Nego­ti­a­tion is the process of get­ting into Agree­ment. Problem-Solving requires what’s com­monly called Lat­eral Think­ing. Here are THE two secrets that will make both processes easy and smooth, and that will bring results every time!

It has to do with our abil­ity to think at dif­fer­ent log­i­cal lev­els. It’s very sim­ple, and it goes like this:

Let’s imag­ine that I want to buy a com­puter (by the way, I’m think­ing of buy­ing an iMac, so, it’s a real life exam­ple). And let’s imag­ine that I am ask­ing you for advice about my options.

If you know any­thing about com­put­ers, it is likely that you are going to go into details, look at the dif­fer­ent parts and explain about CPUs, types of RAM, and hard disk sizes. And if I ask about the types of RAM, you could go into more details still, and advise me to buy a DDG3 RAM because that will boost the pro­cess­ing speed.

If your tech knowl­edge is more lim­ited, you may pre­fer to explain about dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, whether I should pur­chase a MAC, or a PC, and if I choose a PC, shall I go for Win­dows Vista (nooooooooo!!!!!) or wait for Win­dows 2007 to come out.

In both cases, you’d go into more details about com­put­ers. This what we call CHUNKING DOWN. Computer>MAC or PC>Windows Vista or Win­dows 2007 etc…

The ques­tion you want to ask to chunk down is “what (or how) specif­i­cally?”, or “what’s another exam­ple of this?”

Now, let’s imag­ine that I am not even sure whether I want to buy a com­puter, and I ask you whether I should buy one or not. Then, you would prob­a­bly ask me what is the rea­son why I am think­ing about buy­ing one, for what pur­pose. I may tell you, “well, because I want to keep in con­tact with my friends”, but that would not nec­es­sar­ily give you enough infor­ma­tion to pro­vide an answer, so you may ask “keep in con­tact with your friends, yes, and for what pur­pose?”, and I may tell you “well, to com­mu­ni­cate with a large num­ber of peo­ple” and so on.

In this case, what you’d be doing is try­ing to get my higher inten­tion, what is the big pic­ture rea­son behind my think­ing about buy­ing a com­puter. Once you know the higher pur­pose, you can advise whether a com­puter is the best choice for me.

This process is called CHUNKING UP, which means going toward the big­ger picture.

So start­ing from com­puter, if we chunk down and go into more details, we get to parts (CPU, RAM, hard disk) or cat­e­gories (PC or MAC) and if we chunk up, we go toward the larger pic­ture (computer>networking>communication) You’ll notice that if we chunk up high enough, we always end up at “exis­tence” or “uni­verse” because in order to com­mu­ni­cate, we have to exist right?

The ques­tion you want to ask to chunk up is “for what pur­pose, what’s the inten­tion?”, “what’s this an exam­ple of?”

Now, I know you are think­ing what does this have to do with the nego­ti­a­tion table? well… EVERYTHING!

Nego­ti­a­tion is the process of get­ting into Agree­ment, we said that at the begin­ning. Well, you know what? if you chunk high enough, it is IMPOSSIBLE not to get into agree­ment. Dif­fer­ences of opin­ion only exist at chunk­ing lev­els where there are enough details to dis­agree upon. So what you’d do is to chunk up in the dis­cus­sions, to a level where both par­ties would have to agree, then chunk back down (go into more details) only as quickly as every­one could keep a back­ground focus on the higher intention.

I’ll give you an exam­ple of that. A few years back, I worked with 2 busi­ness part­ners who could not agree on any­thing! They had oppo­site opin­ions on where the busi­ness was heading, on busi­ness plan­ning, they even did not agree on the colour of the room and the fur­ni­ture! They decided to seek assis­tance, because they could see that the busi­ness was suf­fer­ing. So we all sat down, and I asked both of them “what are you in busi­ness for, what’s your higher pur­pose?” Even­tu­ally they both got to “mak­ing a profit”. So from there, we chun­ked down while keep­ing the agree­ment. And what hap­pened was magic! Once they had realised that they both had the same higher inten­tion, they were much more will­ing to give up con­trol over the smaller details. Both of them had gone into busi­ness together in the first place because they had very com­ple­men­tary skills, and through the process, they nat­u­rally allowed the other per­son to take deci­sions on what­ever was their area of expertise.

You can see from here that this is not only use­ful in busi­ness, but in fam­ily medi­a­tion, rela­tion­ships, and all areas where two par­ties want to reach an agrement.

A word of cau­tion here: for an agree­ment to hap­pen, there has to be a will to agree in the first place. Some nego­ti­a­tions are doomed from the start because one or both par­ties have already decided to get out anyway.

OK, so what does this have to do with prob­lem solv­ing? Well… EVERYTHING!

How?

Someone’s abil­ity to problem-solve is pro­por­tional to his or her lat­eral think­ing skills. How do you think lat­er­ally? Very sim­ple. By chunk­ing up first (ask­ing your­self “what’s this an exam­ple of”), then chunk­ing down (what is another exam­ple of that?”)

So for exam­ple, in our com­puter story, to chunk lat­er­ally from  “com­puter”, you’d ask your­self “what’s com­puter an exam­ple of?”, and you’d get to say, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, then “what is another exam­ple of com­mu­ni­ca­tion?”, and you could say “mobile phone”, but also “books” or “musi­cal score” (which are other forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion). Then, you can become really cre­ative, and con­nect things which are seem­ingly remote from each other. This is when you prob­lem solv­ing abil­ity increases ten-fold!

Want to know more? Watch the video in the next post. There, I give other exam­ples of why and when the chunk­ing process can be use­ful. I also touch on one of the most pow­er­ful form of chunk­ing up that’s used by politi­cians, pub­lic speak­ers and gen­er­ally any­one in the busi­ness of con­vinc­ing all over the world, and which is called “nominalisations”.

Liked this arti­cle? Leave your com­ment below, or email me helene@themastermindsgroup.com

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