Former FBI Agent Explains How to Negotiate | WIRED

what i find in negotiations in real life is the absolute failure on the part of so many people to not anticipate what you will be asked i'm joe navarro former fbi agent and body language expert asking for a raise haggling in a market deciding where to go for dinner interviewing a suspect all of these are a form of negotiation every successful negotiation follows a pattern there's the assessment phase the engagement phase and the transactional phase if any one of these fail at worst you have a disaster at best this process takes forever so if you

were to ask me well when you were in the bureau what things did you do to negotiate effectively right off the top i i would tell you planning sitting down with you know yellow legal pads and writing out what is my objective clearly define what is the objective here what words am i going to use with this individual if you're talking to to a ceo that has two degrees what are you going to use fourth grade words you have to think of the audience you have to think of what potentially they're going to throw at

you and not just what they may throw at you how quickly they will throw it at you somebody that thinks fast speaks fast you're gonna have to be able to throw that arrow back immediately so it's planning it's coordinating it's rehearsing sitting down with fellow agents and saying okay you're gonna play the part of the bad guy and yet i've been to you know observer of many a negotiation where there's this absolute failure to think about what will be asked and this all goes to you know winging it thinking that negotiations is just about the

transaction showing up and saying what maybe you've thought about when in fact the front end should be what takes up the most time one of the jobs of the fbi was to recruit individuals who were working for hostile intelligence services they would often be in the united states under different cover as students working with companies and so forth but it's not like you can walk up to somebody and say hey hi i'm joe and we know you're spying and please tell us everything so it was a matter of letting them know that i was an

agent of the fbi and how can we begin to at least talk to each other and what i found useful always was i would find them on the street and i would just begin to walk with them and if they carried the newspaper in the left hand i carried the newspaper in the left hand by mirroring their behavior they don't feel threatened but then next time when they see me again walking next to them they're saying wait a minute there are no coincidences in counter-intelligence work and then i can begin a process of engagement that

is a benign so one of the things that i found as an fbi agent in just trying to get people to either confess or cooperate with us was what came to be known as the empathic model of social interaction and the empathic model basically looks at human communications and says in every effective negotiation you have the assessment phase the engagement phase and then the transactional phase we look at assessment as all the information that we can gather ahead of time plus what we can read from this person the minute we come into visual contact and

then throughout the process and so subconsciously by approaching this individual and just mirroring their behaviors they're thinking this is a pro this guy knows how to do it this guy knows that i may be under surveillance but this looks natural the engagement phase is thinking about well where's the best place to meet him how how many people look i'd like to meet you at this bar but if that's going to cause you problems or it's going to force you to have to report it then you tell me where you want to meet and then lastly

it's the transactional phase where at some point we now cross over into what is our goal and objective i want this person to cooperate but that's not going to take place until i can coordinate the assessment and the engagement then it allows us to move into the transactional phase much more easy i'm always assessing i'm always trying to figure out the best way to engage and then what is the best way to transact one of the things that i always looked at is a term we coined called chronicity and that is how we use time

we know that for instance for doctors surgical accidents increase after the lunch hour parole boards are more willing to be lenient in the morning hours less so in in the afternoon so a lot of that has to do with both the circadian rhythm and blood sugars and so as i look at negotiations and law enforcement i need to factor when is this person the most able to resist me versus okay at this point there's going to be less resistance negotiations are temporal whoever dominates time is in charge so you call a little time out let's

go talk that changes the rhythm that changes where this is going when do i remain silent there's a client i've worked with and he said joe i i can't tell you how many times i've used silence in fact i was negotiating for a building with a father and a daughter and they made a an offer that was supposed to be like their final offer and i just sat there and lowered my eyes and it drove them crazy and finally the daughter said okay we're gonna throw in another million dollars and he wasn't expecting that he

was just expecting them to say this is it one of the things that i learned as an agent especially dealing with extremists is that you just let them vent and not just let them vent once but let them vent over and over and over and over and just when you think they're shutting down you say well tell me about that again or would you cover that again and what happens is second law thermodynamics entropy after a while they've grown so tired they've got so much negative emotions poured into this that eventually they wear out and

it leaves you in a better position to then negotiate i've talked with a lot of airlines over the years and one of the things that we say is that when you have a customer especially at the gate and they're being very vociferous let them vent let them vent let them vent and then eventually all that energy is just dissipated entropy takes over and then you can say look this is what we can do for you and and that's all [Music] one of the most difficult cases that i that i ever had involved a man he

was in his late 30s and he was a pedophile we knew there were at least two photographs of what he had done but we knew that these individuals collected a lot more and the question was number one where was it number two would he cooperate with us and number three would he confess to all these crimes and the difficulty was when we assessed this individual he seemed like a nice guy in the sense that if you ran into him on the street you wouldn't perceive him as being a pedophile but at the same time i

was assessing myself and that was how angry i was that i was sitting with this individual so i had my emotions to deal with but i have to negotiate with him i have to get this information out of him somehow and to do so i had to go through that process of assessing him he says he's a churchgoer okay he says that he studied and graduated from high school and so forth so i'm building up all these things that i can at least attach some humanity to how to engage him became immensely difficult i have

to remain even and and and get the information out of him and then i have to be careful about what language i use because if i say the wrong word such as girl or child he may just all of a sudden rear up and shut down so it's about proceeding incrementally constantly assessing him watching his breathing rate watching his blink rate watching how often he touched his neck or he looked at me were his hands flat palmed down on his knees or were his fingers gathered up and after an hour i'm understanding him better we're

now establishing uh communications more effectively and i said let me tell you about my situation i'm a father i'm also an agent i'm not gonna go away i have people that i report to and finally i said to him look i'm probably the only guy in this town that doesn't hate you right now there's a thousand people out here that would string you up right now but i'm talking to you i'm listening to you and in doing that he understood where i was coming from no badge no gun no authority figure just this is who

i am and then he explained his position my life is ruined i'm going to lose my job i'm gonna go to prison blah blah blah yeah most likely now we've established who we are as as humans and then i said well the first thing you could do is be helpful you know be helpful to me forget the us attorney forget the prosecutors i need this and now it's personal and so he immediately told me where the rest of the material was now is this earth shattering does it save a nation state no but i look

at that as one of the most important cases i i ever worked and i attribute that success really not to myself but to this model that in in some ways it's it's really perfect