Get the big picture

Get the big picture. Start by soliciting the other person or groups point of view. Use what you learn to shape the objectives of the negotiation and determine how you achieve them.

— from The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)

In the book

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened. The trick is to get off your own side long enough to see the others: solicit the other person's point of view before you decide you have the facts, and ask yourself, plainly, what is another way I could view this, and how would someone else see it? As Proust said, the only true voyage of discovery is not to seek new landscapes but to see with new eyes. Churchill caught the whole instrument in one line: the pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, and the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. […] Learn, too, what to stop attending to — awareness is as much about what you ignore as what you watch. Cross-check every important perception against fact. Before you act on a reading, ask the two questions that have saved me more than any others: Is this actually true? and What is another way I could see this? Get the other side first — solicit the other person's point of view before deciding you have the whole picture — and hold the humility that there are four sides to every story. Set expectations you can survive being wrong about. Begin by being mindful that you even have expectations, which most people never notice; then deliberately temper them, the way a good investor enters a position seeing things as they are rather than as he hopes. — The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)

You can tell within minutes which one you are in: whether the other side is treating it as a contest to win as many points as possible, or whether they will say, "I understand why these three things matter to you, and I'd like you to understand why these other three matter to me" — and that kind of dialogue works, and goes on working, for decades. So get the big picture first: solicit the other side's view, stay curious and humble, and resist the assumption that you already know their motives. Ask, plainly, why is this important to you? — and build trust before you try to bargain, rather than papering over a breach with concessions. — Communication & Conflict (Communication/Conflict)

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