BR#13: Writing the Other Side’s Victory Speech

Productivity

Just a couple of days ago, I was listening to a great podcast episode between Tim Ferriss and William Ury.

William Ury is a master negotiator who spent decades working with various presidents and state officials on very high-stakes negotiations and wrote several books on this topic, among other things.

Early on in the podcast, he shared a negotiation tactic that I thought was super interesting, so I wanted to share it:

He talks about writing the other side’s victory speech.

Let’s say you’re in a negotiation with a person who has full decision-making authority (a potential client, a stakeholder, or in William’s example, president of a foreign country).

Just because they have the authority to make a decision doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to be scrutinised or judged by their coworkers/ community/ cabinet.

If you want them to agree to your terms, put yourself in their shoes and think about how they’re going to be able to sell that agreement as a victory to their community. In other words, write their victory speech. And that’s how you sell it during your negotiation.

Creativity

On learning fast:

When I was very young, I liked playing chess quite a bit. I used to play with my dad. Then for a long time, I stopped playing. A few years ago, for whatever reason, I felt like playing again. I went to chess.com, created an account and started some games with random online players to see if I was still any good. I wasn’t. I was rushing my moves and making really terrible mistakes.

That frustrated me and it was a Friday, I had the weekend off, so I decided I’m going to spend a bunch of time getting good at it again. It was a pretty busy period for me and that weekend was the only free time I had to get better, so if I wanted to do that, I needed to learn fast.

First, I assessed my options, which to me were the following:

• read a book/ guide about chess strategy

• play a bunch of games and try to get better (not ideal because a single game could last quite a while)

• play speed chess, which only allowed a maximum of 2 minutes or so in total for each player to make their moves during a full game.

I chose the third option because it enabled me to play a lot of games in a short span of time and the idea was that I could learn from patterns in my mistakes and patterns in my opponent’s moves more rapidly. So I played countless games of speed chess, lasting between 2-4 minutes each, for hours on Friday evening. For the first few hours, I was losing all of them.

But as I played, I started to realise that I was frequently making the same mistakes over and over again. Each time I repeated a mistake, it felt increasingly painful.

However, I became really aware of those mistakes quickly and eventually started to realise I was about to do it again before, rather than after it was too late. By the end of the day, I started winning some games. The next day, I played more, and the ratio of win to lose began to improve more and more.

I was able to pick up on patterns and learn to instinctively avoid certain bad moves, not because I spent a lot of time learning the theory, but because I was quickly gaining experience and a visual memory of piece arrangements that flagged to me when I was in trouble.

I wanted to share this story as one example of how simplifying and fast experimentation can help you learn and get better at something quite quickly. This certainly doesn’t just apply to chess.

Mindset

On resolving internal conflicts:

Every now and then, when you’re working with different teams of people, conflicts can happen, even spontaneously. But you need both groups to continue working together, so what do you do?

The first thing that I always do when I find myself in a kind of mediator position is to remind people that we’re on the same team. It’s easy to forget when emotions take over, and it’s a really important thing for people to be reminded of because it’s going to reframe how they think about finding a resolution.

We may disagree on certain details, but if we’re working for the same company/ client/ project/ etc, then we will typically be aligned on the overarching goal. We all want what’s best. We just contribute in different ways.

Simply stopping to remind people of that can go a long way.