By John Cashby
I began to get really interested in negotiation out of necessity – when I lost my power as a white colonial in the newly-liberated Zambia. I was 22 and on holiday from my university in South Africa. While walking on the edge of the road in town, too close the edge, a black man on a bicycle rang his bell at me. “Don’t ring at me, stupid!” I shouted. He stopped, walked back and, looking at me right in the eye, said: “It is a crime to call someone stupid in Zambia”. And it was. And I knew it.
I hastily apologised. He just looked at me, shook his head and cycled off. My world had changed, and I really got it. Black Zambians would no longer agree just because I was white. My demands could now be disagreed with. And no, everything had not just become negotiable. The Zambian people do not live like that. On important issues, they, like most Africans, prefer to “palaver”, have an extended discussion (parley) usually with three or four members on each side with a lot of attentive listening. I now had to learn to do that.
It took me about two years to get the hang of it. It was a rich time for me in my personal
development. The end result was almost always a win/win. This is something that Donald Trump has no idea of. For him a win/win feels like a lose because he is a bully and wants submission. But that is a a short term victory, and it does not mean he gets his way. That is why his agreements nearly always fail as is so amply being demonstrated today as demand after demand falls flat even though he is President of what is often said to be the most powerful nation in the world.
So, after I had emigrated to England and got a great job with Huthwaite Research in Penistone, Yorkshire, as a behavioural researcher and trainer. I researched negotiation behaviour in industry because the class system was alive and well there, equivalent to the racism in Africa. This was now the 1970’s and British industry was in trouble. The Japanese were eating our, and the USA’s, lunch.
The reason was that they had a collaborative culture, especially in their supply chains. Their suppliers wanted the manufacturers to succeed. The UK suppliers did not care. They just wanted to survive in an industry that constantly forced costs down and did not pay on time.
Our first task was to find successful companies and identify where the skilled negotiators were. They were largely in procurement. Three criteria emerged. The most significant was, when compared with average negotiators, the skilled negotiator signed off on deals that actually worked; that were fully implemented.
On this criterion alone Trump fails miserably. In the fact, out of over 2000 negotiators we trained, Trump would not even be allowed into the training room. And he certainly would not get past the initial phase into the bargaining arena. The other side would have walked away within minutes.
Behaviourally, Trump’s bullying is actually his weakest attribute (along with his inability to deal with details), attested to by the fact that attacking the other party is something almost never done by skilled negotiator, i.e. less than two percent of all their behaviour. The average negotiator is three times more likely to attack and the bad negotiator a lot more. Trump would be off the scale. The only person we came across in our work who is a bit like Trump was known as the “Bouncing Czech”, very big physically and really was menacing. Trump is not. He is merely inexplicable.
I have seen many examples of top negotiators at work, but I will finish where I started, in Zambia. It is a story given to me by my Zambian friends about a successful, if primitive, negotiation strategy deployed by the Bemba people. They are the largest tribe in Zambia who, in the 1800’s, were living a generally peaceful life making an agricultural living in Central and Northern Zambia following the demise of the slave traders.
The peace was interrupted by the invasion of the Matabele in 1846, descendants of a faction of the Zulu people who fled north during the reign of Shaka to escape his cruelty. One of Shaka's most successful generals, Mzilikazi, led his followers away from Zulu territory into what is now called Zimbabwe. But while they settled there they still marauded their neighbours, very much like the Border Reivers (raiders along the Anglo-Scottish border when it existed). They penetrated the lands to north (Zambia) and encountered Bemba villages which they attacked in Zulu formation with assegais and spears. It was a savage but brief encounter. The Bembas put up a weak resistance and then fled further north, after setting set fire to their crops and villages. The Matabele followed them, encountering the larger more organised defence including a shower of arrows followed again by the burning of the villages and crops.
After a couple of weeks of fruitless endeavour, a Bemba herald appeared to the hungry and frustrated warriors, followed by a retinue of singing and dancing gift bearers with food, drink and cloth. The invaders were taken aback and even more so when the herald made this announcement on behalf of the Paramount Chief, Chitimukulu:
“You are very great warriors. You have the endurance of wildebeest and the strength of lions. Truly magnificent. So much so that we want you to become our cousins. You may keep the land you have occupied, and we will send our young women to plough and plant the burnt ground.
Or you can keep fighting us despite the fact that we outnumber you by the hundreds as our kingdom stretches all the way to Lakes Tanganyika, Bangweulu and Mweru (an area twenty times the size of Zululand whence they had fled)”.
The herald and his company laid the gifts down and retreated back to their waiting army. The next day the negotiation ensued and peace was agreed, which has lasted to this day. The key to this agreement was the planning process that preceded the offer of peace. As in much of Africa at this time the chief had spent a great deal of time consulting his headmen and his wives. He also gave generous shelter to the villagers who had fled the Matabele. Between them they agreed the terms that were acceptable to them, the villagers, first, i.e., they obtained a mandate from them to carry out the terms of the negotiations. Secondly, they identified the common ground between the Bemba and the Matabele. This was the physical ground, the abandoned villages, which the Matabele could settle on. This was the key concession, made only after a successful palaver with the headmen, who ensured it would be implemented.
In summary, the reason there was peace was because the tribes had made an agreement that worked. This is the key, because here is where the trust-building will begin and peace ensue. Tragically this is not happening over Ukraine and Trump is just fanning the flames.
With thanks to Mbita Kabalika.
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References
Carlisle, J. (1997). Logic is not Persuasive. Research report. Sheffield.
Carlisle, J. and Parker, R. (1989). Beyond Negotiation: Redeeming Customer-Supplier Relationships. Chichester: Wiley
Neil Rackham & John Carlisle, The Behaviour of Successful Negotiators, 2 J. EUR. &
INDUS. TRAINING 6, 6–11 (1978).
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The opinions expressed in this essay are the author's own and as with all Lviv Herald articles not to be attributed to the editors or individual journalists of the Lviv Herald.