Solving the Negotiation Puzzle

The puzzle mindset as creative negotiating framework.

Photo by Nathalia Segato on Unsplash

“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Curiosity. Creativity and problem-solving. Flexibility and humility.

Open-mindedness. Assessing probabilities and understanding the other perspective.

Persistence. A desire to regain control of what you can. Managing emotional responses, and taking a break when you need to regain perspective. Resisting distortion-inducing cognitive biases. Separating the signal from the noise.

Yes, these are all familiar traits and practices of successful negotiators. We’ve highlighted many of these notions in past installments, because they represent skills you can hone to achieve better results in negotiation and conflict management settings.

Interestingly, a new book explains that these qualities are shared by another inquisitive brand of enthusiasts the world over: puzzlers!

Negotiations as Puzzles

Though I hadn’t exactly thought about it before, this book helped me connect the dots and realize that puzzle-solvers and effective negotiators have much in common. Moreover, solving puzzles is an apt metaphor for what we do when negotiating and resolving conflict.

First, the book is A.J. Jacobs’ The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, From Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life. Jacobs (The Year of Living Biblically, Thanks a Thousand, and much more) helps us understand how puzzles — jigsaws, crosswords, mazes, Rubik’s Cube, anagrams, sudoku, Wordle, and everything in between — can, indeed, challenge and entertain, but also spark creativity, curiosity and other qualities of the “puzzle mindset.”

Get Your Mindset

In many ways, the puzzle mindset — along the lines of Adam Grant’s scientist mindset and Julia Galef’s scout mindset — provides negotiators a useful lens through which to view disputes and differences of opinion.

Consider:

• Solving puzzles takes curiosity, creativity, and humility.

• Puzzlers must be willing to experiment and adjust hypotheses as they collect information and test things out, all with the desire and willingness to invest persistent effort to uncover solutions. (Imagine a group of people around a jigsaw puzzle, working together for hours and days and weeks to figure out where all the parts fit. Or that feeling of toiling through a Saturday crossword puzzle, lightly marking next to the boxes and relying heavily on the eraser end of your No. 2 pencil.) It pays to be patient, crafty, unafraid to make mistakes, and determined.

• And, yes, you must be able to “think outside the box.” Did you know that this popular phrase — meaning to think differently, creatively, and beyond initial assumptions — is related to the solution to the classic “nine dot puzzle”? It’s no coincidence, of course, which all makes sense once you’re on board with A.J. Jacobs and the puzzle-as-life metaphor.

Curiosity, Determination, and Problem-Solving

Another key takeaway from The Puzzler is value of engaging curiously with challenges and maintaining your composure and determination, even when the going gets tough. “Get curious, not furious,” as Jacobs says.

He might as well be talking to parties mired in conflict.

Looking at a conflicts, disputes, and negotiations as challenges for parties to resolve collectively, curiously, and creatively, working to find common ground and opportunities to bridge different viewpoints, is at the problem-solving heart of the effective negotiator’s approach. You must be flexible with your hypotheses, much like a scientist would, to be open and accepting of new information that can help guide you towards workable solutions.

Puzzling Illusions and Cognitive Errors

Yet another puzzling lesson for negotiators: Beware of cognitive biases that can lead us to hasty assumptions, even though — like optical illusions (a type of puzzle, surely) — our brains still want to trick us into decision-making errors. You know those lines are exactly the same length, and those circles are the precisely the same size, but the optics urge your brain to insist otherwise. A very recent study even showed that an optical illusion can trigger a measurable physiological response: in this case, a perceived darkening hole — a static image that created the illusion of expansion and movement — actually caused study participants’ pupils to dilate.

Optical and cognitive distortions regularly challenge our decision-making. Perhaps illusions can teach us life lessons (and negotiation lessons), as well. The key is having enough humility to know what we don’t know and staying composed enough, and pressing onward sufficiently, until we uncover something that makes sense and enables a solution.

There’s that puzzle mindset again.

I’ve talked and written before about the mediator mindset — perhaps cousin to the scientist, scout, and puzzle mindsets — and of finding your “inner mediator.” These mental keys help us to channel emotional responses, seek out objectivity, and perceive negotiating challenges as opportunities for collaboration and creativity.

Instead of viewing a negotiation, for instance, as an adversarial, zero-sum clash (i.e., how do we split this pie?), we train ourselves to ask how we can create a more enlightened solution: How do we increase this pie’s size?

It does, indeed, sound like a puzzle.

Key Takeaway: Reframing Your Negotiations

Reimagining a conflict as problem-solving adventure isn’t always easy, particularly when you’re directly involved in a situation causing frustration or even stronger emotional responses.

Nonetheless, the puzzle metaphor is instructive. If we take a broad view, and begin to shift our negotiation framework from adversarial towards collaborative/inquisitive/creative/curious, the closer we move towards true value creation and win-win resolution.

Perhaps, next time, try approaching your negotiation, conflict, or disagreement as a puzzler would. Even if you’re not quite ready to accept that puzzles can show us the meaning of life or make us all better people (or maybe you are!), adopting the puzzle mindset suggests a useful, imaginative view of problem-solving and conflict resolution.