When it comes to negotiation, being in the room is the work. The dropped guard, the nervous laugh, the shift from "not good enough" to workable - none of that travels down a phone line. A reflection on negotiation, presence, and why showing up beats a phoned-in stalemate when the stakes are at their highest.
Photo by Colin White on Unsplash
I was listening to a current affairs podcast analysing the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East and its dire consequences for the global economy, when a particular snippet of audio stopped me mid-listen and left me stunned enough to nearly turn a perfectly grilled cheese sandwich into a burnt one.
A head of state, one who has built his entire career and public identity around being the ultimate dealmaker, even wrote a book about the art of deal-making, was being asked by a journalist why he wouldn’t travel to meet counterparts in an active, urgent, internationally pressing negotiation. His answer, confident and assured, was: “We’re not going to spend fifteen hours in airplanes all the time going back and forth to be given a document that was not good enough, so we’ll deal by telephone, and they can call us anytime they want”.
As someone who has sat in many commercial negotiations throughout my sales career and refined my negotiation skills through certifications, the “I won’t be travelling to negotiate” instantly felt like an anomaly – a sentiment I am not alone in sharing, judging by journalists who felt compelled to ask.
One of these many negotiations was almost blueprint-like in its emphasis on being in the room. Having visited this specific client before to lay the groundwork, my then-boss, a colleague, and I boarded a flight to negotiate a multi-million-dollar renewal with a very important client in the Gulf region – the same number of people were present on the client side, because that symmetry signals that you are taking the deal and your counterpart seriously. Being in the room let me see and sense the client’s confidence in his bargaining hand and how he negotiated for the only outcome he resolutely sought. I could also see the hesitation on my own VP’s face as he conceded, or hear the nervous laugh as he gave ground. We didn’t get what we came in for that day, but the atmosphere and the emotional data gathered in that room could never have been conveyed over a phone call.
The seating arrangement, the room temperature and even the smell of coffee all play a role in setting the tone. But the physical and verbal cues that influence the process and the outcome make negotiating as much a physical act as a verbal one, one that only proximity can seal. People’s willingness to share valuable information, or what may appear to be non-negotiable, sometimes isn’t when people interact within the confines of the same room. Anyone who has closed a significant enough deal will know, with certainty, that being in the room is the only way to win, regardless of what constitutes winning in the eyes of the beholder.
Every negotiation framework – from Harvard-backed to the most basic training – follows the same principles, and physical presence is perhaps the most effective way to shift a document from “not good enough” to a more malleable, more optimistic state. It’s how one achieves a better outcome than they would on their own, surfaces and ascertains the existence of a zone of possible agreement (ZOPA) – a key concept in how negotiation is taught – or decides that walking away is the best or only option. Without being in the room, finding that zone becomes a guessing game, whereas proximity allows mapping out where interests overlap in real time.
Interestingly, both parties in this global showdown met face-to-face during the first round of negotiations – a meeting made possible only by a long-haul flight. What was meant to remain shuttle diplomacy became, reportedly unplanned, a rare, high-level face-to-face encounter between the two countries. The meeting lasted twenty-one hours, and whilst it didn’t lead to a conclusive agreement, it most certainly moved the needle in ways a phone call could never have.
Whilst my sandwich survived the first revelation, it didn’t survive the second, as I kept listening to the news segment. Buried in that same exchange was another equally damning detail: the self-proclaimed dealmaker didn’t know who he was dealing with – in his own words: “We don’t know who the leaders are, nobody knows who the leaders are, I don’t know if they know who the leaders are, very importantly”. The basic work of identifying your counterpart is missing; that’s considered a beginner’s blunder in corporate sales or any other negotiation context. No one would expect a hostage negotiator to communicate with anyone other than the hostage-taker if an end to captivity is the only desired outcome. Nothing less should be expected in a negotiation where far more than the global economy is at stake.
Every negotiator faces complexity, and the key to alleviating it lies in how well prepared one is. The whole point of preparation is to map potential complications through research and situational understanding, even when the information is at times the least straightforward to obtain. Chief among them is estimating your counterpart’s likely priorities and, just as crucially, what they walk away to if they walk away from you – what negotiators commonly call their best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). The more valuable their alternative, the less they need you – a dynamic that often shows in visible or audible cues when sitting across from counterparts. Crucially, it requires knowing the unit that holds decision-making power, what it stands to lose, and what walking away means, a rigorous process that demands knowing the person behind the most crucial pronoun: who.
We know that every framework that has averted many catastrophic events has required someone, or multiple people, to get on a plane, sit in rooms and stay until an outcome – any outcome – is reached. The physical commitment is part of the negotiation and is ingrained in the political process because the consequences are anything but abstract: a critical waterway closed, straining global supply chains and destabilising global oil prices, to name the most obvious in this particularly relentless news cycle. Dire stakes that a handful of fifteen-hour flights and knowing the counterpart who holds the cards were weighed against.
History is the greatest teacher, and those who fail to learn from it are doomed to repeat it (the original author of this quote remains a matter of debate). In this case, however, perhaps the statesman who views flying as a constraint could do well to revisit some of the greatest peace deals of the last century. One of the most significant – The Good Friday Agreement – required all parties’ physical presence for fifty-eight hours, including three sleepless nights, and saw the head of the Irish government helicoptering out to bury his mother and then back at the negotiating table straight after to prevent talks from collapsing. The only phone call involved in this historic agreement was the then-US president being available on demand. “Right, but stay in the building” was a demand made by one of the central figures in this negotiation, a line that, I would argue, deserves much of the credit for the deal’s success.
Negotiation is as much an art as a science. For all it entails, it makes resolution possible, even if the outcome isn’t always a reliable measure of success. It’s easy to think that if the last twenty-one-hour meeting didn’t produce a lasting end to the hostilities, there’s little point in flying out time and again to collect the same unfavourable result. As I’ve learned through theory and practice, however, what matters isn’t the outcome alone but the preparation and rigour that have gone into the process. That process must be tried and exhausted in full before resorting to no deal: a ZOPA must be genuinely nonexistent, and walking away the only viable option, for a negotiation to count as failed. And a no-deal reached after genuinely showing up will always beat a phoned-in stalemate.
The focus must remain on what is within one’s control and on the power of physical presence. Far from mere courtesy, presence means a counterpart becomes legible, leverage can be built, and a document has a chance to go from not good enough to workable. To blatantly refuse the room when the stakes have never been higher is to forfeit the one thing the job demands of anyone who takes it (and negotiation) seriously.
Thank you for reading. If you’ve ever watched a deal hinge on something that could only have happened in the room, I’d love to hear about it! And if you’d like more essays like this, you can subscribe to have them land directly in your inbox.
