🤝 Negotiation

What you’ll learn

1. The Myth of the NaturalReject two myths — that negotiation is a performance and that it's a fight — and adopt the course's frame: joint problem-solving, mostly done before the room.Most people picture a good negotiator as a quick, unflappable performer, which implies the game is won in the room by qualities you can't change. In fact the person who does well is usually the one who prepared: who knows their alternatives, their priorities, and something about the other side. Genuinely zero-sum single-issue haggles are rare, and treating them as the default is the most expensive mistake in the subject.
2. Positions and InterestsDistinguish positions from interests, and understand why positions collide while the needs beneath them usually don't.Mary Parker Follett's two sisters split an orange down the middle when one wanted juice and the other wanted peel — the 'fair' answer was half as good as the available one. A position is a stated demand on a single axis; an interest is the need beneath it. Because positions must collide and interests usually differ, the first practical move is to treat every stated number as a clue to be diagnosed rather than an offer to be countered.
3. BATNAUnderstand BATNA as the real source of leverage — a fact about your alternatives that can only be improved before the negotiation.Your power comes from what happens if the negotiation fails: your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. It's a fact, not a mood, which is why 'be more confident' is backwards — confidence is usually an output of having a real alternative. You can't improve your BATNA in the room but you can beforehand, and estimating the other side's tells you whether their firmness is real.
4. The Bargaining RangeUnderstand reservation values and the ZOPA — the invisible window a deal must live in — and why an empty one means no deal is the right outcome.Each side has a reservation value: the point where the deal and their alternative are equally good. Between them lies the Zone Of Possible Agreement, and every deal inside it beats walking away for both. If there's no overlap, no amount of skill produces a deal — and walking away is the system working. Crucially, where you land in the window is a tug-of-war, but the window's size can be enlarged by adding issues.
5. The Fixed-Pie IllusionUnderstand the fixed-pie assumption and learn logrolling — trading issues you value differently so both sides gain.Almost everyone assumes the other side wants what they want in the same order, which makes them fight hardest over things they could simply have traded. If priorities differ, a trade exists where each gives up what they care little about for what they care about a lot. The catch is the negotiator's dilemma — creating value needs openness while claiming it rewards concealment — which is managed by sharing priorities rather than limits and revealing gradually.
6. AnchorsUnderstand anchoring and learn honest responses to it — including when not to put a number on the table at all.The first serious number reshapes the axis the conversation happens on, and it works even on people actively resisting it. If you're prepared, open with a defensible figure and its rationale — an anchor with a reason is an argument, one without is a demand. If anchored, don't mirror the extremity: that accepts the axis and makes the midpoint absurd. Ask where the number came from, re-anchor with reasoning, or widen to another issue.
7. Ask, Don't TellMake diagnosis rather than persuasion the central in-room skill, and learn the open questions that get under a position.Everything preparation cannot supply — their interests, their alternatives, their ranking — sits in the other person's head, so the core in-room skill is diagnosis. Nervous negotiators argue fluently and learn nothing while teaching the other side plenty. Open questions like 'What's driving the timing?' and 'If we couldn't do that, what would you need instead?' surface priorities, and surprises are worth slowing down for, because differences are where the value is.
8. Offers That TeachUse multiple equivalent simultaneous offers and contingent agreements to find deals without conceding or deceiving.Offering several packages that are equally acceptable to you turns a yes/no into a which-one, and the option they reach for reveals their priorities at no cost to you — as long as the options are genuinely equivalent rather than decoys. When the block is a disagreement about the future rather than about priorities, a contingent agreement bets on it instead of resolving it, so each side gets the deal that's right given what they believe. Both moves treat a difference as the material the deal is made from.
9. The LineLocate the ethical line — persuading with reasons versus making someone worse at deciding — and see why manipulation is also ineffective.Manufactured deadlines, false scarcity and misrepresented alternatives target people who haven't prepared; preparation is the counter to nearly all of them, and misstating material facts is fraud rather than tactics. Coerced deals are fragile because the counterpart must keep performing after the pressure lifts. The test is whether the deal would survive the other side learning everything you know — and 'soft on the people, hard on the problem' means warmth and immovability are fully compatible.
10. The Preparation SheetAssemble the course into a one-page preparation sheet and land the through-line that negotiation is homework, not temperament.The sheet has eight lines — write your BATNA specifically, convert it to a reservation value, estimate theirs, list every issue, rank them by how much you care, guess their ranking and look for gaps, write three diagnostic questions, and build three packages you'd genuinely accept. Not one line concerns what you'll say; every one is something to go and find out. That is the whole argument: negotiation is joint problem-solving, mostly done before the room, and therefore learnable by anyone.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Roger Fisher & William Ury — 'Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In' (Houghton Mifflin, 1981)
• Mary Parker Follett — 'Constructive Conflict' (1925), the origin of the two-sisters-and-an-orange illustration
• David Lax & James Sebenius — 'The Manager as Negotiator' (1986) and '3-D Negotiation' (2006)
• Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School — https://www.pon.harvard.edu/
• Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman — 'Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases', Science 185 (1974), on anchoring

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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