I recently took a negotiation seminar at MIT, which is one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. They covered frameworks for breaking down hard professional discussions w concreteexamples!

I think a lot of people would benefit from this knowledge, so here’s what I learned:

What’s a negotiation, you ask? You can probably think of many: salaries/promotions, buying a car, collective bargaining, etc. It can also be something like setting up a new collaboration, managing professional boundaries, etc.

For clarity, I am very much only talking about more professional / business related conversations here, not about negotiating more fridge space with your roommate.

Let’s first set down some definitions, which I found helpful for being able to break down different components before discussing smaller details. The main components of any negotiation are your RESERVATION and your ASPIRATION values.

Your RESERVATION VALUE should be set to what they call your BATNA — Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement. What will you do if this negotiation is inconclusive? In other words, if you *don’t* get what you need from this negotiation, what is Plan B?

Setting your BATNA is important for a couple reasons: (1) it helps you realize what you need out of this negotiation, bc you should come out *better* than what you would have down otherwise. If you’re worse off, then Plan B should really be Plan A.

(2) As such, it also gives you a clear sign for when you should walk away; realizing this earlier helps you set up a more swift/graceful departure from the discussion, rather than leaving you and your counterpart angry (thus torching the relationship moving forward).

(3) Strengthening your BATNA is also best thing you can do to make sure that you enter the negotiation on the right foot, and it also empowers you to be more confident knowing that you have a viable alternative.

Your ASPIRATION VALUE is the most that you can ask for with a straight face. You can try to set this to research (eg, statistics about a “competitive salary”). Value setting is a little out of scope for this thread, but rest assured you want to be as ambitious as possible.

Your counterpart has a reservation + aspiration value, too. If we use salary negotiation, let’s say you have a competing job offer that pays $70k (your BATNA), and you would be *thrilled* and shocked it you got $85k (your aspiration value). You can keep the happy dance inside.

You may not have another job offer + it is also possible that you need a job NOW since rent is due next week. Still, be explicit: what will I be able to do if this doesn’t work out? How can I improve Plan B as much as I can so I can negotiate w a strong position?

Your potential employer also has a BATNA + reservation/aspiration value. Their aspiration value might be $60k, as they do not want to be laughed out of future recruitment efforts, and their budget is maxed out for this position at $80k.

The Zone Of Possible Agreement (ZOPA) is therefore $70k - $80k. As you can see, improving your BATNA (and therefore your reservation value) makes this zone smaller, but it also makes the possible deal that you can make better.

It is often difficult, if not impossible, to know what your counterpart’s aspiration and reservation values are, and it is (usually) not advantageous to let on precisely what yours are, too. It can also be unclear who should make the opening offer.

So how do you decide? Making the first offer gives you an anchoring advantage — to set the bar for the negotiation — but there’s risk that you give a first offer that’s too low. Making the second offer, however, you to drive the negotiation further.

Deciding whether to make the first or second offer is really about how much information you think you have: making the first offer if you have a lot of information can be very powerful, but making the first offer if you don’t have information can be very risky.

You can use your BATNA in this negotiation by politely alluding to it. In the case where you *don’t* have another offer, for example, and the counterpart asks you point blank, you can be honest and say: “no, I don’t have another offer, but I’m just at the beginning of my search.”

(INTERLUDE: I guess now is a good time to say that “being a better negotiator” is not a replacement for a radical reimagining of an exploitative economic system + I do not mean to suggest that the onus is on individuals to fix capitalism, bc #girlboss! Know your worth!)

(I also recognize that the numbers I’m using, and that the positions I’m talking about, reflect tremendous privilege. It is also ludicrous to imagine telling a search committee with a lowball offer that “I’m just at the beginning of my search.”

(At the same time, I do think that these kinds of scripts / frameworks are a hidden curriculum for many people, and this is esp true of academics who have not had experience negotiating salaries and workplace benefits, and are now learning on the fly as the industry craters.)

(I think there is a lot to be said about giving people tools / scripts to advocate on their own behalf — as well as others — to make the workplace more inclusive and equitable. These concepts are also transferable to negotiating new projects and collaborations, not just salary.)

(There are more caveats which I’m happy to talk about — what about gender/cultural norms, for example??? — and I’m not sure that I can do justice to them in a tweet thread, but I will try my best given the *three days* of coursework I did, alongside some additional reading.)

(This is also an ongoing conversation!! I want to hear about your experiences talking about money and / approaches to difficult discussions too!)

Okay. Back to initial offers and BATNA. When you’re in there middle of the discussion, very rarely are you *only* exchanging numbers within the ZOPA in hopes of converging at some middle value.

You give justifications about why you should get paid more, talk about job title / scope of work. In discussions about projects/collaborations, you divvy up responsibilities, talk about resources (maybe one collaborator gets a software license free from their uni?)...

These are called FOCAL POINTS. They can be reasons why an employer would like to pay you less (eg, you don’t have comparable industry experience) or why you should be paid more (you bring extremely specialized expertise).

You can improve the discussion over focal points (and therefore get closer to converging on a deal) by preparing a little about what you think your counterpart’s focal points are (not unlike preparing for a debate).

However, this is crucially NOT a debate. Playing hard ball is certainly one approach to negotiating, but one way of reframing this is to approach the discussion as a joint fact-finding mission, and not an adversarial interaction.

In other words, people are generally more likely to help you if they like you / don’t feel like they’re being constantly threatened or taken advantage of.

Using this collaborative framework can be helpful bc you can shift discussion away from a ping-pong game about numbers (“it should be $60k! No, I will only accept $85k! So how about 70k?”) towards other things like criteria or standards

Instead of going back and forth about numbers, it can be useful to talk more about the validity of the criteria (“so where does this $70k come from?”) rather than jumping back and forth without more substantive discussion

This also gives you an opportunity to be more concrete and specific about what you want. For example: “I’m asking for $85k bc I see from this salary database that analysts working with a similar portfolio are compensated at this level.”

They might say: “the best that we can offer is X based on our research.” You: “thanks for bringing that to the table, as I have conflicting research. Could we dig a little deeper and see if we can figure out why there are these differences?”

This obviously assumes that your counterpart is coming to the negotiation in good faith, and there are certainly cases where they aren’t and use more underhanded techniques (eg lying) or trying to undercut you by appealing to scarcity / time pressure (eg exploding offers)

I’ll get to responding to these tactics later (I hope!), but it’s worth noting here that collaboration requires a LOT of explicit communication in order to be successful. Nodding, for example, often means “I’m listening,” not just “I agree.”

Be like a flight attendant and ask for positive affirmation: “I need an affirmative response from you that...”

Okay, this thread is getting VERY unwieldy. I will have to regroup, both for readability and my screen time purposes. I should have broken this up!

I think this gets at some of the basics, but in the next thread, I will try to cover even more examples! Stay tuned!!

Whew, ok, after looking at my notes, there are MANY MORE THREADS coming. I will also synthesize them in a blog post, bc Twitter is a lot and I'm sure some people will want to read this in a more tidy form!

Here are some that I have planned (which I'll link back to this thread when I'm done):

PART 2: Scarcity mindset / negotiating for yourself + others
PART 3: Generating subjective value
PART 4: Difficult tactics
PART 5: Closing thoughts

There might be some deviation from these general parts (also, there's *so much* material that I will get tired + have to come back later). I like doing this, tho, bc it helps me cement a lot of the stuff I learned, which was honestly p overwhelming. I hope this helps you too! :)