Hi Reader,
If you've been following international news, there are massive protests happening right now in my (Gerta’s) country of origin, Albania. People are taking to the streets to protest against the government's dealings with the Kushners to develop a luxury resort on a highly coveted, beautiful island in the Albanian Riviera, one of the fastest-growing travel destinations in Europe.
The protests are reminding me that some of the smartest negotiations don't look like negotiations at all.
There's no big showdown with a lot of back and forths, no perfect comebacks that win over the room. It can be a lot more subtle than that. Someone makes a series of small, indirect moves, the other side barely registers them as moves, and by the time anyone realizes what's happening, the negotiation has advanced so far that there's nothing left to push against. The smartest moves are almost impossible to see coming, and even harder to stop once they're rolling.
I find the clearest examples of this in a strange place: protest movements. I have a Master’s in Logistics Engineering, so I'm probably wired to notice that these subtle negotiation moves almost never play out above the surface where people notice.
The negotiations happening beneath the surface
Take Occupy Wall Street. In September 2011, a crowd settled into Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, and everyone watched the signs, the speeches, and the drum circles. What actually kept the protests going, however, was a kitchen serving thousands of meals a day, a medical tent, a library, generators for heat, and a steady stream of water and blankets that volunteers had to organize and restock around the clock. Strip away the politics and you're left with a micro city that ran on logistics. It held for two months, which is a genuinely impressive supply-chain feat for half an acre of park and stone in Lower Manhattan.
The part I find most fascinating though is how city officials responded.. They mostly didn't pick a public fight with the protesters. They went after the operation instead. In late October, fire officials swept the park “on safety grounds” and carried off the generators and gas cans that were keeping people warm as the weather turned. A few weeks before that, the park's private owner announced the area needed “a deep cleaning”, and everyone understood that "cleaning" was a polite word for "clearing." When the final eviction came in November, the kitchen and the library were loaded into a sanitation truck and hauled away.
Every move by the city was positioned as ordinary administrative action – a fire-safety inspection here, a sanitation concern there, the sort of thing that's hard to argue against in public and far more effective than sending in officers swinging. You can rally a crowd against a riot line. It's a lot harder to rally one against safety codes.
The Arab Spring, that same year, ran on a similar logic from the other direction. While governments kept trying to clear the squares, activists had already moved the real coordination somewhere harder to reach. They used Twitter and Facebook to shift rally points on the fly, warn each other when security was closing in, and connect the people who had water and medicine with those who needed them. The crowd in the square was what was happening in the open, while the actual organizing was happening on phones, adapting faster than anyone in power could respond to.
In all of these stories, the decisive actions lived one layer below the obvious ones, down in the operations and the conditions, the part no one was defending because nobody thought to look there. The people who came out ahead, on either side, were the ones playing in that layer.
How this applies to your negotiations
Negotiations you may face work the same way and it's the opposite of how most of us are taught to do it. When a conversation gets hard, most people will push on the obvious thing. A sharply refined argument, a bigger number, one more reason why you deserve it. Most of the time this goes nowhere, because the other person's "no" was never rfacing off squarely with your argumentin the first place. It's propped up by something underneath that your negotiation moves aren’t engaging with.
Say you're asking for a raise and your manager keeps stalling. You can keep listing your wins and watch her nod and stall again, or you can get curious about what's actually in her way. Maybe she's worried about how it looks to your peers, or the budget's frozen until next quarter and she can't tell you that, or she needs something concrete to bring to her own boss before she can say yes. Solve that, and the raise stops being a fight you're struggling to win. The "yes" shows up much more easily, because the thing blocking it is gone.
Deals work similarly. The client who keeps stalling often isn't stuck on price, whatever they tell you. Sometimes they got burned by the last vendor and need to feel safe before they'll commit, and as soon as they do, the number you were stuck on stops being the blocker.
So before your next hard conversation, spend less time sharpening the argument and more on the layer operating underneath. Ask what's really keeping this person where they are, and whether you can change that instead of fighting the part you can see. That's where the real negotiation happens.
If you want to go deeper, there's a good paper on this, what researchers call “the logistics of resistance”. It covers Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and a handful of other movements far more thoroughly than I can here. You can read it here: https://jeds.thebrpi.org/journals/jeds/Vol_12_2024/8.pdf
Warmly,
Gerta
Cofounder, YourNegotiations.com
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