CAN YOU NAME THIS country? The longest standing treaty in United States history is with this country. The first building on foreign soil ever acquired by the United States is located there—and that building is also the only place outside of the United States to have ever been designated a National Historic Landmark.1 This country has been a prominent supporter of the United States in its “war” against terrorism, but military cooperation between the two is not a recent development—soldiers from this country fought alongside American forces in World War I, and it emphatically sided with the United States in its fight against the Confederate states during the American Civil War. Likewise, the United States has long championed this country’s aspirations for noninterference by foreign powers. It is also one of the 20 countries around the world with which the United States of America has a Free Trade Agreement. Which country is it?
Some more hints: It is in Africa. Approximately 99% of the population is Arab or Berber, and 99% is Muslim. It is one of only two countries on the continent that has been designated a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States, affording it special military and financial cooperation. Any other guesses?
Final hint: One of the greatest American films—with perhaps the most highly acclaimed screenplay—is set in the largest city of this country. Who is this special friend to America?
Historians and movie buffs who have seen Casablanca might have an advantage in identifying the African nation as being the Kingdom of Morocco. The real question, however, is what accounts for this long-lasting relationship?
In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams signed the “Moroccan–American Treaty of Friendship” that had been negotiated between the American representative, Thomas Barclay, and Mohammed III, Sultan of Morocco.2 The treaty, written in Arabic and then translated into English, had 25 articles, mostly pertaining to naval and commercial matters. The final article set the length of the treaty obligations: “This Treaty shall continue in full Force, with the help of God for Fifty Years.” Almost 230 years later, it is still in effect. The treaty’s preamble had been much more optimistic—and ultimately more accurate—when it stated that the agreement was made (according to the Islamic calendar) “on the twenty-fifth day of the blessed Month of Shaban, in the Year One thousand two hundred, trusting in God it will remain permanent.”
But the signing of the Treaty of Friendship merely formalized a relationship that had already existed between the two countries for almost a decade. The first, and most consequential, step towards friendship was planted in 1777, when Morocco became the first sovereign country to recognize the independence of the fledgling United States of America. In December of that year, seeing the value of enhanced commercial relationships with America, the sultan announced that the ports of his country would be open to the United States. While it took a few years for the US government to respond to this offer—they had more pressing concerns during the war with England— it planted the seed that would grow into a friendship and a commercial relationship for centuries.
As we have seen previously, there is a powerful first-mover advantage when it comes to framing. The sooner a frame takes hold, the more likely it is to stick and to shape subsequent negotiations. We saw this when discussing default options: it pays to start with your initial template for the negotiations, or with your draft of the agreement. In the case of the longstanding relationship between the United States and Morocco, the friendship frame was set early on, when there was no prior, dominant frame to contest it. In business contexts, multiple frames are usually established very early in the deal-making process. These include, for example, who is perceived as strong or weak, whether it makes sense to be transparent or to be guarded, and which reference points or precedents are appropriate when evaluating offers, valuations, and so on. Effective negotiators are mindful of the influence such frames will have as the negotiation unfolds and seek to establish the preferred frame as early as possible.
Because you do not always get to set the initial frame, you might need to act quickly to assess and change the frame as needed. Not so long ago, a very successful interventional cardiologist I know was negotiating a contract renewal with his hospital. He knew the hospital CEO understood the tremendous value he brought to the hospital and assumed this would be a smooth process. To his surprise, the CEO of the hospital began the negotiations with an aggressive opening offer that would lower his salary by 20%. The CEO justified this using data and extensive documentation that showed the hospital was losing money and that the doctor, too, was operating at a loss. Conveniently, the CEO had included all manner of hospital fixed costs in the calculations to make the case and had ignored various other ways in which the doctor was contributing to the bottom line and to other goals of the hospital system. Each time they met to discuss the situation, the conversation would get bogged down in intractable arguments over what constituted fairness and the legitimacy of specific line items in the CEO’s profit/loss analyses.
It became clear to the doctor that the only way to dislodge the dominant “We are losing money so it is only fair that you should be paid less” framing would be to introduce an entirely different template as the basis for discussion. Before the next meeting, the doctor asked the CEO whether, given fairness was the concern, he would be open to an objective, third-party analysis of the fair market value of his contribution to the hospital. Many hospitals use comparative analyses in a region to decide on physician salaries, and there are firms that provide such services. The CEO agreed to this approach. When the data came in, it revealed, as the doctor had expected, that he was currently underpaid given the revenue he was generating for the hospital. Not only did this shift the conversation towards the appropriate increase in salary; also it gave the CEO the justification he would need to approve a salary increase for the doctor.
One element that sets the Morocco example apart from earlier cases we have examined is that the initiatives by the sultan were not aimed at resolving an existing deadlock or dispute with the United States; rather, he was engineering a path that might preempt future conflicts. Just as early framing is more powerful than late framing, it is much easier to preempt a deadlock than it is to resolve one. This principle holds not only when it comes to managing grand strategic initiatives, but also in dealing with more parochial tactical issues.
Here is an amusing example that makes the point. At the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (1973–1982), Tommy Koh, Singapore’s permanent representative to the United Nations, chaired one of the key committees related to the contentious issue of deep seabed mining. With delegates from over 150 nations at the table, Ambassador Koh needed to find some way to reconcile the divergent interests and perspectives of everyone in the room. Discussing every issue with such a large group would have been impossible, so Koh needed some way to shrink the group to a more manageable number. This would not be easy to do if everyone felt that they had a right and reason to be there. Tommy Koh reflected on this issue, years later:
In the case of the negotiation on the financial terms of mining contracts, we began in a room of 150 countries, and it was necessary to have meetings with 150 countries because you are indulging in public education … on what are the issues, what are the parameters, what are the various scenarios, [and to] explain to them all of the technical terms. . . . Once that’s accomplished, you have to make a transition from this huge plenary group to a smaller forum. . . . 3
But how do you exclude anyone, even when it is for the good of the whole group? Here’s what Koh did:
So I invented a new group called the “Group of Financial Experts,” and I picked a meeting room that could accommodate maximum 40 people. It was open-ended—nobody’s name. Anybody could come. But just by calling it the Group of Financial Experts was sort of intimidating. So a lot of my colleagues felt that they didn’t qualify to join this group. I didn’t try to dissuade them [by telling them] that they did. And so most people did not come. . . . And it gave us—in a smaller forum—[the ability] to advance the collective knowledge about the problem.
As we see in Koh’s approach, effective negotiators try to foresee deadlock and create conditions that will allow people to walk away from direct confrontation without feeling that they are losing or conceding anything of importance. It would have been much harder to ask people to leave the room than it was to create a frame that dissuaded them from entering in the first place. It is a reminder to not wait for conflict to erupt before we start thinking about framing, optics, audience problems, and strategic ambiguity. If the parties are on a collision course, it is better to help them steer away from each other rather than to pick up the pieces afterwards.
A colleague and I recently discussed the following situation: a person was to be selected to oversee a peace process between warring factions within an ethnic group. We knew that the leader of one particular faction would feel strongly that he should be chosen because, from his point of view, he was the legitimate leader of the ethnic group and deserved to hold this esteemed position. The problem was that not all of the warring factions agreed, and this discrepancy was one of the key reasons for much of the infighting. This leader was too powerful to rebuff and too controversial to include.
From our point of view, we needed someone who could be trusted by all of the parties. My suggestion was for us to reframe and redefine the role of overseer so that it no longer represented prestige or status—and to do so before discussing the role in any detail with the parties. If the role were conceptualized as more bureaucratic and low-level, the leader would be less likely to fight for it.
Both the Morocco example and the Law of the Sea scenario serve to highlight another commonly overlooked factor in negotiations: along with the big issues and decisions that parties must often confront, there are many less visible, less urgent, and seemingly simpler decisions that can sometimes have a large effect on the outcome of the deal. In Koh’s case, given the enormity of the overall negotiation, the decision to move from a plenary group to a working group was not a particularly noteworthy moment. In the sultan’s case, there was no urgency in reaching out to the United States, or in moving quickly to establish peaceable relations. In both cases, however, potential conflict was preempted by small, early actions that took place before there was a need to act.
This is not to suggest that one needs to worry about every small decision in a negotiation, but there are some small but consequential choices in most negotiations that deal makers should take seriously. I think of these as high-leverage moments in a negotiation—for relatively little effort, they allow you to significantly impact the frame and, as a result, the likelihood of success. These high-leverage moments tend to emerge in the early stage of the negotiation or relationship when the frame is still up for grabs and every decision has the potential to be imbued with heightened significance. This is powerfully demonstrated in an incident that dates back to the start of US–Morocco relations.4 When Thomas Barclay was negotiating the treaty with the Moroccans, the sultan raised the issue of a tribute—a gift—which he said he ought to receive to secure the deal between the two countries. Barclay responded that the only “tribute” he could offer was a friendship with the United States on equal terms. If that was unacceptable to the sultan, Barclay said, he would have to go back to the United States without a treaty. In that small moment of high leverage, the sultan conceded and agreed to a relationship based on equality. That was a pretty smart move with a country that would go on to become the world’s greatest superpower.
• Control the frame of the negotiation.
• Make it easier for the other side to back down from strong positions.
• Wise concessions on style and structure can help avoid costly concessions on substance.
• Pay attention to the optics: how will the deal look to the other side’s audience?
• Help the other side sell the deal to their audience.
• Make it safe for the other side to ask for help on optics.
• Avoid one-issue negotiations: add issues or link separate one-issue negotiations.
• Negotiate multiple issues simultaneously, not sequentially.
• Diffuse the spotlight so one issue does not become too prominent.
• If there is only one issue, try splitting it into two.
• Unmask the underlying interests: incompatible demands can hide reconcilable interests.
• Be firm on substance, flexible on structure: I know where I need to get, I’m flexible on how I get there.
• Getting unstuck is a worthy enough short-term goal.
• Address the logic of appropriateness: what does a person like me do in a situation like this?
• Leverage social proof to boost appropriateness.
• Framing an option as unique is a double-edged sword.
• Frame your proposal as the default option.
• The party that drafts the initial version of the agreement or process gains leverage.
• Establish a proper reference point for their evaluations.
• Always justify your offer, but don’t apologize for it.
• Strategic ambiguity can help resolve deadlock when no one can back down.
• Strategic ambiguity should be used only if other mechanisms are in place to ensure compliance.
• Strategic ambiguity can help overcome initial hesitations to starting relationships.
• Ambiguity is not a remedy for substantive conflict.
• Ambiguity involves a trade-off between current conflicts and future conflicts.
• If closing deals is rewarded, negotiators might conceal substantive disagreements to push through flawed deals.
• Ambiguous deals may be parasitic, hurting those who are not at the table.
• Be the first mover: control the frame early.
• If the existing frame is disadvantageous, reframe as early as possible.
• Better to preempt conflict than to resolve it: frame decisions in ways that help people avoid confrontation.
• Early in the relationship, find low-cost opportunities to create the right frame for the relationship.