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An instinct for improvisational psychology helps. "Ultimately," write Fisher and Ury, "conflict lies not in objective reality but in people's heads." In confrontation (trying to get the child to bed, trying to get the hostages out), the natural impulse may be either to harden one's position or to be soft and conciliatory, to be nice. Both approaches may be wrong. "Change the game," say Fisher and Ury. Do not negotiate positions, but interests, the real goals that lie behind positions. Separate the people negotiating from the problem being negotiated. When ideology is in heat, it will sometimes emit the cry of "nonnegotiable demands"; but that is mostly just an aggressive display of plumage, a preliminary, and even itself a form of negotiation. The secret always is to figure out your opponents, to find out what they really want. Explain what you want, and see if there are alternatives outside the fixed positions, accommodations that would satisfy both sides. Often a rigid position is only a symbol of what one thinks one needs or wants; fixed positions tend to be crude and unreflective. They've had no test of process. Develop deeper alternatives, including fall-back positions to adopt if the negotiation does not work out—this allows one to negotiate with the strength of detachment. There is always power in knowing you can walk away.
Good negotiations demand trapeze work across wide cultural gaps, sometimes even across cultural time. As Saul Bellow wrote: "Some minds . . . belong to earlier periods of history. Among our contemporaries are Babylonians and Carthaginians or types from the Middle Ages." The Shi'ite ayatollah in Qum was negotiating across several centuries with a President whose working models of reality had to do with nuclear submarines. The oldest American negotiation, the endless business between black and white, may be subverted more than we know by disharmonies of expectation and assumption.
Dirty tactics can often be deflected simply by recognizing them and exposing them in a bemused but unaggressive way: "I assume that tomorrow we will switch chairs, so you will have the sun in your eyes." The secret is to notice them immediately and, if necessary, to make the dirty tricks themselves a subject of negotiation: "Not bad, not bad," you imply, "but shall we get serious now?" Also: never forget the power of silence, the massively disconcerting pause that goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.