A book I am currently reading to develop my negotiation skills, Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell, starts with an interesting  thought experiment to determine the reader’s negotiation style.

You are one of ten strangers in a room sitting at a round table. Someone walks into the room and offers a thousand dollars to the first two people who can persuade the person sitting opposite them to stand up, walk round the table and stand behind their chair. Everyone else will walk away empty handed. You need to think quick, before someone else succeeds in the task. What is your strategy?

Shell suggests that a person’s response is a good indicator of their negotiating style.

An ‘avoider’ will be reluctant to take part in the exercise, fearing looking silly, suspecting a trick, or being unable to consider the possibility of being able to persuade the other party to walk round the table.

A ‘compromiser’ see the possibility of offering $500 to the person sitting opposite if they run around the table. This is the most common solution to the problem (and the one I came up with). Shell points out that, in practice, it is often difficult to reach agreement on who should do the running, however. People fear they may be tricked and would prefer the other party to move. The time it takes for this secondary negotiation may cost both parties the prize.

The  person beating the compromisers may be an ‘accommodator’ who, having listened to the problem, sees time as of the essence and immediately runs around the table and stands behind the other person’s chair. They risk being able to convince their opposite number to share the spoils after the event, trusting in the better nature of the other party.

A ‘competitor’ will try to gain as much of the full thousand dollars by any means necessary. At the most unscrupulous level, this may mean making promises to their counterpart which they later try to back out of, or making excuses to prevent them from having to run round the table to ensure the other party does.

Finally, the best overall solution may be attained by the ‘problem solver’. This person immediately starts running, and shouts at the other person to do the same as, if you both do so, you both stand to win $1,000 without having to do so.

The experiment is instructive because it indicates an important dimension to negotiating which is often overlooked. In negotiation situations our first focus is often on how we can get as big a slice of the pie as possible, which means we perceive any gain as being at the expense of the other party. This mode of thinking can lead to a highly adversarial form of negotiation where each side sees depriving the opponent as the only way to succeed. This puts off many people from trying to make a deal, as they see it as a highly competitive, distasteful process. Successful negotiators, Shell argues, don’t fall for this fallacy, and instead look for opportunities to increase the overall size of the pie, as in the above example where the problem solver sees $2,000 at stake for the two parties rather than $1,000.

Practical situations are rarely as cut and dried as the one above. Shell points out, however, that giving full consideration to the other party’s interests and how they may coincide with your own will often provide insights to make the negotiation process smoother and potentially more beneficial to both parties. He uses everyday shopping as a simple example. Those who fail to fully consider the priorities of the merchant will be reluctant to haggle, as they will fail to give sufficient consideration to the seller’s desire to keep a customer happy. His students have discovered that merely asking for a discount from a retailer will often result in a reduction of price without any need to haggle, as the retailer will consider a reasonable discount a price worth paying to make a customer happy.

Shell’s book is great at providing a theoretical framework upon which to build one’s negotiation style and strategy, and also contains plenty of practical examples and advice on how to apply the theories. To those who find bargaining a natural process this may be over the top and unnecessary, but to us lesser mortals, particularly those with a geeky penchant for underpinning theories and conceptual frameworks, it’s a very worthwhile read.