Painting a Human Picture

Can framing your situation in human terms help get what you need in a negotiation or conflict? Paul Godin shows how to open up flexibility and resolve disputes.

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Painting a Human Picture

Here’s the video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2FBvSkfpqE

{Transcript}

One of my participants from a workshop I did several years ago—we talked about it during the course of the day, and then the next day, she came in and said she had a chance to use that in a negotiation she’d had that night.

What had happened is she had gone from the course to the parking lot, where she had parked her car in a municipal parking lot. And Murphy’s Law: she ended up arriving five minutes after closing time—it was five past six. The kiosk for the parking attendant was locked, the lights were dimmed, but she could still see an attendant moving around inside.

She thought she’d try, so she went to the window, knocked, and asked whether or not she could get her keys. The attendant said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, you know we’re closed for the day. Everything’s locked up. You’ll have to come back and get your keys tomorrow.”

And she said that normally, what she would have done is swallow that—not have been happy about it—but walked away assuming that there was nothing else she could do. Instead, she decided to try what we talked about and painted a picture for the attendant of what her evening and the next day were going to look like if she didn’t get her keys.

So she said, “If I don’t get my keys, I’m gonna have to walk from here down to the bus stop two blocks away, and then I’m gonna have to catch that bus and change at a particular station, take another bus from there, and it’s gonna take me more than an hour to get home. My kids are expecting me to be home at around 6:30, and they’re going to be wondering where I am. They’re going to be waiting for me—they won’t have any dinner. I probably have to call my husband to see if he can get home early and take care of them. And then, the next morning, I’m going to have to get up an hour early and try and get in advance by taking those same buses back here downtown. I’m going to be a mess the next day.”

As she was painting this picture for him, she could see the expression on his face starting to change. And in the end, he said, “Alright, tell you what—just this one time, I’m gonna, you know, unlock the lockbox and get your keys for you. Yeah… don’t worry about it.”

So she got her keys.

And the lesson there again is: if you can make yourself a human being in the eyes of the person on the other side of the negotiation table, they’re more willing to deal with you—if they have that contact. Even hostage negotiators try, in the course of their negotiations, to make the hostage a human being in the eyes of the person that has taken them. So it’s a useful technique in almost any setting—even day to day.