Both sides have interests. Almost nobody talks about them.
Thursday Short — Both Sides of Yes | April 2026
The name of this publication comes from a negotiation principle most people know exists and almost nobody uses.
Roger Fisher and William Ury spent years at the Harvard Negotiation Project studying why smart, prepared people fail to reach agreements they should reach. Their conclusion, published in Getting to Yes (1981), is blunt: the problem isn't strategy. It's that both sides stop thinking and start defending.
They called it positional bargaining. You know it as every negotiation you've ever watched go sideways.
A position is what someone demands. An interest is why they demand it.
A vendor says the price is non-negotiable. Their real interest is predictable cash flow. There are three ways to solve that problem — and only one of them is called full price.
A staff member asks for more money. Their real interest is control over their schedule, or recognition, or certainty they have a future here. Those are different problems with different solutions.
A prospective client says the investment is too high. Their real interest is not feeling foolish about a decision in six months. That's a trust problem, not a price problem.
When you argue positions, you get a standoff. When you surface interests, you almost always find room.
Fisher and Ury introduced one other idea that changed how I run every difficult conversation: BATNA — Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.
Know your walkaway option before you walk in the room. Not during. Before.
Most business owners skip this step. They enter pricing conversations, hiring discussions, and partnership deals without knowing what they'll do if it falls through. That information gap creates anxiety. Anxiety creates concessions. Concessions destroy positioning.
Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference (2016), confirms this from a different angle: the person with the most emotional calm controls the conversation. BATNA gives you that calm. It's a decision you make before the negotiation starts — not a tactic you deploy during it.
Daniel Kahneman's research on loss aversion (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) explains why positional bargaining feels necessary: we overweight what we might lose. Positions become identity. Walking away from a position feels like losing something.
It isn't. It's discovering that both parties have interests. And interests are almost always compatible.
That's what "both sides of yes" means. Not that everyone wins at the expense of reality. It means that most conflicts aren't actually conflicts — they're two people protecting positions when they could be solving a shared problem.
Before your next hard conversation, write down two things:
Then ask the same questions about the other side.
The negotiation starts there. Not at the table.
Use the 5-Step Decision Checklist before any high-stakes conversation — it's free: [link]
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