Voss versus Fisher & Ury

I have long been a fan of Fisher and Ury's excellent book on Negotiating, Getting to Yes. This week, I've been reading Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference.

I started with a lot of enthusiasm. Voss's experience with, and anecdotes about, tense FBI hostage negotiations made this a sharp-edged read.  And much of his early material struck me as useful and thought-provoking, including the power of getting your opposite number to say no, for example; and his emphasis on the emotional dynamics of negotiating is clearly important.

Yet, by the time I ended, I was rather disenchanted and wrote a tetchy review on Goodreads. 

That was partly because he is keen to distinguish his approach form that of Fisher and Ury, but did so by misrepresenting their work significantly and repeatedly. He is clearly not stupid, and has been on the Harvard programme to learn the Getting to Yes approach, so I find that hard to excuse. 

And there's a limit to how many Chris Voss is brilliant anecdotes I can take.  The killer, for me, was when he recounted one of his student's successful negotiations, noted how he would have done better, but ends with a patronising, 'Still, well done.'

Moreover, he ends up essentially taking a hard - and manipulative - positional bargaining approach towards the end of the book, that is less compelling and less appealing than the earlier material.

Now the dust has settled, though, and I have calmed down a bit, I think the problem is the comparison. I think Fisher and Ury's approach is particularly important when you have an interest in a long-term relationship with your opposite number. That is not the case in the situations where Voss learned his craft, where your opposite number is likely to end up in jail for a very long time, if they actually survive the situation.

Voss now has a consulting business selling his approach to businesses, and the book is in part a sales brochure; and that worries me slightly, for the obvious reasons.

However, if you are in a high stakes negotiation, with a strong emotional component, and no need for an enduring relationship beyond the end of the negotiation, then Voss's approach looks good.

More appealing to me, however, is to retain the fundamental ethics and framework of principled negotiation, as laid out in Getting to Yes, and then enrich that with some of the many valuable insights and skills that Voss alludes to in the earlier parts of his book.

So a qualified recommendation of Voss's book; but I will keep Fisher and Ury as the go-to text for me and the one I will always recommend first.

Making a scene...

As the Eurostar pulled into St Pancras (that sounds like the start of a novel, I realise as I type, but be assured it isn't)...  As the Eurostar pulled into St Pancras I noticed on the empty seat over the corridor there were two mobile phones and a passport. 

A number of passengers were already on their feet, moving towards the door.  So what to do?  I hesitated - anxious about touching someone else's personal possessions - and then picked up the passport, and opened it to the page with a name on it.  I hesitated again, and then called out in a loud voice (it certainly seemed loud in the hallowed quiet of the Eurostar Plus coach): "Mr Roberts?  Mr Roberts?" A number of people looked round, but nobody identified himself as Mr Roberts. 

Feeling a need to justify this outrageous disturbance of the peace, I said someone had left their passport and two phones on their seat, and people visibly relaxed as they realised that my raised voice fell within the bounds of acceptable behaviour, in the circumstances.  And as it happened, someone sitting nearby had noticed the person leave and move into the vestibule in the other direction to most, so I opened the connecting door and shouted again.

And Mr Roberts was there - and was, of course somewhat embarrassed, thanking me and saying 'I must have been half asleep.' I replied that I knew just how that felt, and passed him his things. And that was that.

But I was interested in the whole episode, and in particular in the fact that I'd hesitated.

It was clearly important to find the chap - we all know what a nightmare it would be to lose a passport, or a phone, but to lose both - and indeed a second phone - would be an extreme nuisance.

But even so I'd hesitated even to look at them, and again before calling out.  I'm not particularly shy; whilst I am more introverted than many, I am quite capable of speaking in front of large groups and have done so professionally on many occasions. So it wasn't precisely that. 

I think it was more the fear of making a scene, something I suppose I had learned early and powerfully to be taboo. And I have read that the fear of social embarrassment is pretty universal, and very strong.  Which may account for my felt need to justify my shouting by explaining about the passport and phone to the world at large, even though it was clearly of no concern to them.

And it also confirmed something I have long known about myself; that whilst I am very socially confident when I have a clear role and know what I and others expect of me in that role, in more ambiguous situations, my confidence is very much lower.

All of which made me think how frequently, and perhaps with insufficient thought, I have invited people into such places of ambiguity, (in workshops, leadership programmes and so on) and expected them to do rather more challenging things than simply find Mr Roberts...

Implicit Incisive Questions

Incisive Questions are beautifully crafted questions that help cut through (hence incisive) an untrue assumption that someone is living as true that is blocking their thinking - part of Nancy Kline's system of components that together provide a Thinking Environment.

So, for example, if someone assumes that s
he doesn't know the answer to the problem that she is addressing, we might invite her to develop an alternative credible assumption (eg that she might be able to find an answer), and then ask: if you knew that you might be able to find an answer, what might you think?

And, typically, thinking takes off.

In practice, we rarely use incisive questions explicitly, because more often than not, people find that they can continue to think usefully about the issues they are addressing for as long as we've got.

Which raises an interesting question.  The hypothesis is that the Thinking Environment works best when all ten components are sustained by the Thinking Partner.  Yet, if we rarely ask those questions in practice, how does that work? And that leads to our thinking about implicit incisive questions.

Sometimes when people are invited to think they are inhibited by unvoiced (and possibly subconscious) assumptions; that the person listening isn't really interested, or that they are boring, or that their thinking isn't of any real value, and so on.  

So the job of the listener is to listen with such exquisite attention that they are communicating, non-verbally, a series of (implicit) incisive questions:  If you knew that I was really interested... if you knew that you are not boring me at all.. if you knew that your thinking was truly valuable.... what might you think?  And if we, as Thinking Partners, get it right, thinking takes off.

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Photo by Christy Dalmat on Unsplash

Rumination (or over thinking) versus thinking

You know that feeling when you wake up having had a profound insight.  And then in the clear light of day, you wonder if it was such an insight after all...

Well, to avoid that doubt I am writing this early in the morning, before dawn.

And the insight I imagine I may have had is that rumination (or 'over-thinking') differs from thinking (in the sense I use it when teaching Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment) in the same way that self-flagellation differs from doing one's exercise reps.

And as dawn breaks, I realise I may have had this insight (or something very close to it) before, as I find a blog on my sight tagged rumination, and titled Overthinking.

Ah well, repetition is good, as my physio has often pointed out...

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 Image: © frimages/Getty Images

Attention, please...

 Last week, on a Thinking Partnership programme, here in sunny Helton, one of the participants commented on the fact that her partner would sometimes be busy with other stuff while she was trying to tell him something. Yet if she challenged him with 'You're not listening to me!' he was able to repeat the last two or three sentences she had said, word-perfect.

A number of us recognised that scenario - my late mother (who, to be fair, did have eight children demanding her attention and quite a lot to get on with to keep the household going) was superb at that.

That led to an interesting conversation in which we contrasted listening to and attending to. It is no coincidence that Nancy Kline, in her development of the Thinking Environment, identified Attention as a key component, not Listening.

We further discussed the resonances of attending to, and in particular I was struck by the notion of tenderness - both the tenderness we may exhibit when we truly attend to another, and the tenderness (in the sense of painful to touch) of the issues that people may disclose when they are attended to.

So how do we pay attention, tenderly? (And in passing, isn't it interesting that we talk of paying attention? And we may ask someone to lend us their attention? The metaphors recognise the value, and perhaps even the cost, of attention...)

But to return to my question, how do we pay attention, tenderly? This is where Nancy Kline's work is particularly powerful, I think. The first and most essential requirement is to train ourselves not to interrupt: indeed, the title of Kline's latest book on the subject is The Promise That Changes Everything: I Won't Interrupt You. So simple; so difficult...

But a number of the other components of that system we call a Thinking Environment contribute to the highest quality of attention. One is ease; by which we mean a freedom from any sense of urgency. Clearly we may have limited time available for any particular interaction, but within that time limit, we should make it clear that we have time for other person (and
we all know what it communicates when we don't have time for someone...)

And there are eight more components of this system; but reading about them is probably not sufficient: this is a practice-based approach, so you'd do best to come on one of my Thinking Environment Programmes for a total immersion experience (and being based in the Lakes, I do mean total immersion!)

Using a Practice Framework

I have written previously about developing my Practice Framework - a personal model of excellence for my coaching practice.

Having worked with it for a few years now, it seemed a good time to share it with others. So I introduced the concept into a training programme for experienced coaches wishing to become supervisors that I was running with Grant Thornton, and have just trialled it for the EMCC's suite of programmes with the Bank of England's coaches, who kindly volunteered to evaluate it for the EMCC.

The feedback has been very positive in both cases. 

For the Grant Thornton supervisors-in-training, I encouraged them to develop their own supervision practice frameworks, as a way of pulling together all the things they had learned as we went through the programme, and as an aid to continued reflective practice.

I did similar with the Bank of England coaches - encouraging them to discover, articulate and capture their implicit practice frameworks. They then discussed these with each other - fascinated to see how each had approached the task slightly differently, which promoted a lot of learning. And again, they saw the benefits of these as an aid to reflective practice going forward.  As one said, 'I had been expecting to be given a framework to use; but developing our own made it much more relevant and useful.'

And as always, I learned from them. One insight I gained was how well this helps one to articulate one's identity as a coach or supervisor. As I am considering re-designing my website to reflect who I am now, rather than who I was X years ago when we last did it, that was particularly timely. Other intelligent questions and discussions led me to see a wider range of uses for the framework, and a way of using it more consistently and systematically. So as from this autumn, I will be holding one aspect of the framework under review for a period of four weeks, and then moving on to another, and so on, cycling round the whole thing every year.

And that is part of the joy of my work: I always learn from my clients whose questions, challenges and reflections both keep me on my toes and teach me my craft.

Reflections on our Thinking Environment Day of Practice and Discovery

The Delegates

Last week we had our long-heralded Day of Practice and Discovery at Durham University. We brought together 40 people who are interested in the use of Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment in the context of HE or FE. It was a remarkable day for several reasons.

The first was that we heard from a range of people in different HE and FE settings who have been experimenting with the use of the Thinking Environment; from those using it as a modus operandi in PhD supervision (which is pretty radical, when you think about it!) to those who have found that it enables and supports cultural change at the organisational level. For details of all the sessions, see here.

The second was that every session included extensive opportunities for all present to think together about whatever the presenters had shared. We used a range of Thinking Environment approaches to do this, including rounds, thinking pairs, dialogue, and a Thinking Council.

The Team

The third was that the whole day had been put together using Thinking Environment principles from the start. The organising team met and thought together about what needed to be done and organised themselves to do it. 

The fourth was that all delegates were offered opportunities, both one-to-one and group, to experience the Thinking Environment in practice, prior to the conference, to ensure they had a rich understanding of the ideas underpinning the day.

And the fifth was that the whole day was done on a shoe-string budget, so that we could offer it for £50 a head - just enough to cover the hire of the venue and the food. We (almost) broke even.

The result was a day that was buzzing from start to finish, with high levels of engagement, and loads of fresh thinking arising in every session. We are collating some of the outputs now and they will appear in due course on the TE in HE website.  And we all had a lot of fun, too.