FIND THE BLACK SWAN
4 concepts to master
Tactical Empathy / Active Listening / Forced Empathy / Understanding the Other Party's Perspective
ConceptListening as a martial art, balancing emotional intelligence and influence to gain access to another person's mind and increase your influence. Encompasses actively focusing entirely on the other person, prioritizing their perspective, and creating situations where they are compelled to consider your needs, including understanding their worldview and values.
How It Works
By actively listening and demonstrating understanding, you build rapport, gain trust, elicit needs, anticipate actions, and persuade the other party by showing empathy, leading them to become less defensive and more open to your viewpoint. Use calibrated 'How' questions to prompt reciprocity and engage the other party. Understanding core beliefs builds rapport and allows for tailored solutions. Similarity increases rapport and facilitates trust. Tactical empathy uses labeled emotions to create a safe environment.
Leverage / Leverage in Negotiation
ConceptThe ability to influence a negotiation by understanding the other party's unspoken needs and expectations, encompassing positive leverage (the ability to provide or withhold something the counterpart wants), negative leverage (the ability to make the counterpart suffer if they do not comply), and normative leverage (using the other party's norms, values, and standards to advance one's position).
How It Works
By uncovering the subterranean world of unspoken needs and thoughts, a negotiator can find variables that can be leveraged to change the counterpart's needs and expectations. Leverage works by creating a sense of potential loss or withholding desired gains, influencing the other party's decisions and actions. Positive leverage controls access to desired outcomes. Negative leverage exploits loss aversion. Normative leverage highlights inconsistencies between beliefs and actions.
Black Swan
ConceptAn unpredictable event or piece of information, previously considered impossible or never imagined, that has significant and game-changing effects.
How It Works
Black Swans operate outside regular expectations and cannot be predicted based on past experiences, rendering traditional predictive models useless and requiring a shift in mindset to recognize and adapt to them.
Knowns and Unknowns
ConceptA framework for categorizing information and uncertainty, encompassing known knowns (facts and information one is aware of and certain about), known unknowns (uncertainties one is aware of but lacks specific knowledge about), and unknown unknowns (information one is unaware of and has never imagined).
How It Works
Known knowns guide decision-making based on established knowledge. Acknowledging known unknowns allows for contingency planning. Uncovering unknown unknowns requires a shift in mindset to more intuitive ways of listening and questioning.