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Short Summary
Main recommendation: Avoid negotiating by email or text, and instead use email only to drive the other party to a voice-to-voice call or Zoom call, because delivery and tone carry most of a message's impact. Chris Voss's 7-38-55 ratio is presented as a framework in which how something is said (tone, delivery, and syntax together) accounts for 93 percent of a message's importance.
Key Points
- The 7-38-55 ratio, which Voss began discussing in the 1960s and early 1970s while teaching at UCLA, is a framework rather than a precise rule. It treats delivery as five times more important than the words themselves.
- Within the Black Swan method there are three negotiator personality types: assertives, analysts, and accommodators, each with a characteristic voice.
- The assertive voice is aggressive and bully-like and should never be used to influence others; the accommodator voice (friendly, approachable, amenable) should dominate most of the conversation.
- Email has no inherent tone, but recipients assign one, often based on their current mood, which is why written messages invite misreading.
- In text, people fixate on one or two points they dislike, so a message with ten strong arguments can be derailed by the eleventh.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Use the accommodator voice (friendly, approachable, amenable) for most of the conversation.
- When you reach the point where you state your golden objective, draw your line in the sand, and make your ask, switch to the "late-night FM DJ voice": slow down and exaggerate the pronunciation of every word to drive the point home.
- Do not try to negotiate through email; if you do write email, use it only to get the other party onto a phone call or Zoom call.
- Avoid the assertive voice when trying to influence someone.
- The speaker notes that people are surprisingly reluctant to engage voice to voice and prefer to handle everything by text or email, which the speaker sees as a mistake.
- Tone is so important that people imagine a tone into text; for example, a recipient who has just been reprimanded by a boss will read an email through that emotion.
- The speaker frames the email problem by comparing it to playing chess over email while laying out seven anticipated moves, expecting the opponent to accept them passively.
Bottom Line
Effective negotiation depends on the sound of your voice more than the wording of your messages, so move important exchanges out of writing and into live conversation as early as possible.
