Sample frameDay 100·Negotiation · Prepare

Morning. What they're asking for and what they need aren't the same thing. Only one of them has been said out loud.

Negotiation.

The Interest Map

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Behind the sentence the other side keeps repeating sit four or five things they actually need, and only one of them is money: could you name the other three without guessing? Probably not, and it isn't inattention — nobody has told you, because nobody has asked them.

The idea

Mary Parker Follett was a Boston social worker and political philosopher who arrived at management from community organising, and in January 1925 she gave a paper called 'Constructive Conflict' to the Bureau of Personnel Administration in New York. Conflict isn't a pathology, she argued; difference is simply there, and the only question is what you do with it. She named three responses. Domination, in which one side wins, cheap now and expensive later. Compromise, in which each side gives something up and nobody is satisfied, so the issue comes back. And integration, in which a solution is found that meets both desires with neither side sacrificing anything. Her illustration has never been bettered, and she was one of the two people in it. In the Harvard Library, someone wanted the window open and Follett wanted it shut. She didn't want a closed room, only to keep the wind off her; he didn't want that particular window, only more air. They opened the window in the next room, where nobody was sitting. Fisher and Ury, whose work you met on Day 1, restated the point fifty-six years later as positions and interests. The error both are describing is the same one: arguing with the sentence instead of the need that produced it.

The framework

01
What produced the sentence they keep repeating?
A position is the one thing they decided to say: fifteen per cent off, delivery by March, the exclusivity clause removed. It's an output, and arguing with an output is the most common way to spend a meeting achieving nothing, because the sentence can't move until whatever produced it is dealt with. Put the position at the top of a page and draw a line under it. Everything you do this morning happens below that line. The sentence is where the negotiation has been stuck; the negotiation itself is underneath it.
02
Four or five interests, and only one of them is money.
Work the categories deliberately: the economic interest, the operational one (what this does to their week), the reputational one (how it looks to their market), the personal one (what it does to the career of the individual in front of you), the precedent one (what agreeing sets up for their next twelve negotiations), and the procedural one (whether they can defend the outcome to whoever sent them). Four or five will be live. Write each one in their words rather than yours, because your words already contain your answer.
03
Test the map by asking, not by inferring.
Everything on your page is a hypothesis, and hypotheses assembled alone tend to describe the counterpart you imagine rather than the one you're dealing with. So ask, in language that invites explanation rather than defence: help me understand why March matters; if the discount were impossible, what would you need instead; what happens on your side if we do nothing. Then listen for the interest rather than the counter. Asking feels like weakness, which is why the question goes unasked, and why the rest of the deal gets negotiated against your own invention.
04
Price every interest before you price the deal.
Go down the list and put your own price against each thing they need. Some of it costs you almost nothing: a start date you can flex, a reference call, a named contact, a payment schedule that suits their year end, a clause that lets them tell a clean story internally. Those are the entries that matter, because they buy movement on the thing you actually care about. Follett found the room next door by pricing the interest rather than the position. Do that before anyone names a figure. In the room you'll reach for the discount.

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