Day 6: Negotiation and Collaboration
NLP Canada Training, Linda Ferguson
https://nlpcanada.com/nlp-practitioner-video-series/day-6-negotiation-and-collaboration/

Transcript

How much time do you spend every day either trying to work with someone to get something done or trying to negotiate with someone to get something done? I'm Linda Ferguson of NLP Canada Training. I've noticed that many courses talk about influence without talking about these complicated forms of influence we use almost every day to move towards things we want and to connect and cooperate with other people in a way that's good for everyone. So day six of the NLP Canada Training practitioner certification is about negotiation and collaboration and we're going to talk about them as one skill set with a slightly different perspective but in both of them and I call it a skill set because you're going to be drawing on everything you've learned to this point in the course in order to collaborate and negotiate. Well, this means being able to set an intention. Recognize when you're congruent about an intention. Recognize when somebody else has a goal or objective that they're congruent about.

Do rapport both in terms of making it and in terms of stretching it a little bit. Knowing when it's good to be in rapport and when it's better to step out of rapport, calibrating your own states, other people's states, shifting your own states, making shifts in other people's states, setting frames, tracking feedback loops, and the hardest, listening without distorting what you're hearing. So, negotiation and collaboration is a set of skills. It's a pattern of the other skills that you have learned that allows you to achieve what is arguably the most important human function. Working together, sharing learning, sharing knowledge, sharing strengths and resources in ways that are useful to everybody. And we start with the issue of we're going to align states, but we also want to be changing states. We want to be aware of how one person's state is influencing another.

And the way we do that naturally is we tell stories. And when we tell a story, characters interact in the story and outside the story. The teller and the listener get to go through those interactions but also to see them to imagine how they're happening to understand the feedback loops. Now I use the word story. In NLP. You'll often you hear the word metaphor. In literature, metaphor is usually the simple form of using something tangible, something that you can perceive through your senses to represent something abstract that you can't see through your senses.

So you can see a rose, you can't see love. You can see a lion. You can't see courage. You can see the edge of the sword. You cannot see warfare or aggression. Those are big common things.

So that's usually what a metaphor is. And you might not ever use the word metaphor, but you are using metaphors all day long because they are an intrinsic part of how human people think. And we do it naturally. We do it all day long. We talk about uphill battles. We talk about thinking inside the box. These are all metaphors.

I suspect people who started NLP felt that metaphor was kind of a technical term like neuro-linginguistic programming that somehow elevated the technique. But what they were really talking about was storytelling. And it came out of observing the way Milton Erickson used stories in his work to help people imagine and enact change. The other kind of highfaluting word that people sometimes use is narrative. And there's even a branch of therapy called narrative therapy where you work on again the stories people tell. I would say narrative is any communication describing change.

So a recipe is a narrative. It tells you how to move from one step to another. Stories are narratives that have emotion in them. There is no emotion. You have a narrative, but you don't have a story. And we all know this because everyone responds to that word story in a way they don't respond to these more technical terms. If you stand in front of a room full of people and say, "I have a narrative for you," they're immediately going to detach and they're going to be suspicious of what's in that narrative because when we hear that kind of terminology, it's often something imposed on us.

It's often a structure that we have noticed that is not serving us. But if you say to people, can I tell you a story? Everyone's ears perk up. So we start the day with a story circle. Very simple stories about a time you moved to a new place or you started a new job. And what we're observing in ourselves and in each other as this day on collaboration and negotiation begins is the states and emotions that show up in different stories of these new beginnings, and a little bit of awareness of where does that lead the conversation next depending on the story you tell. And this is the important thing about collaboration and negotiation.

All day long they're moving. They are not I got a shift the heavens open the sun came out everything was wonderful. They are: I got a shift and now it's got to shift something else and we've got to keep moving. So this is the Camino, the very long hike one step at a time for a long time. Not, did it in three. No it's not like that now because collaboration and negotiation are complicated. They require states that are not always kind of clean and congruent states that move.

And we want to say what if I was this and this. When we imagine states, we're preparing ourselves for some of the changes in our thoughts and our bodies that will come up as we are interacting with other people. In language, we can only have one state at a time. In our brain, we can activate multiple patterns at the same time. And we can do that consciously by using anchoring by using our body to set off different patterns in our brain simultaneously so that they wire together. Not forever necessarily, but long enough for us to imagine and predict what's coming, what's going to be useful.

So you think of a time you have to work with somebody and you touch one shoulder and you let it go. That's anchoring. Use a touch to hold a memory. Let it go.

But on the other shoulder, we're going to stack anchors. And we are not stacking different resources. This is not one of the exercises where we're saying, "Let's get you really pumped up." Instead, we are going to stack anchors for the states we are most likely to encounter while working with somebody. So, we start with anchoring a time where we've been on a team with a strong shared purpose because most of us have experience of teamwork in some way. We all have experiences then of good teams and not so good teams. Usually the good teams are the ones where people were all on the same page about what they were trying to achieve.

So you find a time you and at least one other person were working together and you shared a common sense of what it is we're trying to do here. Step back into that experience. As always, see what you see, hear what you hear, feel what you feel. Really let that experience build up and come to you and anchor it on a shoulder.

Then we're going to think about a time somebody surprised you. Now, why surprise? Is that useful? It is useful to be prepared to be surprised to be able to recognize that when you are having a conversation and you have that kind of abrupt little jump sometimes in your mind, sometimes in your body that that can reflect surprise and not an adverse reaction. It's not necessarily that you oppose what you just heard. You just didn't expect it.

So, you've heard that phrase, expect the unexpected. One of the ways we're going to do that is we are going to think of a time you were surprised and we are going to anchor that into that same shoulder. And after shaking that off, you're also going to anchor in the idea of being challenged. We've already encountered this in the four chairs exercise earlier in the course. When people challenge us, that is a word that can take us in different directions. And it's important for each of us to notice our own response to being challenged. On the one hand, it is a call to growth, to expansion, to bigger perspectives.

And on the other hand, it feels adversarial and it feels like being doubted. So you get to choose what kind of challenge comes to your mind. You're thinking about this situation where you're working with somebody and now you're thinking about challenge. What kind of challenge is going to come up for you? Go back into the past, find an instance of that challenge. This is not about amping you up. It's about making you better prepared to recognize what is going on in you in response to the other person real time during a conversation during an interaction where, as your state changes, your possibilities change.

So you want to know first of all, did my state change and if it did where did it go? Do I like it? Do I want to bring it back? So now you have an anchor for the situation. You have an anchor for shared team purpose, for surprise, and for challenge. You put them together and it is a very effective way of providing a quick internal model, an experience of what you are expecting in this interaction with the other person.

But it's also a mental rehearsal so that when those things come up in real life, you feel better prepared to manage them to decide whether to go with it or to change things. When we come back after a break, we are working on connection on that managing of rapport that is sometimes building rapport and sometimes breaking it systematically, pulling back from it and deciding where the rapport is leading. Is it somewhere useful to me? This is really about noticing the predictions you are making about how you will connect with somebody else and how they will respond to you and using those predictions to imagine where there will be common ground where you can have the conversation and move step by step forward together.

So, we start with a calibration game and it's calibrating the difference between suggestions. A time somebody gave you a suggestion and a time somebody gave you an order. Now, in this framing, you're going to think, well, suggestions are better. It sounds nicer.

But there are many many times when two or more people have a strong shared purpose and a strong shared sense of what needs to be done where an order works just fine. An order actually can be a sign of a kind of strong rapport and shared attention. The difficulty is when we mistake how our words will be received. And if somebody else is looking for a suggestion and we give them an order, that will not help our rapport. It will not help our ability to negotiate or collaborate.

So we want to notice also how we respond depending on what language we are hearing, which is not necessarily the language they are using. A suggestion and a command can be almost exactly the same words and we know the difference by context and by the impact they have on us. So calibration game time: somebody gave you a suggestion. Then calibrate a time somebody gave you an order. Notice what is different in those things.

Then we play a little game where we set up suggestions where we earn permission to make a suggestion. Now suggestion by itself is tentative. It says maybe you want to come here. It does not say you must go here. It means we don't have that level of complete agreement about intention and methodology that would allow somebody to give us an order.

And so suggestions need to be earned and they are earned by paying undistorted attention to what somebody else is saying. So when we reflect back exact words that we have just heard while we are doing non-verbal signs of rapport, we establish, hey, I'm here. I'm listening. I'm thinking about you. And then we give a suggestion. It is the yes and game from improv, just a slightly different form because instead of saying yes, we're reflecting back exact words, to show you we're listening without distortion, and then adding a suggestion. And we wrap up this very complicated section (because we don't have very much time for this very complicated process of collaborating and negotiating and the flow between the two) with just having a discussion about what happens in conversations where two people are bringing goals and they have to somehow navigate how each of them gets a satisfying outcome while the other person is trying to get their satisfying outcome.

And this is a normal conversation. This is a conversation during your workday. This is a conversation about what to have for dinner. This is a conversation with friends about, you know, things that are going on in your personal life or things that are going on in the world. We all come into conversation into connection with an intention. Sometimes it's stated and conscious. Sometimes it's less conscious.

And every conversation is about the interaction of these different goals. Then we take another break and we come back to think about frames. Now frames are hard to get our head around literally because the point of a frame is to focus our attention on what's inside the frame, not to look at the edges of the frame. And that can make it seem mysterious or confusing and it allows people to choose very simple examples which then don't really help you because you understood that example but you didn't understand framing.

So we're going to start with a simple example of how a frame creates expectations. And the simple example is something you encounter all the time. It's when we write and we go to writing remember because it slows the language down so we can kind of observe it working. It stabilizes it so that we don't have what you will see in the transcript of this particular video which is a flow where sentences can shift in the middle where frames can be shifting where it's complicated to follow.

So we take something relatively straightforward and slow and we say what's the difference between sending a text message and sending an email in terms of the receiver's experience in terms of how does the length and format of a written communication tell people what to expect in that particular kind of communication. You know, is this appropriate for a text message? Does it require a phone call? Does it require in person? Text messaging, instant messaging. We have these ultra short messages. What about emojis?

What does an emoji signal to people really? What about if you're writing an email? How long can an email be? How do you set that up?

So, this isn't about how do you write a novel and get people to read it. This is about noticing that you are for various reasons including making a record of what was said because as part of negotiation and collaboration we need a shared understanding of which information was exchanged. Often that includes, especially at work, some form of writing or reading. How does the way we set it up change the way it's received? And we just think about that because it's relatively easy to do with short pieces of writing to know that if you get a text from somebody, it's already indicating something about what kind of relationship you have with them whether or not you are engaged enough with the same things to understand very short messages correctly, whether the short message is received as a welcome communication and part of a connection or as an intrusion.

So just thinking about those things. Marshall McLuhan, very famous Canadian thinker from the last century said the medium is the message. He said it long before we had text messaging, we had social media posts, we had slide decks. But I think all of these new media really help us see what he was getting at. That each of these media sets us up to expect some things and to be prepared to do some things and not others. And then we get into one of the hardest things to think about, which is how questions work and how they set frames and how to ask questions. And because we don't have days and days to work on what is a skill that involves really fine framing, really fine calibration skills, really fine anticipation of the other, a lot of good mental modeling.

Now, human beings have all those things. We're just not good at thinking about having all those things. You've asked questions your whole life. Children don't need permission. They don't need to be taught to ask questions. Sometimes it feels like they're born asking questions. How do we, what are the kind of conditions for asking good questions?

What makes a question a good question? Is it something in the magic words or is it something in context or is it something in the other person's experience that you are matching? And you're going to have an opportunity in the day to think about all those things as you work through a couple of patterns where you get to think first because we ask questions naturally but we lose track of our thinking process as we move through a conversation. So starting out by thinking things through and writing them down. This doesn't mean that you always need to prepare this way. It means this is the way that you are going to be able to observe your own thinking to make changes if change would be useful.

So we're going to go with five for no particular reason. Could you go with three questions? Sure. Once people are curious about each other and genuinely curious about what answers are going to come into a conversation, it's very hard to stop at three.

So, we're going to go with five. And you're going to ask five questions. First of all, to figure out how to share an intention, a goal, and second to share a perspective. The focus is not on influence here. It's on how do you understand, how do you get enough information into the conversation so that you can identify common ground. And the number one thing you need to be better at asking questions is a genuine curiosity about the answers. And that sounds so easy and it requires so much discipline and state management because you have to hold your own reason for being in the collaboration or negotiation and that has to be firm.

You have to be able to come back to it. You have to make sure you honor your own objectives. And you have to let go of all of that to be curious to establish the kind of trusted connection that just allows you to see where do we have something in common? How can we both move towards our goals at the same time even when we have different goals? And that brings us to the end of the day, to the part of the day on intention. And this is where we are going to go back to the idea that stories are a natural human communication that moves different people through similar emotions in a similar order so that they can come to similar understandings about what is useful and good, about what will satisfy their needs, and also what will satisfy the needs of the other. And we do that primarily not because emotions are simpler than words, but because they are so much richer and more complex than words.

In the first exercise, two people form a shared intention and then each of them separately prepares a story about how somebody gets that intention, how they serve it, how they get the goal. And we remember we keep reminding people over and over story has to have an emotion and the emotion has to pivot on something unexpected. There has to be either some friction, some opposition or a twist of fate. Something has to happen in the story to trigger a change in emotion.

And so these aren't strategies. These are not laid out in some corporate recipe way that says this will happen and this will happen and this will happen. A story is more like I took this step and this step and then this happened and drew me off course and then that person helped me get back on track and then I found I could do something unexpected and then I had the aha that led to my goal. Something like that format.

So there's got to be something interesting in it. Now the interesting part for us at the end of the day on a day on negotiation and collaboration is, having worked as a team to set the objective, the intention, you tell each other your stories of the way that intention is achieved and you get to hear where are you absolutely in sync and where did you have wildly different ways of approaching how to get there. The hard thing about collaboration is that if there is no difference, there is no growth. There is no benefit to working together. I used to tell my business students that in a business if four people were assigned to a project, you needed to do four times better work than one person could have done in the same amount of time alone. And it boggled their minds a little because nobody thought of group work that way. People thought of group work as slowing them down and kind of bringing everything down to the lowest common denominator.

But it's true that theoretically if a business is oriented towards growth and profit, you actually need to make more difference, more impact as four people. You have to make not just four times more impact, but maybe four and a half times more impact to do something either better or faster. How do we get there? We get there because we bring different strengths to the table and those different strengths and information and abilities interact differently. Letting difference in when we are very focused on our personal objective is difficult. It requires support from a frame, support from connections and support from intention.

The final exercise of the day is to use Ericksonian language, the language of vivification of directing people into their senses without telling them exactly what to experience to make your partner the main character in a story about how they achieve a goal. And it allows you to do this really important preparation of moving somebody not just through steps and behaviors, but through the problems, through the curves and twists that you can anticipate, so that they can anticipate them too and also feel the satisfaction of reaching the goal and you as the guide reach it with them. And you're going to learn a lot in that exercise, not just about negotiation and collaboration, but about guiding and leading, which will guide us into the topic for day seven, leadership. Thanks for listening. I hope that you will come back and learn more about leadership and that you will come back into a real room and try some of this with us.