Possible, p.1
Possible, page 1
Dedication
For Gabi
and all the possibilists to come
Epigraph
Hope is a passion for the possible.
—Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by Jim Collins
Chapter 1 / The Path to Possible
Chapter 2 / The Three Victories
First Victory: Go to the Balcony
Chapter 3 / Pause
Chapter 4 / Zoom In
Chapter 5 / Zoom Out
Second Victory: Build a Golden Bridge
Chapter 6 / Listen
Chapter 7 / Create
Chapter 8 / Attract
Third Victory: Engage the Third Side
Chapter 9 / Host
Chapter 10 / Help
Chapter 11 / Swarm
Conclusion / A World of Possibilities
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Also by William Ury
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
On November 28, 2018, Bill Ury and I went for a hike on the Lion’s Lair Trail just west of our hometown of Boulder, Colorado. It was one of those absolutely gorgeous fall afternoons, with the low light, the long shadows, and a golden glow from a late-season warm snap before the descent of winter. As we became enveloped in the bubble of our conversation, I found myself captured by the story of his behind-the-scenes efforts to defuse the growing tensions between the United States and North Korea. As with all of our walks, Bill and I got lost in discussing a wide range of topics—from the enduring lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the future of the Middle East to the challenges of family businesses torn apart by squabbling heirs and even to the ultimate challenge of wrestling with the debilitating conflicts each of us carries inside.
On this walk, I was particularly struck by Bill’s rare ability to bring calm and optimism to seemingly intractable conflicts and by his blend of intellectual clarity and practical wisdom. This led me to ask him a question: “If you had to boil your life’s work down to just one sentence you could leave behind, what would it say?” Bill went quiet for a few uphill switchbacks, then replied, “Great question. I need to answer that.” And by the time we’d descended the final switchbacks as the sun fell behind the hills, Bill had already begun thinking out loud about the sentence and how he could construct a book around it.
The only book to write is the one you cannot not write.
Whenever someone asks me for advice about writing a book, the first thing I tell them is that they should do everything they can not to write it. In response to the initial impulse to write a book, the primary response should be “No! I will not write it.” And when the impulse returns to respond in kind: “I refuse to capitulate to the suffering required to write a book. I will not throw myself into the monster struggle of making ideas and words and pages and structure all come together in a coherent work. I will not do it!” But if the book idea keeps coming back at you, grabbing you around the throat and delivering the unmistakable message “You must write me”—if despite your most valiant and persistent efforts to banish the idea from your brain, it simply will not go away, you just might have a book worth writing. And this is especially true if you are the one best person to write the book; if you don’t create it, no one else can or will.
This book meets that test. The “one-sentence” challenge lodged itself in Bill’s brain and would not let go. And as he describes in these pages, he accomplished the single sentence, one born of cumulative experience and penetrating insight. With sentence in hand, he dedicated himself to the task of creating this book. In a sense, Bill had a distinctive responsibility to synthesize his life’s work to date, not just for the enduring intellectual contribution but also because it arrives at a perfect moment in our divisive zeitgeist.
There are three reasons why Bill is the one best person to write this book.
First, he has deep intellectual foundations and a body of work to build upon. The big questions he circles back to in this text have roots in his seminal book Getting to Yes, coauthored with Roger Fisher, which has guided people through stressful, high-stakes negotiations for more than four decades. Getting to Yes is a true classic. Then he built on those ideas in further works, including Getting Past No and Getting to Yes with Yourself (a personal favorite). But in fact, the roots of his dedication to conflict resolution had already taken hold more than a decade before he met and worked with Roger Fisher. On one of our hikes around Boulder, I asked, “When did you first discover your interest in and instinct for what became your life’s work?” Bill’s answer: “Before age ten, when going to a school in Switzerland that had a bomb shelter. It was right around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that just clicked something in me.” In a sense, Bill has been working toward the sentence that forms the seed architecture of this book for fully six decades.
Second, his insights are beyond the merely intellectual; they are deeply practical. I see Bill as a tactile researcher with the world as his laboratory. Instead of sharpening his intellect and insights by doing research sitting in a plush faculty office at some Ivy League institute, Bill decided early to “go to the hardest places first,” throwing himself into working on political negotiations in the Middle East. Drawing upon decades of hands-on experience, he has learned what works in complicated and contentious negotiations. How to prepare. How to zoom out to see clearly. (I often think of Bill’s “go to the balcony” metaphor when I need to calm my emotions and see a conflict from a larger and different perspective.) How to create solutions that can work for both or all parties. (I’ve always appreciated his metaphor of “building the golden bridge”—the notion of constructing a durable structure across the straits of contention to connect both sides.) How to activate a broader community to help both sides want to build that golden bridge. How to hold firm to the non-negotiables while finding a successful compromise. How to say no by saying yes to something even better, not only for yourself but for the entire community. How to get yourself to accept what is best—for you and others—when your emotions get in the way of your self-interest. Yet behind all his “how to” skills, Bill always has an intellectual framework, a deep understanding not just of what works but of why it works.
Third, Bill Ury is in a rare category of thought leaders who have made the journey from smart intellect to wise sage. With this book, Bill is in full-on sage mode. The world will always veer toward war and violence; the verdict of history does not support the idea that the inevitable trajectory of human society is peace and cooperation. Bill understands that a propensity for conflict is buried deep in our DNA. He begins all of his teaching, writing, and practical work with a realistic understanding of human behavior, the will to power, and realpolitik. Yet at the same time, he remains a practical idealist, dedicated to the proposition that the pursuit of peace and collaboration is also part of our human nature and social self-interest. He is the champion of a simple, powerful thesis: that the pursuit of peaceful resolution, even amid intractable conflicts, is a signature of strength and wisdom, not of weakness. And most of all, he shows us that it is possible.
Jim Collins
Boulder, Colorado
April 2023
Chapter 1
The Path to Possible
We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.
—Margaret Mead
It was a phone call that would change my life.
On a freezing Sunday night in early January 1977, the phone rang at 10:00 p.m. I was living in a little rented room in the attic of an old wooden house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just up the street from the anthropology museum at Harvard University. I was twenty-three, writing term papers, reading the assignments of the students I was teaching, and studying hard for my graduate school exams in social anthropology.
When I picked up the phone, the voice at the other end of the line sounded strong and clear: “This is Professor Roger Fisher. Thanks for sending me your paper. I liked your anthropological lens for looking at the Middle East peace talks. I took the liberty of sending the main chart to the assistant secretary of state for the Middle East. I’ve been advising him, and I thought he might find your ideas useful as he plans for the negotiations.”
I was speechless. Was I dreaming? I don’t think I had ever been called by a professor, let alone on a weekend. And it had certainly never occurred to me that an idea that had popped into my head while writing a student paper could be of practical use to a high government official in Washington working on what was widely perceived as the world’s most challenging international conflict.
Like many young people my age, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Anthropology—the study of human cultures and societies—was fascinating, but something was missing for me. I was longing to pour my time and energy into a project that could help people in a more direct and practical way. I wondered: Could I apply what I was learning to a major human dilemma that defied current solutions—the perennial problem of conflict and war?
Professor Fisher continued speaking:
“I would like you to come work with me. What do you say?”
“Yes,” I stammered. “I’d love to.”
So what was the idea in my paper that Professor Fisher liked? It arose from a simple thought experiment. Lookin g at the walls of my little plain attic room, I had imagined myself as an anthropologist, a fly on the wall, in an ornate room in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Middle East peace negotiations were expected to take place. I asked myself a question: What could I observe from the way the parties were talking that would indicate whether the negotiations were going poorly or going well?
If the talks were going poorly, I posited, I would hear the negotiators blaming one another. They would be mired in the past. They would be focused on what was wrong.
If the talks were going well, I would hear something very different. Instead of dwelling on the past, the talks would be focused on the present and the future. Instead of harping on what was wrong, the negotiators would be discussing what could be done. Instead of attacking one another, they would be attacking the problem jointly.
In other words, I was simply suggesting that the way in which those in conflict talk with one another could either close down or open up new possibilities for agreement.
That late-night phone call from Roger Fisher was the start of my initiation into the art of opening up possibilities in seemingly intractable conflicts. Learning that art would become my life’s quest.
MY LIFELONG QUESTION
Roger Fisher’s generous invitation tapped into a calling I had felt for almost as long as I can remember. I spent much of my childhood growing up in Europe, then still recovering from two world wars whose untold horrors had taken the lives of tens of millions. The suffering was still palpable in the ruined buildings and the hushed stories shared by traumatized survivors—even to a child who had not experienced it directly.
On top of that, a third world war loomed on the horizon, this time apocalyptic because of the atomic bomb. We didn’t talk about it much because it was just too dreadful to think about and there didn’t seem much that anyone could do about it. But there were vivid reminders. My school in Switzerland housed a mandatory nuclear bomb shelter. In the winter, it doubled as our ski storage, so I visited it often, getting an occasional chill down my spine as I paused at the massive steel blast door hinged at the entrance.
“I don’t get it,” I would say to my friends as I grew older. “Anytime there is a crisis between us and the Russians, the leaders can decide to launch a nuclear war that would blow the whole world to smithereens. How can this be? There’s got to be a better way to deal with our issues!”
Children from many nationalities, cultures, and faiths attended my school, but we generally seemed to get along. And the disputes that did arise were interpersonal, not between groups. So, even as a boy, it wasn’t hard for me to imagine a world in which we could all coexist relatively peacefully.
Conflict was present not just in the world but at home, whenever I watched my parents quarrel at the family dinner table. I found it painful to hear and tried to distract them if I could. It dawned on me that conflict affects everything in our lives—from the happiness of our families to our ultimate survival as a species.
The basic question I kept coming back to, as a curious teenager, was this: How can we deal with our deepest differences without destroying all that we hold dear? How can we find a way to live and work together—even with inevitable conflicts?
I studied anthropology in college to search for answers to this question, hoping to learn more about human nature and culture. Anthropologists often study small endangered communities facing external threats. The endangered community I worried about was humanity and the existential danger we pose to ourselves. Why do we so often fall into destructive conflict whenever a serious difference arises between people, between groups, or between nations?
But I didn’t want to just study; I wanted to get my hands dirty. One thing I loved about anthropology was the idea that, to truly understand another culture, you need to become both a participant and an observer. I wanted to participate in conflicts, not merely observe them from the sidelines. I wanted to get into the thick of the action and practice the art of negotiation in the places that were the most resistant to resolution.
That one phone call led me on a journey of almost fifty years wandering the world as an anthropologist and negotiator, using real-life conflicts to stimulate answers to the basic question: What does it take to transform tough conflicts from destructive confrontation into collaborative negotiation?
I have asked this question in many traditional cultures, from the Kua community of the Kalahari to the clan warriors of New Guinea. And I have asked myself this question as I experimented with different approaches in the toughest conflicts I could find—from bitter coal strikes to US-Soviet nuclear confrontation, from boardroom battles to family feuds, and from partisan political strife to wars in the Middle East. I sought out the hardest and highest-stake conflicts, figuring that whatever methods worked on them would probably work anywhere.
I have also asked this question in conflicts with my own family and the people I love. I have learned from the setbacks as well as from the successes.
Through all these experiments, my original hunch as a boy has been confirmed: There are far better ways to handle our most serious differences. As human beings, we have a choice.
WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF CONFLICT
As I look around at the conflicts we face today, I see that the simple but powerful lessons I have learned on this lifelong quest have never been more needed.
Conflict is all around us, and it is intensifying. Every day—in our homes, in our workplaces, in our country, and in the world—we are confronted by the headache and heartache of contentious disputes.
More than at any other time I can recall, destructive conflicts are polarizing our communities, poisoning our relationships, and paralyzing our ability to address our most critical issues. How many needs are we sacrificing, and how many opportunities are we losing, for lack of a better way of dealing with our differences?
Ironically, after many decades of working on intractable political conflicts in the wider world, I find an intractable conflict tearing apart my own country. Unthinkable as the prospect may seem, more than two in five Americans, according to recent polls, fear that the country may be sliding into a civil war. I have never seen such levels of fear, anger, and contempt for the other side. Nor have I seen such depths of resignation, numbness, and despair—so many people throwing their hands into the air and concluding that they are powerless to change the situation for the better.
The phenomenon of polarization is not limited to the United States; it is a global trend, separating families, communities, and societies around the world. “Because of political differences, my brother doesn’t show up for our traditional family get-togethers. My mother is heartbroken. It’s gone too far,” laments a close friend in Brazil.
If anthropologists living a thousand years from now were to look back at this moment, they might call this the era of the human family reunion. For the first time in human history, thanks to the communications revolution, virtually all fifteen thousand language communities are in touch with one another. Yet, as in many family reunions, it’s not all peace and harmony. There is a lot of conflict.
Never before in human evolution have people faced the challenge of living with billions of others in one single community. Far from bringing a lessening of conflict, the reunion means a heightening of hostilities as people are forced to confront their differences, as resentments over inequities flare up, and as identities are threatened by different customs and beliefs. Coming together can produce more heat than light, more conflict than understanding as our differences come to the fore.
Thanks to our new ways of communicating, we are much more aware of conflicts in other parts of the world than ever before. We are inundated around the clock with news of strife and war. And, if anything, our new media for communication are designed to focus on conflict—and intensify it—if only because it captures our attention and attention brings profit.
Conflict is not going away. We live in a time of enormous accelerating changes of all kinds: new technologies like artificial intelligence, economic dislocations, environmental disruptions, demographic shifts, just to name a few big ones. The pace shows no sign of slowing down but rather seems to be speeding up. More change naturally means more conflict.
