shaped”).
In the end, this book ended up on my famous “shelf” with books I’ll always return to and consider among the best I’ve read. 🙂
This book is really excellently rated (okay, a high rating on Amazon is always expected, but also on Goodreads, which is always harsh in rating books), and various authors have given it nice praise, including Joe Navarro (former FBI special agent and author of the book “What Every Body Is Saying”… which is planned to be read earlier than planned because of this book :D), Daniel Pink (who deals with the topic of motivation), and Adam Grant (author of the excellent book “Originals,” whose review you also have here).
Simply, I don’t know what more I could tell you about this excellent book without spoiling it. Simply, buy it, read it, and see for yourself. 🙂
And you, dear reader, is your approach to communication also “never split the difference”? 🙂
The Black Swan Group website (author’s agency)
Book price: Čarobna knjiga | Delfi | Dereta
Ratings (and purchase) on foreign sites: Goodreads | Amazon | Bookdepository | Audible | Waterstones
