Getting to Possible: William Ury’s Roadmap for Transforming Conflicts

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is William Ury. William co-founded the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. He served over twenty years as its director. Then, he established the Harvard Negotiation Project which trained over 30,000 people in conflict resolution strategies.
He also works extensively as a negotiation advisor and mediator around the world. He's helped in disputes ranging from corporate conflicts to civil wars in the Mideast, Venezuela, and Ukraine. He received a Distinguished Service Medal from the Russian Parliament for his work resolving ethnic conflicts.
William is also the co-author of Getting to Yes which popularized principled negotiation with over fifteen million copies sold. His latest book, Possible, draws on his experiences to offer time-tested practices to engage and transform conflicts. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, and now here is the remarkable William Ury.
So many instances in your book, including the foreword from Jim Collins, they're talking about this one sentence that defines your life's work, so let's just get that out in the open. Now that you're seventy years old, William Ury, what's the one sentence that defines your life's work?
William Ury:
That. That was a hike I was taking with Jim, and he asked me to sum everything up that I'd learned in one sentence that could be relevant to today's times to help us. I went back and thought about it in terms of three metaphors, and I'll give you the three metaphors, but you really need to unpack them because he then said when I came up with, he said, "Great. Now, go write the book."
The three metaphors are the balcony, the path to possible. The question basically is that I've sat with my whole life is like, "How do we get along with each other? How do we deal with our deepest differences? How can we make agreements? How can we get to yes and not blow the whole world to smithereens, either the small world or the large world?"
So I've sat with that question ever since I was a schoolboy, and for me, the path to possible in these times when conflict seem impossible is to go to the balcony, which is just a metaphor for a place inside of us of common perspective where we can keep our eyes on the prize and see the bigger picture.
The path to possible is go to the balcony, which is dealing with ourselves first, then build a golden bridge, which is a metaphor for trying to reach agreement across the chasm of disagreement, and then because that's really hard to do, it's to engage what I call the third side which is our birthright, which is the community that surrounds us that can help us transform these difficult conflicts because we're not going to end them, but we just might be able to transform them.
So the sentence I gave Jim was the path to possible is go to the balcony, build a golden bridge, and engage the third side.
Guy Kawasaki:
I love it. I love it. Now, you basically have described the three components of possibility, right. Okay. So the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room is, I read that, and I love the theoretical concept, but the first question that came to me is I cannot imagine Netanyahu going to the balcony or building bridges. What do you do when it's something that profoundly broken between Netanyahu and the rest of the Mideast?
William Ury:
That's true. People ask me after forty-five years, maybe almost fifty, actually, of wandering around the world as an anthropologist and negotiator in some of the world's toughest conflicts starting with the Middle East. Am I an optimist? Am I a pessimist? I like to say, "Actually, I'm a possibilist." I believe in human potential.
Why? Because I've seen with my own eyes human beings, whether it was in South Africa with apartheid where it seemed like it was going to go on forever, and you saw a remarkable transformation there of a racial war against the racist system of apartheid. Then, Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, people said, "Oh, they're going to fight each other forever. They've been fighting for generations." I watched as that conflict was transformed.
More recently, I was in the country of Colombia where fifty years of civil war, hundreds of thousands of dead, millions of victims, and that conflict also got transformed. That's why I come back to the Middle East today, and it looks impossible just as it looked impossible in South Africa, just as it looked as impossible in Northern Ireland, just as it looked impossible in Colombia.
Yeah, I can even see possibility. Now, do I expect Netanyahu to go to the balcony? I wouldn't count on it, but we need to go to the balcony in dealing with people and dealing with a leader like Netanyahu.
Do I think it's possible to build a golden bridge between Israelis and Palestinians? In other words, if we shifted the question from who's winning and who's losing, which we all know that win-lose game. What does it lead to? Everybody ends up losing. People may win a battle. You might win militarily a little bit, but you all lose. Everybody loses, including the community.
Can we change the question to, "How can two peoples live side by side in the same land in security, in dignity, in peace?" People have been able to do it in other parts of the world with impossible situations, so why not here? But it's going to take because that's really hard. It's going to take the activation of the third side which is all of us together.
The Israelis and Palestinians, just like any two sides who are really deeply traumatized, they're two traumatized peoples. They're going to need a lot of help from within their society of natural third-siders inside their society, and then with outsiders outside the society. Is it going to be easy? This is the hardest work you can do, but is it possible? I believe so.
Guy Kawasaki:
What's the first step?
William Ury:
The first step is to start by stopping. That's the going to the balcony. What I found in negotiation is the single biggest obstacle to me getting what I want in a negotiation is not what I think it is. I might think it's that difficult person on the other side of the table. It's actually the person on this side of the table. It's the person I look at in the mirror every morning.
It's me. It's our own very natural, very understandable tendency to react. In other words, act without thinking, act out of fear, act out of anger, act out of trauma. When you react, you often act in ways that go exactly contrary to your own interest. As the old saying goes, when you are angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
William Ury:
You will send the best email you'll ever regret, the best text you'll ever regret. So that's why it's so important to start by stopping and to take a step back. The balcony is a metaphor for it. Imagine you're negotiating on a stage. You, and the others, and everyone else, and whatever, part of you goes to a mental and emotional balcony where it's a place of perspective. It's a place of calm. It's a place of a slight detachment where you can ask yourself, "What's really important?"
For example, going back to the Middle East, what's really important for the Israelis right now just because you mentioned Netanyahu? It's security, right? What's going to advance their security? Is the current behavior that their leaders engage in, is that really going to advance their security?
I doubt it long-term. It seems that actually can probably make them less secure, so that's a good example to me of all of us. We all fall off the balcony when we get hit, when we get attacked, when our traumas get activated, and that's why we need help from our friends.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, when you say we need help from our friends, are you saying that Joe Biden should call up Netanyahu and say, "Listen, Bibi. You need to back off. I'm not going to send you any more weapons until a ceasefire starts." Is that help from the community and friends?
William Ury:
That could be. That's one option, and some people would think that should have been done long ago. There are precedents for that, and I'm not saying one way or the other, but yeah, from your friends. Sometimes, all of us, we get so blinded in a conflict, we can't see the way out. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, "An eye for an eye, and we all go blind."
Guy Kawasaki:
That is a great quote. Yeah.
William Ury:
So we need the ability to step back, and so we could go back to that example again. You're talking about maybe the hardest conflict in the world, and let me just give you an example. When I started off in my career, I was working on the Middle East. There had been a surprise attack on Israel's holiest day, Yom Kippur, the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Egypt, surprise attack, thousands dead. Just Israel and existential crisis.
At that point, there had been four wars in the previous twenty-five years between Israel and Egypt which was the largest military powers at the time, and everyone expects there should be another war, but Jimmy Carter, bless him, was trying, and everyone said it's impossible, and he was about to give up himself.
He and his wife, Rosalynn, went off to Camp David for a weekend to enjoy things, and she said, "Why don't you bring him here? It's a balcony. It's a place of nature. Little cabins. Maybe that will help. One last try."
So he brought the leader of Egypt, Anwar El-Sadat, and the leader of Israel, Menachem Begin, together. The first three days, there was no chemistry. They were attacking each other, and neither one was going to give in one little bit.
But lo and behold, to everyone's surprise, after thirteen days, there was a surprise Camp David Accord that actually brought about an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty that exists to this day, forty-five years later, through wars, assassinations, everything, all the rough stuff, and it's holding strong. So, early on, I learned that what everyone thought was impossible, actually, with a little bit of growth, with a little bit of grit, with a little bit of grace, could become possible.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my God. Let's go back to 9/11. Should the first step have been to go to the balcony as opposed to go to the missile strikes and trying to take out Osama bin Laden?
William Ury:
Yeah. What I'm saying is yes. The thing about terrorism, as terrible as it is, is that it's intended to provoke a reaction in which we hurt ourselves much more than the terrorist hurts us. We play right into the terrorist's hands, and the war on terror last I checked with some scholars led to an estimated one million deaths worldwide. one million deaths. 3,000 people for every one of those. But anyway, so many people, and the question is, did it make us more secure as a nation?
We spent trillions of dollars, and what actually did it bring us? If we'd gone to the balcony at that moment and said, "Let's really think about what's our interest here. What's our deepest interest here? How are we going to safeguard America? How are we going to safeguard the world? How are we going to move things forward?" Would we have gone into a twenty-year war in Afghanistan? Would we have gone into Iraq?
Everyone can see that those turned out to be colossal failures if we don't learn that it's actually our own reaction that hurts us more than our original action. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have done something. Of course, from the balcony, then you think, "Okay. What would be the smart thing to do?" Maybe it's to treat it as, "Okay. We'll see if we can disable Al-Qaeda," but that doesn't necessarily mean taking over an entire country.
It can be a police action, an action that's highly targeted which ultimately succeeded in some sense, but did we need to go in and think we're going to rebuild and revamp a country that we knew from history pretty soon, the longer you stay, even though you might be seen as friends by some when you first show up in the country, pretty soon, they see you as occupiers? We saw that happen in Vietnam. We could learn these lessons, and those are lessons you learn from the balcony, the place of wisdom here.
Guy Kawasaki:
I was just saying this is obviously wishful thinking, but if after the October terrorist attack, Netanyahu had called you up and say, "Listen, I just read your book. I understand the concept of going to the balcony. What should I do? Should I send in the IDF and wipe out that country?" What's your advice about the long-term viability of Israel?
William Ury:
Yeah. The first thing is humility because we don't know, and in this sense, humility in front of it, but I would say from the balcony, I would say think hard. What's Israel's main interest here? It's to make sure that this never happens again, never again, and what are the lessons we need to learn from this? There was a catastrophic failure in Israel's defense is one thing, right, because that should never have been allowed to happen.
As we now know, there was intelligence that wasn't listened to. But the thing is be careful about how you act right now because right now, the country is traumatized. It feels to people, and this is where deep empathy is needed. It feels to people like, "Wow, this is horrendous." People were saying this is the biggest loss of life since the Holocaust and whatever. That trauma is coming up.
One thing is you have time. It's not like Hamas is going away, but you could make sure this doesn't happen again. But you've got time to reflect and think about what's the smartest thing that will advance and protect the security of the situation and understand what's the game that the people who inflicted this were up to, and make sure you don't play right into their hands and do exactly what they want you to do because what they want you to do is to go in and attack right now.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you could say that 30,000 people were killed in retaliation, right? So let's say they have, I don't know, on average, five members of their family each. Did Israel not just create like 150,000 people for the next thousand years are going to hate Israel for doing this?
William Ury:
I would say that's a very plausible possibility. Yeah. It's a little bit like the old myth of the Hydra where you cut off one head, and then ten heads grow. So the thing to think about is you have time to think about what's your best action in this case. Right now, you have the strong sympathy and support of the entire world after October Seventh where you're going back to that moment. How do you deploy that to be able to build a Middle East in which this will not happen again?
If you remember, at that moment, Israel was on the verge of a breakthrough normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia which in fact, that attack might have been intended to spoil, right? What would be the best way to prove the terrorists wrong and to defeat them, but to go ahead with that deal and create a Middle East in which Israel is integrated in the Middle East, safer in the Middle East, and in which terrorism has much less of a toehold?
Guy Kawasaki:
I understand the difference between causation and correlation. Okay. But there seems to be at least very high correlation, and I'm going to ask you if there's causation. Seems to me like a lot of these things that blow up like this, the leaders are always men. Now, do you think if we had women in charge, we would be in such a bad place in these kind of conflicts, and just acts of terrorism, and reactions like this?
William Ury:
Probably not, at least from my understanding of these things. I often say that in my work, in dealing with wars around the world, I'm always dealing with the ME problem which is Male Ego. That's not to say that you can't have wars with women in charge and so on, and people give examples, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and so on.
But the truth is, yeah, women, by and large, they're not quite going to be drawn into these kind of ego slugfest, not as likely, and they're more relational. They tend to be a little more empathetic.
Yes. I do think as more and more women become leaders, and more and more women go into even the field of negotiation and mediation, I think you're going to see a beneficent effect. There is, actually, some data on this, actually, to back it up too. We were just talking about Jane Goodall. You were saying one of the most remarkable people you and I both know. That kind of leadership from a woman is the kind of leadership the world sorely needs these days.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I want to go backwards a little bit. Let's just go on the balcony for a second. Now, one author to another, I want you to explain how Getting to Yes became such a bestselling book. How did you pull that off?
William Ury:
I don't know. I don't know if I pulled it off actually, so it was a surprise to both my co-author, Roger Fisher, and myself at the time. I think what helped was we made it very simple. We made the language very clear. Academics, sometimes we're prone to write in ways that make it hard for people to understand what you're saying. We tried to make it very simple, short, pithy, and the other thing was we tried to write down what I think of as common sense, but it's actually uncommon sense.
It's common sense that's uncommonly practiced, and what we said in that book too was there's probably some sense in which you already know these things, but we're articulating them. We're putting them to words, into concepts, into tools that you can then use more easily. I also think it was the zeitgeist. At that time, the bestsellers on the New York Bestsellers List to do with negotiation had titles like Looking Out for #1 and Winning Through Intimidation.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
William Ury:
So we were coming at it with a, "Hey, let's think differently here. Let's take a different approach. One that's actually both sides could win or at least come to a deal that's better for them for both sides, and look at it differently." It just hit a chord and kept on going, but the rest of it is a mystery to me.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you didn't have some magic, mystical marketing plan that got it on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Tom Peters endorsed it or whatever. I'm looking for a path here. I'm looking for tactics here as opposed to the zeitgeist happened.
William Ury:
Yeah. Okay. Keep it simple. Keep it clear. Don't obfuscate. Speak from your own experience, what you truly have seen and whatever, which is what we did. What did we do? We didn't have a brilliant marketing plan. We did get some good quotes. Do you remember Ann Landers?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
William Ury:
Ann Landers. She gave a quote together with Cyrus Vance. So we had Secretary of State, and then we had dear Ann from the newspaper column, and one thing we did do was we had a center program at Harvard that offered courses, and academics picked up those courses, and then of course, they assigned Gary Diaz, and it spread that way through so that a lot of people who've gone through law school, or business school, or school of government, or psychology departments, whatever picked it up, and it filled a niche.
The other thing I would say is address some basic human need where there's a need. We're like, "Okay. How do we deal with our differences?" and we frame negotiation not just as, "Okay. You got a sale. Here, you're selling your house," or whatever it is, but negotiation is in the sense that everybody is a negotiator, and everybody negotiates every day, just back and forth communication, trying to reach agreement. So it got framed in a larger sense.
I'll give an example here. Before that book, Roger and I wrote a little book called International Mediation, A Working Guide. We joked at the time there were about six readers of that book, and to be honest, we didn't really publish it. We published it privately and so on. But nevertheless, international mediation, how many international mediators are there?
Guy Kawasaki:
Six.
William Ury:
I had lunch with them. I said, "What if we took out 'international' and we made it not just mediation, but everybody is a negotiator, made it negotiation?" So we framed it so that actually, a lot of people could see themselves in that book. Basically, the same ideas that are on International Mediation, A Working Guide are in Getting to Yes with a different framing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Who came up with the title?
William Ury:
I wish I could say it was Roger and me, but actually, we came up with a lot of titles. We had some "Getting" titles like Getting to Negotiate, whatever. But actually, it was our editor at Houghton Mifflin at the time who was shaving, and he came up with, "What about Getting to Yes?" When I first heard that, I thought, "That's not quite grammatical, is it, Getting to Yes?"
Guy Kawasaki:
Mm-hmm.
William Ury:
Definitely, but it actually stuck, and I think the title, actually, that is a tip. Get the right pithy title that has a chance to become an everyday phrase in the language because now "getting to yes" is used independently of the book all the time by people. I hear people, "Oh, let's get to yes," or whatever. It didn't exist in the language before it got coined.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. My last question, and obviously, it's because I'm an author that I am just so curious how this went down, but did it immediately go bestseller and just take off, or was it months, and then finally, one day, it hit critical mass? How did it roll out?
William Ury:
It wasn't a sprint. It was a marathon. It wasn't like, "Oh, hit the Bestseller List the next week." No. It grew. It spread by word of mouth, and that's the thing is it's like the little engine that could. It just kept on going. There's a lot of grit there. It just kept on going.
Of course, we helped by teaching and giving courses and things like that, but it kept on going and going. To this day, that book came out, believe it or not, in 1981. So that's forty-three years ago, and it's still selling almost as well as it sold in the first year. So it just keeps on selling because it's a timeless subject.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. Huh.
William Ury:
Now, I've lost count, but the last time I tried to count, it's probably about fifteen million copies.
Guy Kawasaki:
All you have to do is endorse the royalty chair. That's it, or is it a wire transfer at this point?
William Ury:
Probably.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, throw some humility at us. So did you get anything wrong in that book that now you say, "Ugh, I should have said this instead of that?"
William Ury:
Well, there are probably things that probably I would rewrite, and I'm trying to remember. One thing. The first chapter, we call it “Separate the People From the Problem,” and what we meant by that was distinguish between the people and the problem so that you can be soft on the people while you're hard on the problem, but some people took that "Let's separate the people from the problem," means like don't deal with the people.
No. We were saying deal with the people first. Human beings are negotiators, so maybe we would change that so it didn't lead to that misunderstanding of, "Oh, you can take the people out of the equation." You don't take the people out of the equation. You start with the people.
You deal with the people first, but you're soft, you're respectful with the people. Respect is the cheapest concession you can make in a negotiation, in my opinion. It costs you nothing, but someone else's dignity means everything else to them. So, yeah, I might change that.
What I tried to do in Possible, this latest book, is I realized that Getting to Yes is necessary. It's the central part. It's a little bit like the Golden Gate Bridge there not too far from you. There's the bridge. Getting to Yes was about how to build that bridge, but there are these two giant pylons on each side which support that bridge which make it work.
For me, the first pylon is the balcony, and we didn't have that in Getting to Yes. We didn't have this notion of that you have to get to yes with yourself, that your biggest opponent is yourself.
So, for me, the balcony is the foundation of that, and then on the other side of the bridge, the other pylon is the third side. In a lot of these negotiations, it's hard to build that bridge. You gave examples. I'll give you an example. Without the engagement of a power that's untapped around us, which is our birthright, which is the way in which indigenous cultures have always dealt with conflict, which is you engage and mobilize the community to help the parties transform the conflict.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. So you may think I'm being facetious, but I'm dead serious because I think that about 99.99 percent of the people listening to this are not negotiating the peace in the Middle East or some South American country. Okay? So I just want to know this. Since the book, can you just say that, "I regularly get mundane things like I can always get an aisle seat, I get first class upgrades, I get free refills. When I get pulled over, I never get a ticket because I'm freaking William Ury, and I know how to get to yes?"
William Ury:
No, no, no. Listen. I'm an eternal learner, a lifelong learner.
Guy Kawasaki:
Your growth mind.
William Ury:
The kind of things we're talking about in the book, lessons like maybe the most important thing you can do in your negotiate is to listen. We think of negotiations as talking, but more about listening. That's something we have to practice every single day. Yes, the methods in the book which are sum up what we see successful negotiators do can help you in those instances.
But more importantly, what they help you is in the vast majority of our negotiations. When I ask people, "Who do you negotiate with in the course of your day?" What's the first thing they say? They say, "My spouse," "My kids," "My boss," "My colleagues," "My co-workers," "My staff."
Whatever it is, the vast majority of negotiations that we have are with people with whom we have ongoing relationships. It's not a one-shot deal. A one shot deal. You're buying a used car. There are the usual bargaining tactics and things like that.
No. That's a tiny percentage of our negotiations. Our negotiations are with people with whom we have ongoing relationships. If we treat them badly, they're going to remember it, and they're going to say, "I'm going to get you back next time."
What you find is the strategies in Getting to Yes or the strategies in Possible are, "Go to the balcony. Okay. Watch your reactions because you may act, particularly in difficult situations, in ways that you will later come to regret. Build that bridge by listening to the other side, by trying to understand what they really want, going behind the positions, the underlying interests."
Yeah. Those things will help you a lot in life, and when I teach negotiation, it's not about dealing with the Middle East. It's about, "Okay. Day to day, how do you deal with all those negotiations?" Those are the negotiations that count because oftentimes, when we think of negotiation, the question is, "Who's winning?"
In the negotiations, I'm talking about which are with the people with whom we care most about, the people around us. If you ask yourself, "Who's winning this marriage?" your marriage is in serious difficulty. If you ask yourself the question, "Who's winning this business partnership? Who's winning, me or my long-term customer?" You ask that question, that's not the right question to ask. It's like, "How are we doing?"
Guy Kawasaki:
I wish I could ask Melania that question, but okay. I see your point. More tactics. So how should people prepare for a negotiation besides figuring out you got to go to a balcony, and shut up, and listen?
William Ury:
Yeah. So, first of all, preparation is essential no matter how skilled you are. You might be the best negotiator in the world. You don't prepare, you put yourself at a grave disadvantage, so prepare. Take at least as much time and ideally, a lot more than you would spend talking with the other person, so preparation is time on the balcony. The first thing you want to prepare to ask yourself is, "What do I really want? What are my interests?"
I'll give you an example. I was working with a fellow, became a friend of mine who was a business leader, a big business leader who was in a big fight with his business partner over control of the company. I asked him, "What do you really want?" He said, like a good business intelligent leader, "So I want this amount of stock, and I want the end of the three-year non-compete clause. I want the company headquarters, and I want the company sports team." He had this whole list.
I said to him, "But Emilio, I understand that. Those are our positions. Those are the things we say we want." I said, "But what do you really want? What do you really want?" He looked at me stunned for a moment because he wasn't used to be asking that question because we think we know what we want. I said, "But what do you really want? You've been in this fight for a long time, two and a half years at this point. It's driving you crazy. What do you really want?"
He looks at me for a long time, and finally, with a sigh, he says, "You know what I really want? I want my freedom. That's what I want." As soon as he heard that, again, listening with a heart, not just with a head, it's like the tone. It's like a little bell, and I thought, "Okay. That's what he really wants."
I knew a little bit about him, and freedom actually had some resonance for him because thirty years earlier, he'd been coming out of his apartment, he'd been kidnapped by a group of urban political guerrillas, and held in a coffin for a week, and thought he was going to die. So, freedom, but that's often how we often feel in a conflict. We often feel like we're hostages, right? But I asked him, "So what does freedom mean to you?"
He said, "Freedom means freedom to spend time with my family which is the most important thing in my life, and freedom means the chance to make the business deals that I'd love to make." So then, I thought, "I'm not trying to be able to get you all those things. You said that laundry list, but maybe I can get you your freedom."
The other thing that I could sense was dignity. Everyone wants their dignity. This thing had gone public. It was in the newspaper. It was all over. He didn't want to be seen as a loser. He couldn't be seen to lose in this situation. So, once I had those two clues, freedom and dignity, then when I sat down with the other side, in this case, the representative of the other side who was a mentor of the other side, it wasn't about, "Okay. We're going to negotiate these dollars," and sensing.
No. It was about, "How do we give our clients who are our friends, how do we give them the freedom they want? How do we get them out of this? How do we make sure that neither one loses in this situation?"
That approach in face of this impossible business dispute, within less than a week, we had both men sitting at a law office signing an agreement, wishing each other well, joint press release, wishing each other, going to explain to the executives and the employees of the company what they had decided, and it was over.
I asked my friend. I said, "How do you feel?" He said, "I got everything I wanted," and he did actually get much of the things on his list there and said, "But the most important thing is I got my life back."
Guy Kawasaki:
Huh. Wow. Wow. Okay. Can you mention, just so we have some examples in our head, who's in the William Ury Hall of Fame for Negotiation? As people or as companies, as an expert in negotiation, who do you say, "Oh my God, they really did this right?"
William Ury:
The person I'm going to come up with is Nelson Mandela, and I'll tell you why. When I was in South Africa the first time, he was in jail. I was there to give some negotiation training to both sides and so on, but he was in jail. He'd been in jail for twenty-seven years, and it looked like there was no chance. The white nationalist government, they had all the power. They had all the guns and everything like that, and it looked like this war was going to go on for generations.
What did he do in jail? He was a boxer. He was reactive. What he learned in jail was to go to the balcony. He learned to study himself. He writes about it to his wife in his prison letters. He learned to meditate. He said, "You've got to observe your thoughts and things." He learned to control his natural reactivity, and then the second thing he did was about bridge which is he learned the language of his enemies. He learned Afrikaans so he could speak to them in their own language.
Not only did he learn their language, he learned their history. He learned their history of their own history of humiliation and trauma at the hands of the English during the Boer War when they were in the first concentration camps and all that horror so that when he was then able to come out of jail, he was able to negotiate with them in their own language and persuade them to build that Golden Bridge, to give them a way out, to give them a dignified way out, and he harnessed, he engaged the third side which is the international community and engaged the community within South Africa, the business community, the labor community, the women's groups, the faith leaders, and so on.
It was those three things altogether, balcony, bridge, and third side. He wasn't just an advocate for his side. He made it very clear, "I'm not just fighting for the freedom of the Blacks. I'm fighting for the freedom of the whites too." He was a third side leader. So, for me, that's what makes him a great negotiator.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's great. A few minutes ago, you were talking about sending out press releases and stuff, and you mentioned this in your book about crafting the theoretical victory speech of two people who are at loggerheads. Give me the victory speech that both Zelenskyy and Putin can make to resolve the war in Ukraine.
William Ury:
You're asking the easy questions there, Guy. Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Hey. You know what?
William Ury:
No. Right, right.
Guy Kawasaki:
NPR doesn't ask you questions like this.
William Ury:
Yes. When I am facing a difficult, impossible conflict, and I recommend this to anyone who's listening to this, I like the thought experiment of imagining the other side's victory speech. In other words, imagine that the other side accepts what you want them to do. The boss does what you want them to do. The spouse does what you want them to do.
Now, imagine that they have to go back in front of the people they care about. Their board of directors, their voters, their workers, whatever it is, and explain why this is a victory for them, why saying yes to you is a victory for them. What would be their three key talking points?
Yes. In the beginning of the Ukraine War, what did I do? I sat down and wrote down what I thought would be Zelenskyy and Putin's victory speeches. There was a chance in the beginning of the war to bring the war to an end just in the first month or two before it gets solidified into this horrible thing, and there was a day.
It was Victory Day, the day in which both leaders and both countries commemorate the victory against the Nazis. What did they need to say? Zelenskyy needed to be able to say, "We stood tall. We still exist. They tried to wipe us out and wipe us out as a country. We still exist. We're independent. We're sovereign." He needed to be able to say something like that.
Now, we're sitting down, and we're trying to figure out, "Okay. What do we do with this situation?" But he needed to be able to say something like that. Putin needed to be able to say at that moment, "We went in here to prevent Ukraine from joining, from being part of NATO and whatever. That's not going to happen. We went in to protect our Russian, co-ethnic speakers. We're not going to do that."
They need to be able to give something like that, and then say, "Okay, and now we're stopping, and we're going to negotiate this thing." There was a general. When I worked on the Cold War back in the old days, I met a Soviet general who once said to me, "Will, I've seen a lot of wars, a lot of wars, and what I've noticed is every one of those wars seems to end in a negotiation, so why not start with a negotiation?"
Is that easy? No. This is the hardest work you can do, but that exercise of writing the other side's victory speech, of starting at the end and working backwards, of stimulating your imagination, I find, can take even seemingly impossible situations and open up new possibilities. I'm not saying there's any magic here. What I'm saying is the magic is inside of you.
That's where the magic is. Maybe there are some very good negotiators, but every one of us has a negotiator inside of us that can be developed and honed to be a remarkable negotiator. That's what's needed in today's world. We need to start with the conflicts that are around us, and then expand out to the larger conflicts like the ones around the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. You also explained the concept why more conflict is a good thing. So would you explain why more conflict can be constructive and positive?
William Ury:
I say that sometimes a little bit tongue in cheek because people expect me to say, "No. I'm all in favor of ending conflict." First of all, conflict is natural. As an anthropologist, it's part of life, and it can even be healthy. In fact, psychologists will tell you that a successful marriage isn't about suppressing the conflict. It's about engaging our differences, but engaging it constructively rather than destructively, surfacing them.
In business, the best decisions often result from divergent perspectives coming together, and out of that creative friction, you come up with a better idea. You probably discovered that at Apple and Steve Jobs. In that sense, conflict is the foundation of human growth. It's how we grow. It's how we learn. It's how we deal with all the injustices in the world, and there are a lot of injustices in the world. There are a lot of changes that need to be made that happens through conflict.
That's what Mandela taught us. That's what Gandhi taught us. That's what King taught us. Actually, ironically enough, in this world, we're going to actually need more conflict, not less, but healthy conflict because the choice we face is not to get rid of conflict. The opportunity we have is to transform it, to change its form from destructive fighting in which everybody loses into constructive, creative dialogue and negotiation.
Guy Kawasaki:
In this theoretical world, what, do people meet at the United Nations, and they hash it out? "You can have Crimea, but you cannot join NATO." Is that the kind of discussion we expect?
William Ury:
That might happen at some point, frankly, and it could take place at the UN. Oftentimes, I tell you where these conversations take place. It's the informal conversations, the back channel conversations. In the front, on the stage, it's theater. I'll give you an example. Back to South Africa, we were talking about Mandela.
Mandela, when he came out of prison, he was negotiating with the clerk who was the leader of the president of South Africa at the time. The two didn't actually get along with each other. They didn't have good chemistry. So where did the real negotiations took place? Behind the scenes.
I call that wizards, and there was a person that Mandela trusted who was a young trade union leader with a lot of negotiation experience. His name was Cyril Ramaphosa. He's actually now the president of South Africa thirty years later, and then there was a fellow, a junior minister in the government, Roelf Meyer.
These two would get together with their teams behind the scenes. Oftentimes, the negotiation, the talks would break off. There'd be violence because oftentimes, in conflict, things get worse for a while before they get better. But behind the scenes, these two we're working things out, and that's what you need all the time. We need wizards.
I'll give you one other example here. Roger Fisher and I once visited the arms control talks in Geneva between the Russians and the Americans. Over lunch, I was asking these guys. I said, "So you haven't made any deals in seven years and no agreements. But before that, in the 1970s, there were quite a number of arms control agreements. What was true then that's not true today?"
They said, "There are many things." He said, "But back then, we had a really interesting little process we called the wizards." I said, "What were the wizards?"
The wizards were two Americans and two Russians who had four characteristics. They were bilingual in English and Russian so they could communicate easily. They were technically knowledgeable about the subject which happened to be arms control. They were lower level than the ambassador, and hence, as they joked, they were disposable.
Whenever there was an impasse in the talks, these four would get together out on a ferry boat in the lake there at a restaurant, and they'd shoot the breeze. "What if we were to count the warheads this way? What if we were to do it that way?" Each side knowing full well that neither had the authority to bind their respective delegations.
The joke about being disposable was if the conversations went too far, you could always ship them back to Washington and Moscow, and say, "This conversation never took place." It was deniable, and they said more good ideas for breaking impasses came out of those wizard conversations. So my question for us today, we had a small conflict in a business or whatever it is, or conflict in politics is, where are the wizards and might you possibly be a wizard yourself?
Guy Kawasaki:
How would you know if you are a wizard?
William Ury:
I think all of us could be wizards. It's that a wizard is someone who can easily communicate with the other side. He might've gone to school with that person. Whatever. You've got some trusted relationship. In that case I was giving, that business case, I was a friend of one of the parties. I contacted a friend of the other party. He was a mentor. They knew him. So we were each trusted by our sides, and all of us can think of situations like that.
We got together, and we said, "How do we help our friends get out of this?" So we were the wizards behind it. They would not have been able to reach agreement to anything, but we were able to go back and forth, and we build enough trust between us that in a week, we're able to settle something that seemed absolutely impossible.
So that's what you're looking for is wizards are trusted, and they're often creative, and we all can build trust. We all have trust of certain people and create trust, and we all have that inner creativity. If we bring that to our conflicts, then we become genuine possibilists, and that's what the world needs.
Guy Kawasaki:
I can't remember who I interviewed. I think maybe it was Barack Obama's speech writer, but he told me that years ago, in Washington, D.C., all the members of Congress used to live in the same area regardless of party. So what happened was inevitably, their kids were on little league teams together and all that.
So there's a lot of informal physical face-to-face meeting at little league games, sitting in stands, in restaurants, and that's how a lot of things got done in politics. But now, everybody lives completely separately. Mike Johnson's kid is not on the same little league team with Chuck Schumer's. That just ain't happening anymore.
William Ury:
Absolutely, that.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think that's like a little bit of wizardry, right?
William Ury:
Yeah. Exactly. That's what used to happen in Washington. You think of Congress as they're taking votes, but most of what Congress is negotiation, right? That's what they're doing most of the time. When you think of the president as mostly giving orders or deciding executive orders, no. He or she is negotiating with different interest groups all the time, and negotiation is the central way in which we make decisions.
You're right about Congress that it's a pity that now there's so much silos. People don't even spend the weekends in Washington anymore. They just fly home. So you don't have those relationships. You might disagree about this, but you're on the same baseball team, or you go to the opera together, or whatever you do together.
Actually, opera. I remember, I think it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved the opera. It was a very conservative Supreme Court justice. They used to go to the opera together, and those kinds of things, those relationships help.
It boils down to relationships. I once was a facilitator at a meeting of 200 members of Congress, a hundred from each side, and this was a time of great stress. It was in Hershey, Pennsylvania where the Hershey chocolates come from, and they were saying they spent more time with each other on the train going up from Washington to Hershey, Pennsylvania than they'd had in the previous three years.
But we need those kinds of get togethers to build relationships, and this is the key thing. There's a funny thing where we say we're going to be in conflict with each other. So you have a problem with your neighbor, you cut the phone line. No. The more conflict, the more you need to spend time together.
You need to spend more time together with your "political enemies" than even with your friends because that's the way it works. So the tendency to cut communication as a way of dealing with conflict is very unfortunate. I think we need to do the exact opposite. The more conflict, the more communication.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you would make the case that one of the normal reactions in conflict is to pull your diplomatic corps out of the country which would be probably the worst thing to do right now or at that time?
William Ury:
Yeah. Absolutely. You're cutting off your nose despite your face if you do that because you're losing your ability to understand. Even if it's your enemy, know your enemy. It's funny. I remember once giving a talk at a military academy, the Naval Academy. This is back in the Cold War days, and I was saying we needed to put ourselves in the Soviets' shoes to understand how they see things.
One captain got up and said, "You're asking me to put myself in the shoes of the Soviets? That might distort my judgment." But the truth is even in warfare, the first rule is know your enemy, right? You got to understand them. We have to understand each other.
Like right now, the US and China are on a collision course. We need to understand the Chinese. All the more so if we're going to be in conflict with them. We need to understand them just like they need to understand us. What's interesting, there's something like over 100,000, maybe 200,000 Chinese students here in this country. Do you know how many American students are in China?
A few hundred. We need to learn more about that culture, that civilization, that history, those people because the two biggest powers of the world, we will either go down together or we'll find a way to coexist.
Guy Kawasaki:
When you bring that up, this concept that we should make it so hard to get a student visa and all that kind of stuff because we're afraid they're spying on us as their students and all that, it's also counterproductive, right?
William Ury:
I agree. Yes. Of course, you have to have some safeguards and so on, and be prudent, but no. The more we know each other, the better able. How are we going to deal with any of the big problems facing the world? Take health, take climate, take economics. We're so intertwined, we need to find a way to manage that relationship.
Yeah, we're going to have our conflicts. Of course. Conflict is natural as I said, but we need to be able to manage it in a way that's for our mutual benefit and for the benefit of everyone else in the world. Otherwise, what kind of future are we going to leave our kids if we get into a war, God forbid, with China?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Okay. My last question, talking to the father of negotiating here, is, how do you discern people's true strengths and weaknesses? Because everybody is trying to bluff everybody in negotiation, so what's a sign of strength, and what's a sign of weakness?
William Ury:
I think as John F. Kennedy once said, let us never fear to negotiate. In other words, negotiation, to me, reaching out to the other side is a sign of strength. It takes confidence. Sometimes people think negotiation is a sign of weakness. No. Negotiation is a sign of strength, and empathy is a sign of strength.
Sometimes people might think it as a weakness but think of it as strategic empathy because in negotiation, you're trying to change someone else's mind. How can you possibly change someone else's mind, unless you know where that mind is or their heart is?
We might think of as vulnerabilities actually are our strengths in negotiation. The ability to build trust and inspire trust is essential to negotiation. The ability to empathize is essential to negotiation. The ability to listen is essential to effective negotiation.
We need to reframe some of those things and actually see that those things actually are the ones that actually lead to successful negotiations, and people who are successful negotiators are happier. They get more of what they need in life. Negotiation may be the core competence, one of the very few core competencies that any of us need to deal and navigate in the world of today.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I asked all the questions I could think of.
William Ury:
Let me just say this again. The reason I wrote this book, Possible, is because we live in an age of conflict. Conflict is not going away. It's increasing everywhere. We're around it. Everywhere I ask, "Is conflict going up or going down?" Everyone says it's going up, and so the question is, how do we navigate it? We are all potential possibilists.
If we become possibilists and apply our innate human curiosity, our innate human creativity, and our innate human collaboration to our conflicts, then we can learn to work together. If we can work together, we can solve our problems, we can realize our opportunities, we can make life the way we want, we can transform our conflicts. Guy, I think we can transform our lives, and we can transform the world. That's my dream.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you are the Carol Dweck of the possibilist mindset basically.
William Ury:
She was kind enough to give me a quote for my book, actually. Yes. Definitely. I really have a huge amount of respect for her, and exactly, it's about applying the growth mindset. We need to take the very same things like Carol has learned about that you talk about in your own book about growth, grit, and grace.
We need to apply that to the conflicts around us, and if we can do that. I've got a grandson now, Diego, and he's my new boss. We can create the world that I want for him and all the future generation. We can do that through creative, constructive, curious negotiation.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, there you go. I hope this episode of William Ury has turned you into remarkable. Be a possibilist. See what's possible. Do what's possible. Try what's possible. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, and I have a team of possibilists.
They are Madisun Nuismer, producer and co-author, Tessa Nuismer, researcher, Shannon Hernandez and Jeff Sieh, they are the sound designers who believe in all kinds of possibilities, and then there's Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura, and Fallon Yates.
We are the Remarkable People Team, and we believe that it is easily possible that you can make a difference and be remarkable. If you want help from Madisun and I to make things that are possible real, read Think Remarkable. Until next time. Mahalo, and aloha.