Trust Me. I Am a Negotiator
Some years ago, I was teaching a management course in the Far East. My words were to be consecutively interpreted to the class so I had to send all my material for translation in advance. One of the exercises I used was a version of the ‘Prisoner ’s Dilemma’, a game where the participants’ integrity is challenged and where they can be tempted to try to gain advantage over other participants by saying one thing and then doing something else to ‘win’ the game. The teaching point is that, once someone acts without integrity, trust is prejudiced and for the rest of the game no-one else will trust them, whatever their assurances might be. One of my interpreters said to me that she thought this game couldn’t work because it was ‘not logical’. A day later, as she watched the fury of the participants at the first person who had ‘cheated’: one venerable lady was standing on her chair and pointing accusingly at the perpetrator saying I know not what, but doing so with great Vietnamese venom, my interpreter said, ‘It does work’.
‘Yes’, I said, ‘that’s because we humans are not necessarily always logical, especially when we trust someone and their actions make us think it has been misplaced.’
I was reminded of this a week or so ago when a friend telephoned me to ask some advice. He had resigned from his job to join a competitor of his company for a substantial increase in salary and the potential of much greater career prospects. He told me that his boss had greeted the news frostily and had made frequent references to ensure that he should “tidy those projects up before you go”. He had served all but two weeks of his three-month notice period when, to his surprise, his boss had called him and told him that his present employer would