EXPLORING PARADOX

It was as I was returning home one Saturday afternoon from a long work week that I realised my negotiation model was broken. This was the mid 1990s and I was working for Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a technology services company. We were at the leading edge of outsourcing deals, taking over an organisation’s technology and offering it back to them under contract for a multi-year term with a big cost saving. From pretty much a standing start, we had just outsourced all the IT of the DVLA (the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency), Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and also global giant Rank Xerox. We were now being offered a big deal with a large UK-based industrial conglomerate. Not only would we run their computing systems globally but we’d also buy two consulting and technology businesses they owned. My boss and I were the two in-house lawyers; he ran the legal side of the outsourcing deal while I looked after the purchase of the two companies. To do the deal we had to base ourselves in Coventry for weeks on end and somebody smart negotiated a good price for us all to stay in a huge rural gothic hotel outside Coventry. This was ‘being sent to Coventry’ in style.

I distinctly remember coming home that Saturday night after a particularly hard week, as the negotiations came to a climax. Even though it was a long drive home, I was still pumped full of adrenalin. We had just put our final positions to our client across both deals. What struck me was how horrified my then partner was at my behaviour. She first remarked on my language, which she said was pretty foul and unlike me. It went deeper, though: my whole attitude had become abrasive and even abusive in her eyes. She was shocked at how confrontational I was. This was the first I knew of it, but instinctively I felt she was right. I went from proud to slightly defensive and then more slowly to slightly sheepish.

From that point I knew something deep down that I only later acknowledged consciously. I knew that we were not going to win the deal. We hadn’t acted as we might, we hadn’t got the right relationship, we hadn’t done the best we could. The following week I was there to help in the briefing when our managing director was due to go to a meeting with the client’s CEO, ostensibly to wrap things up. I remember seeing him off with gusto but he came back later with no deal. We heard a week later that our major competitor had been invited in. Subsequently they won the deal. We understood that it was a loss leader for them and the client was subsequently absorbed in a huge merger. We took consolation in all of that, but the fact remained that we had lost.

As I reflected on this deal I realised that it was a turning point in my career as a lawyer. I had focused on getting the best possible deal for my employer. I had been an advocate for some strong positions and argued hard for them. We had taken these positions because we believed they were right. As the lawyer I had ended up leading the active part of the deal team, the negotiations with the client. The rest of the team, external lawyers from a top City law firm, financial experts and our technical team, were taking the lead from me. We stoked each other up and believed our own publicity. The client’s team was structured in the same way, and as a result we ended up being highly confrontational. There was also a lot of ego involved. In hindsight it didn’t feel good.

I subsequently left EDS and also fundamentally shifted my focus. I could see that there was a much larger picture than a positional fight for the technically right answer. We felt we’d made compromises when we presented our final deal to our Coventry client, but they were just that, compromises. They weren’t creative solutions to fully understood problems that we had worked on together. I also wasn’t happy that my work and home personas could be so different, particularly without my being aware of it. I knew that I needed to work on understanding both the commercial and human challenge more broadly to achieve more in future. The challenge was mine but I also knew that I needed to shift environment to find the answers. If I had known what to do, I could have done it at EDS. Not knowing what to do was a good reason to move somewhere else where I was more likely to get some help. By luck as much as judgement, I was right. The firm I joined, Andersen Consulting,1 were pioneers in understanding a new thing they called ‘Relationship Management’. At its core, this was about understanding more, both about the client but also about yourself. What drew me in was the professionalism, profitability and image of the organisation. I would find out more about what that was driven by in due course.

The first thing I want to be clear about is that I think negotiating with dominant power is relatively easy. If you hold the thing people want, you can demand the best terms. You can tell people what you think and you can define what is right. Big supermarkets have often pulled business from suppliers because they won’t agree to their prescribed terms. So many of our ways of thinking and our systems are built around a prevalence of dominant power that runs at least through the past 2,000 years or so of history. In it the bullies prosper. For my part, I was bullied at work and I in turn bullied. The fruits of my labours contained seeds of sustenance but also of destruction. Once after a bad day at work I got stopped for speeding and realised that there was no sense in taking my frustration out on others. What was the point of intimidating other road users, scaring pedestrians and ultimately defiling the quietly ever-giving natural world around me that gave me sustenance? We hate being victims ourselves, but at the same time it is easy to become part of a pattern where we take our revenge for being bullied by also taking a part-time role as the villain. The problem is that through this approach we don’t grow. The good suppliers give up and go elsewhere. Creativity and new product thrive in an atmosphere of trust, not fear. Sooner or later the bully will be left sitting in his vast but now empty palace, as the last cronies desert.

While we wrestle with this situation, we are living at a time of opportunity. As the dust of two world wars continues to settle we have the opportunity, in an environment of unprecedented transparency, to reach back to a different way of negotiating everything in our lives. In our hearts we know it is possible, it is just that the way things have been organised for so long makes it difficult to see the way. All that it requires is to see beyond ‘fighting’ for things and to understand how we achieve much more through ‘creating’ opportunity. As ever, the surface language we use is an indicator of the deeper attitudes at work. This is about moving from a coercive model steeped in dominant power to a co-optive model based on higher distributed power and choice. It’s not an easy change to make because the prevailing model, however nice we are individually, sits deeply in us systemically.

In the technology services industry we learnt to operate this way because we had very little if any dominant power. As a supplier in a busy industry we were one of many and had to seek differentiation from others to succeed. We could not simply dominate or demand. This was our, my, mistake in Coventry. Punching out or back when we didn’t get what we want didn’t work for us. Much as that solution appealed to part of our ruffian selves, our truly creative deeper self knew a better way.

It was years later when I finally realised that my approach to fatherhood and relationships was also going to change. Full awareness can take a while to set in and so it was in me as I hid behind many layers of habit and belief. My wife had just given birth to our son, our first child, and was exhausted. I had taken our days-old baby from his cot to calm him late at night and had laid his small soft form on my chest as I lay on our bed. Slowly he calmed and slowly I understood what was happening. He was taking comfort from my warmth but also from my heartbeat beneath and around him. In that moment I truly realised how deeply all my models were broken. In that moment I listened to what was really there. I listened to what he was telling me and knew then and there that I wanted to be a different father from the one I had expected to be. Child had spoken to child, and a different man emerged. This man could no longer carry forward the rather Victorian approach to parenting and relationships that I had had. I did still need strength but I also needed to be true to the gentle softness I felt. That was the base from which I built.

The problem with holding things within is that they tend to find their own way out. Often the thing will get us physically. In my case, I had a sudden bout of bad back pain which took the best part of a year to get better. Then, a year later it recurred. When I had first had the problem I had been busy with an intense deal at work and after a doctor’s appointment, where surgery had been discussed, I had dealt with it myself, taking the pain and managing my way through it. I just didn’t have the time to deal with it properly, I told myself. This first time it had been tough; too tough to want to repeat. I had learnt a lot but hadn’t really asked for much help. This time had to be different and I immediately booked an appointment with a physiotherapist and talked to friends about their experiences. Of all the advice I took I knew surgery was at the very wrong end of the scale for me. A friend had taken this option and it had not gone well. I felt this strongly but wasn’t sure why.

The solution I found, through the sports clinic that I attended, was Pilates. I got a few basic exercises and after a Pilates introduction on holiday I bought a book and followed a daily programme at home.2 Within weeks I felt different and within six weeks my body was different. Pilates helped me build a strong core, slowly from the inside. Instead of looking at things from the surface and wondering what to do, something very different emerged from within. Living muscle was now working in concert with my skeletal structure to provide this strong core. In the next few years my bad back recurred once or twice briefly but could be managed away in days not months. Since picking up a bit of yoga to add flexibility and Feldenkrais3 to boost my bodily and structural awareness, my back problems have disappeared.

This question of core and spine came to mind one sunny afternoon when I watched a horse roll in a field. I couldn’t help noticing firstly how much the horse enjoyed the act of rolling on the ground, but also how for the horse there was no simple roll from side to side. We might think of a horse as having a rounded back and that, like us, a roll through its back is straightforward. This isn’t the case. This horse lay on its side for some time, moving and scratching, and then with a great wriggled push went for a roll. At first it failed and fell back on the side it had started from. On the second try, the horse put in more effort. By force of its swing into the roll through legs, head and neck it achieved a full roll to the other side. As the horse finally got up, I noticed what I had never really thought about: the prominence of the horse’s spine along the top of its back and the fact that this horse, at least, couldn’t simply lie on its back. It very definitely had to be on one side or the other. A horse’s spine is effectively on top and its soft organs are underneath, much more protected.

As we humans progressed from a four-limbed to an upright stance, one of the huge immediate issues must have been the movement of the spine to the back part of the body, as we face forward. For any animal standing on four limbs, its soft organs are naturally underneath, shielded from exposure or attack. Standing on two legs, they are immediately exposed at the front. Some organs like the heart are protected by the rib cage but many, including the stomach and in particular the genitals, are not protected at all. As my daughter says when I express any concern for her safety on her own: ‘Don’t worry, I know how to bring a man down very quickly.’ As a direct result of this exposure, we often take action to protect the softness we thus expose. Historically we have the codpiece as a form of adornment as well as protection. In the trenches of the First World War it was even noted that as a soldier went over the top he tended to lean forward to protect his genitals.4 Male cricketers wear a protective box when they go out to bat.

Overreliance on outward trappings can become a strong shell that protects and hides. A tortoise carries its heavily armoured shell but without it the tortoise cannot live. Naked tortoises only exist in cartoons. I was reminded of this as I watched a chauffeur-driven limousine pull up on a street in Hamburg. A well-dressed middle-aged man emerged first, followed by a female colleague in a crisp, expensive suit with sunglasses, high-heels and scarf. I contrasted this with a man I’d observed the previous day in the German countryside drawing up in a lightweight electric-powered trike. Neither situation was remarkable but the differences were significant. The trike driver emerged in a leap from his flimsy machine, casually dressed and in search of a place to plug in his vehicle. He was slim and looked highly approachable. Neither his clothing nor his vehicle provided much protection. The couple in Hamburg were by contrast outwardly impressive. They reminded me of Russian matryoshka dolls as they emerged from a luxury car dressed in smart clothes. They certainly looked the part but I couldn’t help noticing that this man was carrying a great deal more weight beneath his business suit. The contrast between the two situations was marked. The man in the lightweight trike had the wheels of a car but no need for a carapace. In London a few days later I reflected on this as I watched people speed about on bicycles. At unarmoured risk yes, but with the ability to stop and smell the air; freedom as the payback.

This process of adding armour both has its limits and works against our core direction of growth. We know armour has its limits because in physical form we can see that the heavier the suit of armour gets the more it restricts us and weighs us down. In both evolutionary and practical terms, the lobster is trapped in its shell and so it is cooked. The simplest way in which the shell stops development can be seen in ammonite fossils,5 whose beautiful spiral shells reveal how chamber was added on chamber as the structure grew. In furtherance of this basic strategy ammonites sought to protect themselves with more and more elaborate forms of shell protection, adding spines and other extensions which made them even more unpalatable to predators. This same protection ultimately became too great a burden, allowing other adaptations and rival species to take over. Although ammonites were highly successful in the Jurassic and Cretaceous seas, they are now extinct partly, it is thought, because of a failed reproductive strategy. The over-armoured shell may literally have stopped them connecting.

We have many situations where this physical limit to our armour can be seen. A good example is the Halifax bomber during the Second World War when Leonard Cheshire, who went on to found the Leonard Cheshire Foundation, was a squadron leader. Cheshire became frustrated with the number of bombers that were being lost. He realised this was partly because the aircraft had been weighed down with extra equipment, thus losing power and manoeuvrability. The last straw was the addition of cowls to blanket the exhaust fumes from night fighters. Cheshire ordered the removal of the cowls along with some gun turrets and other non-essential equipment, which transformed the performance of the bombers allowing them to fly faster and higher.6 Losses soon fell and morale improved.

The parallel problem is that the more time we spend exploring the limits of armour, the less time we spend in developing better co-operative solutions. After the war, Cheshire moved into working with people with disabilities. Like Cheshire, once we step out of armour we can apply our energy to far better ends; developing our awareness of the situation, our trust of others and our creativity. Instead of spending, indeed wasting, energy on armouring ourselves to protect our separateness, we can spend on relationships with others to build on our connectedness.

Ultimately this is about being happy to be naked, metaphorically or literally. As humans we tend to dress up. There’s no problem with this, unless we are actively hiding something. If we feel uncomfortable naked, why is that? It can often be because we impose impossible expectations on ourselves and as a result lack confidence. We think that our bodies should be different in some way, closer to our image of perfection. We compare ourselves with others who are, by the way, secretly making exactly the same comparison. It’s a judgement we make of ourselves and it takes us away from the reality of what is. To refuse to accept what we are is disrespectful; firstly to ourselves but also to others and, ultimately, to the natural order of things. The only way to start any journey properly is to accept where we really are and to build from there. Thus, even if we do need to change, we must still get comfortable with our current state first. If we are in Birmingham there is no point in planning a journey to Cardiff believing we are in Bristol.

The child inside

The poet Ted Hughes was a complex and brilliant man with a controversial private life. In 1986 he wrote a powerful letter to Nicholas, his son from a previous marriage to Sylvia Plath, whom he had left when Nicholas was a baby.7 In the letter (which is available in full on-line) Hughes talks about the child he saw inside all of us. We are, he says, only aware of this child as a general crisis of inadequacy, helpless dependence, pointless loneliness or simply a sense of not having a strong enough ego to deal with the turmoil of the external world. This sense is one that most people seem to feel, however frequently or infrequently, throughout their lives, whether or not they can admit it to themselves or their closest friends.

What we have done, Hughes explains, is to build from an early age and then hide behind an armoured secondary self that deals with the outer world and protects the inner child. The problem, Hughes goes on to say, is that that child is the only part of us that really matters. It holds what makes us human and is where our truth and inspiration come from. In Hughes’s view, the bits that don’t come from the inner child are worthless. This is exactly where the issue lies. What we hold at that emotional, sometimes slightly scared and incredibly vulnerable core is the very heart of our being. We surround it with armour, but that armour has a cost.

The paradox, father explains to son, is that the only time people really feel alive is when they are suffering; when the external everyday armour is overwhelmed by a challenge and the naked inner child is exposed and made visible. This emotional, existential paradox is completed when we find ourselves fighting desperately hard to prevent this essential experience from happening. We instinctively know that we need to invest more heart to truly live and to grow, yet we find ourselves building approaches, structures and lives that protect us from the risk of our exposed nakedness being seen in public.

It is this inner core that we need to get to know and to nurture. The paradox that Hughes talks of sits at the core of the work that needs to be done. Close connection with this inner self holds many of the essential clues. In this inner sanctum we also hold the drivers behind many of the behaviours that can limit us. Exposure of the child is hard and makes us feel vulnerable but through it we grow in confidence. As in the completion of a physical challenge, pushing ourselves to do something we are most fearful of can be our route to growth.

This duality is not just a poet’s way of seeing things, it is echoed in much of modern psychology, from Freud’s ego and id through Jung’s development of persona, front and shadow. The conflict also appears in Erik Erikson’s ‘identity crisis’ and Alfred Adler’s ‘inferiority complex’, and in drama where character is based on the struggle between what the character really is inside and what they project as a front. Think David Brent in The Office or Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers. In both the comedy comes from the way the conflict between the front and the core is made visible to us and exploited for entertainment. Basil’s veneer of gentility fails to hide a desperate and hopeless sense of inadequacy in the same way that Brent’s bouncy playfulness covers up his loneliness and insecurity.

Front can be a useful tool but put up unwittingly it becomes simply a lack of self-awareness. The danger then, is that we don’t understand or control it. Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz relays a warning story told to him by a woman he met on a flight who was going to visit her mother for the first time in nearly 16 years. The Jewish woman’s father had so taken against her blond Catholic boyfriend that he had threatened, and then when she married the man carried out the threat, to stop speaking to her; a lead which her mother had been obliged to follow. The reunion of mother and daughter was only taking place because the mother was divorcing the father. She’d found out that her husband had, all along, been having an affair with his receptionist, who was Catholic and blonde. The daughter’s take on the situation was ‘the bigger the front, the bigger the back’. The protest made was in direct proportion to the real but hidden issue. Did projecting his own guilt onto his son-in-law really help the father? This unwitting externalisation of our own stuff onto others is a fertile source of conflict. If we don’t see what we are doing, transferring the conflict onto someone not only stokes up our anger, but prevents us from dealing with it.

As the stakes get higher the armour, the skin we put over things, looks thicker but the reality can be very different. As we are more successful the risks go up. Business leaders often admit to their executive coaches that they are insecure. Many of us aim for the top in our careers but once we get there we often feel lonely. Insecurities don’t get easier as the role gets bigger, they get worse. A friend once asked his father what was the best thing about being retired and was shocked at the answer. ‘I no longer have to worry about someone walking into my office and telling me I have been found out,’ came the reply. His father, who ended up as MD of a large company, had been chronically insecure all the time. Once, faced with a similar frank admission from a world-weary CEO, I asked a room of senior executives on retreat to put up their hands if they felt this way. Everyone, including myself and the other facilitator, raised their hands in quiet salute to this largely unspoken but prevalent fact. The important thing is dealing with our feelings of uncertainty and harnessing them appropriately. US architectural critic Paul Goldberger even came up with a saying, known as Goldberger’s Law, when he reflected on architect Zaha Hadid’s suing a journalist over an allegedly libellous book review: ‘The greater the success the thinner the skin.’8

Two of everything?

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the world’s worst disease.9

Seng-ts’an, c. 700BC

You are either with us or against us in the fight against Terror.

George W. Bush, 2001

One of the many paybacks of standing up is that we can take advantage of our hands. In primitive times these would have been engaged in the act of walking, balancing, climbing and getting about. In time, bi-pedal man also developed art and language which allowed us to express ourselves more openly to each other, face to face. This is fine up to a point. We each have experiences, stories and then opinions, but the rub is, that they tend to differ. As a result, we tend to polarise. In groups we are even more tribal. We see ‘them and us’ distinctions in our behaviour. Leaders, reinforce the choices we make. Without necessarily knowing it we daily negotiate this space: we do it in our families, in our organisations, in politics and in our relationship with the rest of the natural world. The way we see the opportunities and the way we negotiate them becomes a crucial life skill.

An expression that I notice and use frequently is that of ‘on the one hand this’ and ‘on the other hand that’. It is both a form of language but also, more importantly, of behaviour. I’d like to introduce this as a way of seeing the paradox. It is our freed up hands in play. Here it is in its simplest form.

Perhaps this is a challenge that comes out of our bi-pedal and bi-modal nature; we do tend to see things as polarities and to feel that one or another must be right. The challenge that The Power of Soft seeks to address, is the extra value available to us in the reconciliation of this paradox, at least in part. If each polarity does have its own value, what greater value might be available to those who can successfully combine the most valuable component parts? Physicist Niels Boehr pointed out that although the opposite of a measured fact is a falsehood, the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. The joy of creative living in this space is to be able to see the best parts of each opposing paradox and to meld them together to shoot forth something new that captures the positive energy of each.

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Part of the duality behind the power of soft came clear when I changed roles in a new organisation. The new company was struggling commercially and was not winning as much new business as it wanted to. As I talked to people, the picture I saw had elements in that I recognised from previous experience. This organisation had been a dominant player and tended to take quite aggressive positions with its customers. Once the customers pushed back, the organisation conceded and usually gave way more than it needed to. It was like a parent who at one moment shouted at or argued with their child but later smothered them with kisses. Like the mixed up child, that might grow up from extremes of parenting, the company’s customers and even more so, its potential customers, were left feeling confused. The company thought everything was all right because it had ultimately given the customer what it wanted but the customers, when I asked them how they felt, said that we were ‘commercially difficult’. What they meant was that they didn’t know where they stood with us or what we really wanted. They were also put off by the aggressive signals we were inclined to give off, particularly early on. The overall result was distrust, lack of understanding and a feeling of insecurity in the relationship.

Later, when we were discussing the issue, I stood up, took a pen and used a series of symbols to explain the problem as I saw it. The first symbol I drew represented the positional front we tended to take. It was tough and felt ‘spiky’ to others. It was almost a weapon we chose to wield. The shape was a simple crude arrow-head:

This spiky armoured front wasn’t the whole picture though. What I was seeing here was all the strength being projected forward. What had happened to the back? The answer was clear. This was the duality. We easily flipped from one polarity to the other, as our sales team got more involved. Initially we wanted to protect ourselves then, when push came to shove, we dismissed these initial concerns in order to win the deal. At core, we had very little structure. Behind the strong, position-taking front, there was a lack of self-knowledge. We bent to what we felt at the time. So, to the strong front I added a jelly shape behind it:

The package as a whole looked like it had strength but this was mostly held in the front rather than in the core. Our armour was keeping us upright. If we were a person, we would have had a weak, and thus a medically bad back. What we achieved, we achieved mostly by chance. Our profitability showed this unstructured approach. By not knowing what we really needed we were failing in the most important ultimate measure for a business; our numbers were also poor.

As we talked about the challenge I started to draw an alternative picture of what quickly became a ‘strong core’ combined with a ‘soft front’. Here the shapes were different. Here the core has a structure that builds on the idea of a strong central spine; reminiscent of the old adage: ‘get a backbone’. Because of this core strength, the shape was able to change out front to a softer form, represented by a more circular shape, more open to the world:

What we are seeing here is a need to bring the strength back into the core, similar to my own experience with the bad back. If we build our strength from our core, we have more flexibility in how we solve challenges out front in the world, in our dealings with customers and suppliers. This is no different to the challenges experienced by the parent with the child. By setting strong boundaries in the right areas, we can in turn, allow more flexibility. Having core strength allows us to release the full benefits of the softer, more open front. It is only with strength at core that we can really get the best of our softness. This duality is both the paradox of the power of soft itself but also its contribution to exploring and making the best of all the paradoxes we face.

Over time, the componentry of the strong core and the soft front became clearer. Into these shapes, everything I had learned and struggled with over the years, fitted neatly. The Core itself has two major parts, which make up the next two chapters. Breaking away from position-taking to focus on underlying needs is the subject of Chapter 2. This approach builds on one of the most important breakthroughs in negotiation philosophy, the idea of Principled Negotiation that came out of the Harvard Negotiation Project and which was popularised by Roger Fisher, William Ury and later Bruce Patton in their book Getting to Yes, first published in 1981.

To get things really working, the power of soft requires a re-boot of the way we understand power. Power is a critical component that is less stable now than it has been for thousands of years. In Chapter 3 we take the Humpty Dumpty of power off its wall, take it apart and put it back together again.

These first two moves, understanding our real needs and our real power, together make up the substance of the strong core. How they come together and how we build this strength with appropriate boundaries is also key. Chapter 4 starts with a small boy on a train and ends with the errors of Goldfinger.

Once we have attended to our core, the harder, more structural aspects, we can turn our attention to the softer Front. This is where we truly unleash the Power of Soft. There have been a lot of developments in psychology and neuroscience in recent years and there is much benefit to be taken here. Chapter 5 focuses firmly on people and relationships and picks up poets and taxi-drivers on the way. The other component of the Softer Front is our Awareness: how we see things; the power of observation and the dangers of assumption and judgement. Chapter 6 shows what clear perception can do for us, while Chapter 7 brings the soft front together with a focus on listening and being heard. The problem is that our eager mouth tends to tug at the leash. We look at why that is so and introduce the Inner Interrupters. Finally, in Chapter 8 we connect up the rest of the paradox that is the full Power of Soft and see how a little boy and a tree can widen the question still further.