Getting to Win/Win

We hear a lot about creating win/win solutions. But most of us are not very good at doing it. As a demonstration of this I sometimes take out two dollar bills at trainings I am conducting. I ask people to pair up and offer to give the two dollar bills to the first two people who can convince the person they are paired up with to stand behind their chair. Usually, within 15 or 20 seconds two people have someone standing behind their chairs, and I give them two dollars. These two people won, but the person they convinced to stand up lost. Sometimes the pairs agree to split the money, which some people think is creating win/win – but it is not. Splitting the money is getting each person a half of what they could have gotten.

Win/win in this situation would involve each person in the pair getting up and standing behind the others chair. But in being so committed to getting what we want as individuals, we don’t focus on the fact that we can help the other person get what they want also. Both parties can get all of what they want.

As Stephan Covey says in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Win/Win is not a technique; it’s a total philosophy of human interaction.” But we don’t know how to get to win/win because, as Covey writes, “Most people have been deeply scripted in the Win/Lose mentality since birth.”

In order to get to Win/Win we must be curious and listen carefully to the other person. We must be able to assess whether our needs are really mutually exclusive as they often seem to be, or if we can both get what we want. It often necessitates backing away from specific solutions in order to inquire into what is really most important to the other person. Interestingly, people do not often lead with what is most important to them.

A woman I worked with recently entered a post-divorce mediation asking for custody to be changed so that the children would not have to visit their father. The reasoning for this woman insisting on this change was that the children had not been getting along with their father. What she (and the father) really wanted was for the father and the children to heal their relationship. Rather than pursue the custody change, the woman agreed to let the father pursue some counseling and parent/youth mediation with the children. After a few sessions, they had worked a number of their problems out. In this Win/Win example, everyone got what they wanted – although what the woman wanted was not really what she said she wanted at first.

To get to Win/Win we need to stay curious about what the other person is saying and experiencing. We need to not take things personally and make sure we really understand the other before trying to be understood. Overcoming our internal barriers to creating Win/Win can be hard work and take energy, but no more energy than Win/Lose or Lose/Win outcomes have. Because when someone loses it rarely ends there.

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