Wi2024: Lunch Keynote with William Ury

Lee Hooyboer3h 20min

Unknown Speaker

00:00

Speaker 1

06:15

To do this or you wouldn't do that. Sure.

Lee Hooyboer

13:13

RIGHT. Hello. Hello, my friends. Greetings, all 951 booksellers Have you plus all of our various partners from the industry. Oh, you got really quiet well done. Hi everybody. I am Kim Hooyboer. I'm the Director of Education here at the American Booksellers Association. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm absolutely delighted to be seeing all of you here today. Thank you so much for waking up early to see our friend James. Thank you for coming to all the education sessions which are obviously amazing. And thank you for being you and doing what you're doing. So you can bring this back to the stores in your communities. It is my great honor today to be able to introduce William Ury. For those of you who know me, I am that one weird bookseller who loves me a good business book. Please join me in the business book club. See book web.org for details. William Ury. You will all absolutely recognize from his 15 million copy bestseller. Getting to Yes. Which I'm sure is in every single person's bookstore right now. Yeah. It was translated to 35 different languages but he also has come out with multiple other books that have become bestsellers as well. That said over the last four decades, he's done a lot more than write these incredible books that we are allowed to sell in our stores. He has served as a negotiation advisor and mediator in conflicts ranging from the Cold War to ethnic and civil wars in the Middle East, in Chechnya and Yugoslavia and in Colombia. In recognition of his work, he has received the clock millon Peacemaker award, the Whitney North Seymour Award from the American Arbitration Association and the Distinguished Service Medal from the Russian parliament. Our friends at Harper business have brought him to us today and I am just so absolutely thrilled to introduce William Ury, author of possible

Speaker 2

40:01

Thank you, Kim. It's just a huge pleasure to be here speaking with you all. You know, when I think about independent bookstores, it just brings back a lot of warm childhood memories of browsing for hours. Choosing which book to buy, you know from the tides bookstore in Sausalito to city lights in San Francisco to the Yale Co Op to the Harvard coupe when I was a college student to bookshop, Santa Cruz and the Elliott Bay bookstore. More recently, the boulder bookstore and the tattered cover, and many others just to name a few, but I just have a special love for bookstores and books and so it's just a huge pleasure. To be here with you speaking. I can appreciate how, how challenging it's been for you a little bit over the last few years faced with competition from big chains, Amazon and then of course, the pandemic. But I also know what a vital role you play in your own communities. As a place to gather a place to learn to place to enjoy. So I'm really just delighted to be able to share a few lessons with you that might, I hope serve you as you serve others. And I should say this is my very first book talk about this book. So I'm thrilled to be here. So this book possible, and thank you, Kim, for the warm introduction. started with a question I had as a boy, I spent a few years growing up in Europe. And it was a very different Europe than the Europe of today was wasn't that long after World War Two and you could still see the ruins and a lot of the cemeteries and feel the devastating effects of two great world wars. And then there was this uneasy menace, you know, heralded by things like the Cuban missile crisis that kind of reminded us that there might be a third world war. You know, our school had this nuclear bomb shelter with big steel blast doors. And it just got me thinking as a boy that there might there's got to be a better way for us to deal with our differences, even our deepest differences then blowing the whole world to smithereens. Threatening everything that we hold dear. So eventually, has when I went to college and stuff I decided to devote my life to enquiring into that question of how can we human beings learn to live together? How can we deal with our differences constructively, and that led me first into the field of anthropology to understand human beings better and then finally into the nascent field of negotiation? Because that seemed like a lot better way to deal with conflicts. Fast forward to a few years ago. One sunny autumn day, I was walking with a fellow author, another business author, leadership author, Jim Collins, the author of books like Good to Great when he suddenly turned to me and asked, he said, you know, our country in our world we're in conflict here. You've been wandering around the world for the last 45 years, working on some of the world's toughest conflicts. What do you think can help us and then he turned to me with a little smile on his face, and he said, Do you think you could sum up the essence of all you've learned in a single sentence? Well, Jim's challenge intrigued me so I gave it some careful thought and our next hike, I gave it my best try. And he looked straight at me and said, Okay, now go write the book. So I wrote possible with these times in mind, but I didn't have an idea even though it would be quite so timely, with so many challenging conflicts facing us today from the polarization and here in this country, the war in the Middle East war in Ukraine, just to name a few. If I were a Martian anthropologist, looking at that right now, I would say, you know, we're living in a time of great paradox. Never before in our history in our evolution, thanks to our inventive technologies and our ability to cooperate. If we enjoyed such an abundance of opportunities to solve the world's problems, and live the life that we want for ourselves and our children, I mean, this is a moment in one sense of enormous potential. And yet, at the same time, with all the disruptions that are brought about by the same forces of technological, economic, social, political change, we face a wave of destructive fighting that's polarizing, every facet of our lives, from our families, to our workplaces, to our community, to our world. And it's often paralyzing our ability to work together. So let me just actually turned to you for a moment and just your own experience. And just ask you just a few questions for you to think about as we think about this moment. First, let me just be very just think about yourself. As a negotiator negotiation, I defined very simply and very broadly as the act of back and forth communication. You're trying to reach agreement, someone you may have some issues and I'd like to ask you, Who do you find yourself. Think about it. Who do you find yourself negotiating with in the course of your day? Just you wouldn't mind just even calling it out just to see what the range is. What do you find yourself negotiating with? Your kids? Okay, first and foremost, okay. family, kids, partner, co workers, okay. yourself. Of course, we negotiate with ourselves all the time. Who else? Authors, okay, publishers and so on. So, clients, you know, customers come in and so if you were to just think about for a moment, how much of your time do you if you had just the estimate, ballpark estimate? How much of your time do you think you spend negotiating back and forth, you know, some kind of back and forth communication with your kids, your partner's your friends, your co workers, your customers, authors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? How much of you if you had to put a ballpark like a fraction of yourself? How much do you How much time do you think you spend negotiating, in that sense? broad sense of the term? What would you say? 15 and a half hours okay. Thank you. So let me just ask you how many would say it's at least 10%? At least 10% of your time you spent engaged in that. Keep your hands up if it's at least 20% Okay, about 30% 40% Okay. 50% Okay. 60%. So, it's like, you know, it's a huge fraction of our time and a lot of hands were still up, well over 50%. So it's, we may not always think of it as negotiation, but in that broad sense of the term, that's what we're doing from the moment we get up in the morning to the moment we go to bed at night. 15 and a half hours here. And let me just ask you one last question for now, which is, if you had to think about the conflicts that are going on right now, at home or at work, including I know you know, the struggle for a living wage or in the community with upcoming elections and book banning censorship, you know, and then think about the world. Would you say that the amount of conflict is staying pretty much the same as it's always been? Is it going down a little bit, or is it going up? When would you say? How many would say it's going up just to see you. Okay, so, what's the whole room here? That's, that's what we're dealing with. So the question, I have the question, and impossible is, how can we navigate this wave of conflict these turbulent times, so that we can live the lives that we want for ourselves and our kids? Because it's it's all too easy right now and I find myself susceptible at times to be pessimistic. You know, these days you watch the news. Someone recently called 2020 for the year of Voldemort, you know, and, and yet, as seductive as it is, there's probably nothing quite as dangerous as the spirit of pessimism because it can lead to resignation and despair and eventually becomes a self confirming prophecy is, as Henry Ford famously quipped, if you think you can't, and you think you can, if you think you can, you're right. You know, after so after all these decades working in tough conflicts, and wars People often ask me, Are you an optimist, or are you a pessimist? And I like to answer that actually, I am a possible list. One because I believe in our human potential to transform even the toughest conflicts we face, from destructive fights into creative negotiations and dialogue. I believe it because I've seen it happen with my own eyes over and over. When I started off, you know, studying in the field of negotiation many years ago, there was the Cold War, and everyone at the time was predicting that would go on for generations, it'd be going on right now.

Speaker 2

49:54

There was the race based war in South Africa, you know, that seemed like it was just gonna be interminable. There was sectarian strife between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. There was war between Egypt and Israel for wars, then there have been four wars in the previous 25 years, widely expected to be another and I had a chance to go to these places personally witnessed with my own eyes and participate in some ways. As all of these conflicts that were widely considered to be impossible. were transformed. They weren't. The conflicts weren't entirely ended, but they were transformed, the form was changed. The wars came to an end. And these were not just wars but also in labor strikes. You know? I was, I worked I did my PhD thesis actually just south of here in Kentucky and the coal mines. And there were you know, workplace disputes family feuds in countless situations, I've watched people unlock our hidden potential. That exists in every one of us and make the seemingly impossible become possible. I would just add that possible is aren't blind to the dark side of human nature to be a possible it means to look at the negative possibilities to but then to use that perspective to motivate us to look for the positive possibilities, the ones that avert the worst, and optimize the possible because I've seen how conflict can sometimes bring out the worst in us but I've also seen how can bring out the best in us so where there are obstacles possible is to look for opportunities. It's a change in mindset. And just to quote my fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead, she once said, we are continually faced with great opportunities that are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable. problems. I have a hunch if you're here today, at the Winter Institute, you might just be a possible list yourself. Here's the secret. We can't end the conflict. And perhaps nor should we. I mean, it may sound may sound strange for me to say this, but I actually believe we need more conflict, not less in the world. And by that I mean the healthy kind of conflict that allows us to engage our differences to grow, address in justices and change what needs to be changed. As an anthropologist I have long noted that conflict is natural, it's part of human life. So the real choice we face is not between conflict and no conflict, but between destructive conflict and constructive conflict. in conflict situations, we tend to fall into what I would call the three a trap. The first day stands for attack. We go on the attack, we get a counter attack. Oftentimes, as Gandhi once said, An eye for an eye and we all go blind. The second day stands for avoid, you know we we pretend like the conflict doesn't exist, which doesn't solve much. And the third day stands for accommodate or maybe a PS, which is we give in which is very unsatisfying. And often we do all three things that you know, we avoid for a while we even accommodate and then we lose it we go on the attack. So each of us I think, has a learning edge. I would say mine might be if I had to say which one of you might be to avoid, but I just asked you to think about what you're learning edges. Where is it that you have something you know, to learn? What's your tendency? How many of you would say you have a tendency when you get into conflict to attack just out of curiosity to attack, okay. How many would say it's to avoid and how many would say it's to accommodate or, okay, so we all have that, and that's what we can work on. I would suggest that the way out of the three a trap is very different. It's to rather than avoid it's to lean into the conflict, embrace it, and find a way to transform it to change its form. You know what, why was writing the book I decided to try and get some perspective. So I went on a two week river rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. And as some of you may have done this river rafting once you're in the canyon here, you're in it for the duration you know, you're you're facing the biggest river waves in North America. It was very late in the season, the waters freezing. And so I was faced with a choice. I could either resist each wave as it came across, and it's freezing temperature, I can lean in and embrace it and enjoy it. And it occurred to me at that moment that those turbulent waves are a little bit like the turbulent conflicts we're facing today. So I wondered to myself, What if we treated today's difficult conflicts like those giant rapids on the great rushing Colorado River? What if instead of avoiding conflict, we welcomed it with curiosity What if instead of attacking, we embrace conflict with creativity? What if instead of accommodating we transformed conflict with collaboration and by transform I simply mean change the form of from destructive fighting into creative constructive collaborative negotiation? So what do we need to do to do that? If I had to synthesize, as my friend Jim asked me to do on that mountain, the hike, drawing on everything that I've learned, from my experiences, failures, many failures as well as successes I would suggest that we need to unlock three human potentials. The first is a potential inside of us. It's what I would. It's a clearer perspective. Let me just Yeah, it's a clear perspective right there. I call that the balcony. And I'll talk a little more about that. That's a potential that exists within us. And then there's a potential that exists between us and other parties, which I called the Bridge which is simply an attractive way out. And finally, there's a potential around us, which is involves getting help from others around us, which I call the third side. So when conflicts are tough, we need all three at once. We need all three, for me a kind of circle of possibility around the conflict. Now there's an old story. One of my favorite stories of negotiation. Old story comes from the Middle East from centuries and centuries ago, which I've told often but I've only recently become to understand it in terms of these three human potentials. And it's a story of man, they're living the Middle East many centuries ago who dies and leaves to his three sons 17 camels. And to the oldest son in those days he left half the camels. And to the middle son, he left a third of the camels, and to the youngest son he left a nine to the camels. Well, the three sons got into negotiation and 17 doesn't divide by two, and it doesn't divide by three, and it doesn't divide by nine. And they got into a big quarrel and it started to look like it was gonna be fisticuffs. So in desperation, they consulted a wise old woman while she thought about their problem, and finally just came back and said, Well, I don't really know if I've got any solution for you or any I can help you but if you want, I have a camel. You couldn't have my camel. Well, three sons looked at each other and said, okay, so then they had 18 camels? Well, 18, as it turns out, does divide by two so the first son took his half, half of 18 is 918 does divide by three so the second son took his third which is six, and the third son took his ninth a nine to 18 is to, well, if you add nine and six you get 15 plus to 17. They had one camera leftover, they gave it back to the wise old woman. Now, if you think about that problem for a moment, I think you'll find it resembles a lot of the negotiations we get involved in. There seems to be no way to solve you know, to resolve this, you know, and yet somehow what we need to do is take a step back from the situation, get some perspective, go to that proverbial balcony. And we need to look for an attractive way out a golden bridge, which in this case happens to be an 18th camel, and because it's hard to go to the balcony and it's hard, oftentimes to build a golden bridge, we're going to need to help and maybe that might be the wisest woman in this case. So as we talk about these three for a moment, I think it might be useful if you have in mind at least one difficult situation you're currently facing might be at home. Your children might be with a co worker, it might be with an author, it might be with a customer just think of some situation, I just think you'll get a little more value. If you're running through at least one you may have more than one in mind, but just just useful. So let's just start for a moment. With the balcony for a moment. perspective

Speaker 2

59:46

with a balcony. So here's the thing. When it comes to today's tough conflicts, we are often our own worst enemies. You know, maybe the biggest lesson I've learned since co authoring getting the so many years ago, is that the greatest obstacle to getting what I want in a negotiation is not what I think it is. It's not the difficult person on the other side of the table. It's the person on this side. Of the table. It's me, it's the person I look at in the mirror every single morning. It's the difficulty lies in our natural, very human, very understandable tendency to react, often out of fear out of anger. You know, we're human beings, we're reaction machines, and we lose perspective and act often act in ways that go exactly contrary to our own interests. As the old saying goes, when you're angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. And that you'll send the best email you will ever regret. So what's the alternative? It's to do the exact opposite. It's to pause for a moment get some perspective, is to think about what you really want and how you're going to get there. Imagine yourself negotiating on a stage like this stage up here just as a metaphor. Imagine yourself negotiating on the stage you and maybe there are other players too. It's the balcony is a is a like a mentor an emotional place overlooking that stage. It's a place of calm, where you can keep your eyes on the prize and look at the big picture. Because if you just think of our emotional system in a difficult conflict, our emotional state fluctuates, you know in between the state of hyper activation of our nervous systems, you know, anger, fear, anxiety, and then the state of hypo activation which is, you know, depression, despair resignation. In between those two states have hyper and hypo lies an optimal band and optimal zone where we go through our emotions, we naturally emotions are really important, but we don't go so far up that we burn out and then drop down and despair. So the balcony is a place from which you can meet animosity with curiosity. And I learned that balcony lesson maybe perhaps most dramatically. Many years ago, I was in the middle of a political mediation. And in the country of Venezuela. There were a million people on the streets, protesting the president at that time, Google Chavez demanding that he resigned. There were a million people supporting him. There was some you know, violence between the two crowds there was concerned that it might turn into a civil war. Anyway, I had. I had a meeting at midnight with the president of Venezuela with Google Chavez in front of his entire cabinet. It wasn't my first meeting but he and I, I was expecting to find him alone. And here he was with his entire cabinet. And he said, you know, you're how are things going here? And I said, Well, Mr. President, the you know, I've been talking to some of your ministers here. I've been talking to leaders of the opposition. Seems to me there's been some progress will progress wasn't the WORD he wanted to hear. He said progress. What are you talking about? Are you a fool not seeing the dirty tricks. Those traders in the opposition are up to you so naive and he leaned in very close to my face so I could feel his hot breath as he kind of proceeded to shout at me. And I felt naturally, you know, imagine you're being shouted out like that. I felt embarrassed and flustered and, and thinking all the work by works gone down the drain here, and I was about to react defensively when I caught myself. A friend of mine who once said to me, he said, you know, if you're ever in a tough situation, pinch the palm of your hand. Let's say that none what why would I pinch the palm of my hand? He said because that will give you a momentary pain and will just keep you alert. So for whatever reason, I remembered at that at that moment, a pinch the palm of my hand. And I thought to myself, Why am I here isn't really going to advance my objectives here? If I get into a quarrel with the president of Venezuela as I can to calm the situation, so I realized that wouldn't so just listen to him instead? You know, I kind of went to the balcony by noticing my emotions. I kind of like, could settle my system a little bit and listen to myself first so I could listen to him and then I listened in with curiosity, just watching what was going on. And after 30 minutes or so of him shouting and he could go on for hours, but because I wasn't reacting. I just saw him sort of slowly, his voice fully tailed down. I saw his watch his body language, his shoulders son of slowly sank. And then he asked me so it's so URI What should I do? Well, that my friends is the faint sound of a human mind opening. So I said, you know, Mr. President, send your president a this is almost Christmas. People are exhausted from the conflict. Why don't you just call a truce, a trade war in Spanish over the holidays just give people a chance to enjoy the festivities with their families. And maybe there'll be in a better mood to listen. And he paused for a moment. He looked at me and then he said, That's an excellent idea. I'm going to propose that my next speech and he clapped me on the back, and his mood completely shifted. Well, what I had learned then in there was that the greatest power we have in a negotiation is the power not to react. It's the power to stop to pause for a moment and go to the balcony instead. You know, it's ask yourself, what do you really want see the bigger picture now I think we all have our favorite ways to pause. It might simply be take a deep breath, I pinch the palm of my hand. It might be to take a break. It might be to go for a walk. It might be to when the emails hit the you know the Draft button rather than the send button. You know, think about it sleep at night. Think about what your favorite way is for a moment. Everyone have anybody else have what are your favorite ways just out of curiosity? What are your favorite ways to pause? What do you do? Breathe. Take a walk. Yeah, that's one of my favorites is take a walk even before you just break it up. You know, you don't have to give yourself a moment because this is that faint gap between the stimulus and the response, where you have all the power to decide how you're going to respond. And whether it's going to advance what you want. How many of you can think of sorry, curious can think of a favorite way you have to pause? I'm gonna click. So this is an innate human potential. Just remember this negotiation. It turns out is an inside job. It proceeds from the inside out. And paradoxically, the best way to start is to stop. The best way to engage is first to disengage for a moment. So that brings us to the next challenge. In today's tough conflicts. We need more than ever to be able to find a way out a way out of the labyrinth a way out of destructive conflicts. The other side might be far from cooperative. They dig in they refuse to budge, they pressure they attack, they threaten. And here's the challenge their position their mind is over here. Your mind may still be over here, right? So there's like a big gap between where you are and where they are. It's like a chasm. It's like the Grand Canyon. And it's filled with doubt, anxiety, fear, you know, fear of looking weak, and so on unmet needs distrust and you want them to agree with you, but it's not at all easy. So our challenge for a moment is to leave where our minds is our for a moment because we're saying Come on, come over to our position come over to where we are, but it's not so easy for them. They're over here and there's this huge chasm here. So we need for a moment to leave where our mind is, and that's not so easy, and begin the conversation where their minds are where their hearts are. Start from and then proceed to build them a bridge, a golden bridge over that chasm so that they can make it as easy as possible for them to move in the direction you want them to move. Normally in a difficult conflict. Often our instinct is how do I make it harder for them actually, you want to make it as easy as possible for them as easy as possible for them to make the decision you'd like them to make. Because our instinct is like, if I'm pushing right now, if I'm pushing you if I was pushing you right now and you were pushing back against me, what do you instinctively do you push back, and that's often what happens is we push they push, they push us we push back and we end up with a stalemate. The thing to do is to break that cycle by doing the opposite of pushing which is to attract them, make it as easy as possible for them to make the decision you want them to make.

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