Getting to Yes with Yourself: And Other Worthy Opponents. William Ury

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       Develop Your Inner BATNA

      From Blame to Self-Responsibility

       I saw too many people give away their last morsel of food, their last sip of water to others in need to know that no one can take away the last of our human freedoms—the freedom to choose our own way, in whatever the circumstances.

      —Dr. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps

      In the mid-1980s, I helped facilitate a series of conferences between top Soviet and American policy advisers on the question of how to prevent a nuclear war. The times were tense and the accusations were flying back and forth between the two superpowers. Each time we held a meeting, the first session began with a long laundry list of attacks and defensive arguments. It poisoned the atmosphere and took up a lot of valuable time. By the third or fourth such conference, my colleagues and I tried a different tack. On the printed agenda, we labeled the subject of the first meeting “Mutual Accusations” and scheduled it before breakfast for anyone who wanted to show up. Everyone got the point.

      The blame game is the core pattern of almost every destructive conflict I have ever witnessed. The husband blames the wife and vice versa. Management blames the union and vice versa. One political enemy blames the other and vice versa. Blaming usually triggers feelings of anger or shame in the other, which provokes counterblame. And on it goes.

      It is so tempting to blame those with whom we are in conflict. Who started the argument, after all, if it wasn’t the other person? Blaming makes us feel innocent. We are the ones who were wronged. We get to feel righteous and even superior. And blaming also nicely deflects any residual guilt we might feel. The emotional benefits are clear.

      But, as I have witnessed in countless conflicts over the years, the costs of the blame game are huge. It escalates disputes needlessly and prevents us from resolving them. It poisons relationships and wastes valuable time and energy. Perhaps most insidiously, it undermines our power: when we blame others for what is wrong in the relationship—whether it is a marital dispute, an office spat, or a superpower clash—we are dwelling on their power and our victimhood. We are overlooking whatever part we may have played in the conflict and are ignoring our freedom to choose how to respond. We are giving our power away.

      If we want to get to yes with others, particularly in the more difficult situations we face every day, we need to find a way to get past the blame game. We need to reclaim our power to change the situation for the better. While I was working on the problem of preventing nuclear crises between the United States and the Soviet Union, I studied crisis management in other areas of life such as business. At the time, the most striking example of a successful response to a dire situation was the way the pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson responded to the Tylenol crisis in 1982. Today, Johnson and Johnson’s response has become a classic case study, but back when it took place, the company’s approach was truly eye-opening. The top news story in the nation day after day, week after week, was the deaths by poisoning of six adults and one child who had ingested Tylenol laced with cyanide in the Chicago area. No one knew who had taken the capsules and injected them with poison. CEO James Burke was faced with the dilemma of how to respond. Tylenol was the company’s most profitable product, commanding 37 percent of the market in over-the-counter painkillers.

      Many experts cautioned against a nationwide recall, arguing that the incidents were limited to the Chicago area and that the poisoning was not the fault of Johnson and Johnson. But Burke and his colleagues chose not to take the easy way out by placing the responsibility for their customers’ safety elsewhere. Instead, they assumed full responsibility, ordered the product withdrawn from the shelves of drugstores across the country, and offered to exchange all the existing Tylenol capsules in people’s homes for Tylenol tablets. This one decision, made almost immediately after the deaths were reported, cost the company an estimated hundred million dollars.

      The result? Contrary to conventional wisdom at the time, which held that there was no way the Tylenol brand could possibly recover from such a widely publicized disaster, Tylenol was relaunched within months under the same name in a new tamper-resistant bottle and went on to achieve an astonishing recovery in sales and market share. What could easily have turned into a devastating crisis in public confidence became a confirmation in the public’s eyes of Johnson and Johnson’s integrity and credibility.

      The opposite of the blame game is to take responsibility. By responsibility, I mean “response-ability”—the ability to respond constructively to a situation facing us, treating it as ours to handle. That is what James Burke and his colleagues at Johnson and Johnson did. No matter how challenging or costly it might be, taking responsibility, they knew, lies at the heart of genuine leadership. And the rewards were great: taking responsibility made it possible to get to a yes in the form of restored confidence with doctors, nurses, patients, and other stakeholders.

      Once you get past the blame game and take responsibility, it becomes much easier for you to get to yes