A Conversation with a Purpose

Before an important conversation it helps to work out what it is for.

In “Getting to Yes,” Roger Fisher and William Ury proposed separating people from the problem, interests from stated positions, and the solution from a fight over a single option. The Harvard Negotiation Project didn’t start as a school of elegant pressure but as an attempt to understand why parties get stuck in incompatible wordings when their practical interests sometimes allow an agreement.

That is why a prepared conversation starts with a purpose. If one person needs predictability and the other needs the freedom to change the schedule, the argument about who “respects other people’s time” can run forever. Negotiation becomes possible once morality is translated back into terms.

The purpose can vary: to get information, to announce a decision, to reach an agreement, to repair a relationship, to set a boundary, to choose an option, to test whether cooperation is possible.

Without a purpose a conversation easily turns into a set of questions, each producing new words and none bringing the result closer.

Planning a conversation is useful. Building a tree in which the other person can’t object is already an attempt to replace their participation with a controlled script.

Good preparation covers your own minimum acceptable outcome, the other side’s interests, the key facts, the questions you actually need answered, the likely points of disagreement, the conditions for ending the conversation, and time to decide.

Some questions really are useless.

Is the meat fresh?

The seller knows the expected answer.

Better to ask about things you can check:

When did it arrive?

How was it stored?

Can I see the label?

“Why” and “what for” are not meaningless questions, but they can sound like an accusation:

Why did you do that?

Sometimes the person doesn’t know, or invents an explanation on the spot. It is more useful to ask about the process:

What was happening before the decision?

What options did you consider?

What did you expect to get?

That produces material rather than a defence.

The point of a conversation is not that the other person never objects. If there are no objections because every route to them was blocked in advance, the agreement can evaporate the moment the meeting ends.

A reliable agreement survives the question:

What here doesn’t work for you?

Translating a position into an interest looks dull and usually works. A tenant demands a lower rent, the landlord refuses — nothing left to discuss. If it turns out that what matters to the tenant is not the amount but the fact that rent is due on the fifth while wages arrive on the tenth, and that what matters to the landlord is predictable receipts, the solution fits in one sentence and costs nobody a penny. Both were sure they were arguing about money, and both were ready to walk away.

A position is one decision that a party has already made for everyone. As long as positions are on the table there are exactly two options, and both belong to someone. Interests bring the rest back into the conversation.