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Dave, thanks for joining us today, my friend.
Oh, my pleasure.
I'm happy to be here.
Yeah, it's great to have you.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Wow, okay.
Well, I started my legal career in Miami Florida in the courtrooms of downtown Miami Florida for about 10 years in the 1980s, which will give you a sense of how old I am.
And if you know anything about Miami, you know anything about the 80s you ever watched Miami Vice, then you know what the 80s was like in Miami.
It was, I'll put it this way, a great place to learn how to practice courtroom law.
Let's put it that way.
And no, I didn't do any criminal law.
It was all civil side, but there was a lot going on in Miami.
And in all ways, culturally and otherwise.
It was a terrific place to be, including watching and participating in the growth of the modeling and restaurant and tourism industry on South Beach.
Um, after 10 years in Miami I moved west because I was born in Seattle and uh moved back west and went back to school uh law school at Stanford.
Some of my friends teased me when I left Miami and said, okay, you know, Johnson's no good.
Uh, he had to go to law school twice, but it was the right thing for me.
I was doing an advanced degree, uh, thinking about becoming a professional academic.
I decided not to do that.
Finished my degree.
Went to work in Silicon Valley, which at the time was in the midst of the dot-com boom.
So it was a really good time to find work and get going there.
Worked in Silicon Valley in tech companies.
Some time of that was in law firms.
Most of it was in-house inside the companies.
I ended up GCing a few tech companies.
And then after about 10, 15 years of doing that, segwayed over to teaching.
And I was lucky enough to get a spot teaching at the law school at Stanford, where I teach negotiation and advanced negotiation of transactions particularly.
And I teach mostly law school and B school students, excuse me, in that course.
And about five years ago, I ventured over to the D school, what we call the D school.
It's technically Hasso Plotner Institute of Design at Stanford University.
And I say that, you know, with some admiration, because Hasso Plotner is a founder of SAP and he funded the construction of the Institute of Design, the D school at Stanford.
And I've always been interested in design.
I even worked I was a COO for a period of time at a company that did organizational design consulting in the Valley.
So it's been more than just avocational for me.
And ultimately it came around to putting together a course on negotiation by design, which is really the application of design thinking to negotiation and trying to explore and experiment with how design thinking might help negotiators do better and get better results.
This is great, Dave.
I think it's so fascinating to see how your journey has led you to where you are today and how you're able to bring a new spin on the approach to negotiation.
And I think the audience is going to get a lot out of this.
And for the listeners out there, I'll give you a quick roadmap.
So what we're going to do is, first we're going to talk about what design thinking is and how it applies to negotiation, then dave's going to give us two practical tools that we can use and then lastly, he's going to share the negotiator's matrix another great tool that we could use.
So let's start off with design thinking.
So, for those who who don't know what is design thinking, so there's a lot of different uh definitions from a lot of different designers about design thinking, but the generally accepted notion is design thinking is a process.
It's a process that has developed over decades and decades.
It became a method that started to be taught, particularly in engineering school, for engineers who were designing products and then also products plus services.
It's a way of thinking about solving problems.
And, by the way, software is a way software designing and software development is also a way of thinking about solving problems.
So there's some overlap there.
But design thinking emerged basically as a set of tools and set of instruction to help students uh improve their abilities as uh product engineers.
And then it grew because it found design thinking found uh homes in uh Other fields like computing.
Like I've brought it over to law, as have others.
But design thinking has also found its place in other disciplines beyond engineering, and computer science is one of them.
Education is another.
There's a great deal, of course, design going on in the last 20 years or so, that is, applying design thinking.
So what is the core of design thinking?
It is, first and foremost, approaching a problem that you're trying to solve by immersing yourself in the needs, wants and desires of the end user.
Now that sounds really obvious, but I can even tell you a story as to how not obvious that was.
When the dschool was first begun, about 15 years ago Uh, it was housed in a trailer on the outskirts of campus.
It was a new thing.
And one of the courses uh was taken by a student named Sarah uh Greenberg, who is now the director, the executive director of the D school.
She was an engineering student and she and her partner were supposed to do this user centered human centered design project and her partner. disappeared for about five days went off and built a prototype of the product that was the assignment and on the last day brought it back to her and said here here's the product here's the prototype he completely missed the whole idea the the proper process would be for the two students to go out and interview potential users find out what users wanted in the product and Use that information to back into prototypes that might then meet the needs of the user and build in that direction He on the other hand said I think I know what users want I'm gonna go off and build something that I think these users want and I'm gonna deliver that and that'll be the product so that story sort of encapsulates the shift that needed to happen in in engineering and in order to make design work better for the end user.
We call it the designer's mindset.
This is great.
And this story Dave, serves as a fantastic metaphor for a lot of the negotiations that I'm sure you've seen, as well as a professor and a practitioner as well.
Because a lot of times we get in our heads and we say I know what we need to do in order to be successful here.
So we say, hey, this is a problem.
And then we go about trying to solve the problem unilaterally, without considering what the other side needs.
Yeah.
And in this instance it will not be.
Half of your audience will not miss the fact that it was the male engineering student who went off and did it his way and then returned with the quote answer for the female student who then became the executive director of the D school.
So, you know, kudos to the to those of you in your audience that that caught that snippet.
Oh, man.
Very typical.
Very typical.
But there was a little mansplaining going on there and he didn't even know it.
Right.
But again, it's a great example.
And I love the idea of thinking of this as a process.
And so now, when we take design thinking and bringing it to negotiation, what changes in your approach with this new mentality?
So let me put a little more, hang a few more ornaments on the Christmas tree here.
The designer's mindset has evolved to now, at our school anyway, include something we call the essential design abilities.
There's right now eight of them.
Some people talk about 10 of them.
And I won't bore you with a list of them, but the ones that I like to think about relevant to negotiation is synthesizing information, communicating deliberately and navigating ambiguity.
And there's a fourth one in there that I'm forgetting at the moment.
I'll come back to it.
And so we have these specific abilities, that sort of categorize a skill set, each in their own silo.
Categorize a skill set that we put students through to sort of for lack of a better phrase improve their designer toolkit, ways of doing things.
So the place that we start with our course on negotiation by design is with navigating ambiguity.
And the reason is because we see that as sort of an overarching ability for negotiators.
Almost every negotiation I've ever been in, of any significance anyway, has developed in some way, shape or form, some ambiguity once you get into the negotiation.
And the reason is one party brings their set of information to the table.
The other party brings their set of information.
And no matter how much you prepare, you still are working from incomplete information.
So two things happen once you engage in the negotiation.
One is more information emerges either by me questioning you, you questioning me, et cetera, et cetera.
Or more often, somebody changes their mind a little bit.
The position they stated before the negotiation began changes.
Sometimes it's my position.
Sometimes it's their position.
Sometimes it's both positions.
And so with a change of positioning plus new information, ambiguity arises.
There's uncertainty in the space.
It's not necessarily bad.
It just is.
I think of it as, you know, increased fog.
Since I live near the coast, you know, we have different measurements for different levels of fog.
And so navigating ambiguity boils down to this, or teaching the skill of navigating.
Ambiguity is number one, making sure that we train ourselves not to be thrown off track or lose our sense of direction in the fog.
In other words, don't let the ambiguity throw us off.
Know it's coming, it's going to happen and be prepared for it.
Then step two is don't guess about what's going on, necessarily where things are in this ambiguous space.
I always return to what I know.
I return to the facts that are irrefutable, or facts that I'm really certain about myself, even if the other side doesn't agree with those facts.
And I resynthesize the information that I have.
I told a story the other day to class about a big negotiation I had.
And one of the things I did in an ambiguous situation I won't go into the details, but one of the things I did as soon as I started resynthesizing information once the negotiation began, was to go back and reread sections of the other company's SEC filings.
It's a public company.
They have to file with the SEC 10 Qs and 10 Ks, the quarterly and annual filings.
And lo and behold, these days they are signed under penalty of perjury by the CEO and CFO, which means they are reliable.
Anything in that document has to be accurate.
And they can't deny its accuracy.
Otherwise, they're saying their officers signed under penalty of perjury, and it's false.
So they have to basically admit those facts.
In negotiation, Having reliable facts is key.
So I go back and synthesize that information in a new way.
I reframe my argument based on the ambiguity that's arisen and the facts that I know.
And then I proceed back into the negotiation and I can start to put down markers to how, shall I say, map the ambiguous territory.
And suddenly the fog starts to lift.
When you can start planting markers with facts and and irrefutable arguments, then the fog starts to lift and you can process your way through and you see the horizon and you're back into a good space to continue the negotiation.
I've seen way too many negotiators get thrown off when things go sideways.
It could be an emotional outburst from the other side.
It could just be the new information, the surprise tactic, the entry of a surprise third party.
Whatever it might be.
But staying grounded and just navigating your way through.
That embracing the ambiguity and navigating your way through is one of the big skills that we teach to our students in the design class.
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This is great, Dave.
And one of the things that I like about this is the fact that we're seeing the blend of mindset and skillset here.
Because with the mindset, we're addressing the reality that, hey, negotiations are ambiguous.
There's no way for us to know everything that there is to possibly know about this situation, about the company and the person sitting in front of us.
It's just impossible.
And given that fact, ambiguity is going to come up from time to time.
So we can't be thrown off by those surprises.
We have to expect the unexpected.
And so by expecting it, we're going to be less thrown off.
And then the last part is we have the skill set to do something about it.
And so this goes into the process of actually negotiating, focusing on those facts and building from there and then finding ways to resolve the ambiguities that arise with the skills that the people learn in your class, for example.
Yeah.
And you know I'll be honest to put it on the table.
Another piece of this training, because we do teach.
I teach negotiation from a position of pure self-interest.
Now,
All negotiators, I believe, should be acting from a position of pure self-interest.
You don't want to make a bad deal.
One of the things I like to teach in class one seminar number one in negotiation is don't make a bad deal, because there are things like bullying persuasion, deal momentum, intimidation that can get a lot of people into trouble in making a bad deal, particularly when they're opposing a competitive and skilled negotiator.
Making a note to having a no deal is better than a bad deal.
And so.
The ability to survive.
Navigate a fog.
Remember, a fog bank could be intentionally created by the other side.
So having the ability to navigate through that fog is a skill in defense of another, a sharp player, a competitive player on the other side.
But since we're negotiating out of our self-interest, there are times when we might also be the ones generating the fog to see how our counterparty chooses to deal with it.
It may, in fact, disclose things about our counterparty that may prove that they may not be the partner that we want to do a business deal with, or it may prove that they are very adept at handling ambiguity and uncertainty and are more likely to be the kind of partner that we want in a business deal.
So it does almost everything you teach in negotiation cuts both ways.
It's either a defense against a really strong strategy on the other side or conversely, it's a really good strategy for us to try against the other side.
This is great and uh, as you were saying this, i was saying to myself this sounds like something that would be in in an old negotiated negotiation treatise, like sun tzu's art of war.
This is, this is really good stuff because again, i i like the fact that you address it from a position of pure self-interest i'm going to get back to that but also the fact that You're right.
We have the reality of bullies.
For example, we have Rebecca Zung, a fellow attorney, who came on the show talking about how to negotiate with narcissists and high conflict individuals.
Those people exist.
They are real.
But we have to remember that we have autonomy and control over our decision making process.
And we can't be forced into a bad deal.
We have to agree to a bad deal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I talk a lot about agency and making sure that we maintain conscious awareness of the depth breadth of our agency and our authority in a negotiation.
In a business negotiation, we have equal agency with anybody else we're negotiating with.
Even if they have more power, we still possess our agency.
If you're an employee in a company, your agency includes walking out the door and never coming back.
Now, that may have downsides for quitting your job.
But if a company is trying to bully you, you have to start thinking about your agency and not allowing yourself to be bullied just because the company has power over you in the nature of a paycheck and maybe a recommendation for a new job if you choose to leave.
There is a difference between power and leverage.
And I should probably drop this because I like this example so much.
It comes from Richard Schell's book. who I like a great deal, Bargaining for Advantage.
It's a great primer.
It's a great first book on negotiation.
If anybody's interested, Bargaining for Advantage.
But he tells the story this way, to discern the difference between power and leverage.
And we've all been through this in one way or another.
You're at home at dinner time and You have your six-year-old daughter at the dinner table, refusing to eat her vegetables.
Now, whether it's you or somebody else, the parent sits down and says honey, I want you to eat your vegetables.
And she says, no.
Well, in this situation, the parent has all the power.
I mean, all the power.
The roof over the head, the clothing, the safety, feeding, taking care of, et cetera, et cetera.
All the power over a six-year-old child.
Undeniable. but they cannot force the little girl to eat her vegetables.
The little girl has the leverage.
She has the agency and she's exercising it.
She has the choice whether to eat the vegetables, be a good girl, do what her parents tell her, or not.
Eat the vegetables and see what happens.
And then it's up to the parents to either punish or just walk away from it.
But that's the difference between having power and having leverage.
And I use this often in talking with startup companies.
You say, how do I negotiate with Google and Apple?
They're the 800-pound gorilla in this space.
And they say, well, find your leverage.
Find your leverage, just like the little girl.
And she ends up getting an extra dessert or an extra hour of TV time in exchange for eating her vegetables.
Her parents will give it to her every time.
And so leverage works.
I love that example.
And you're absolutely right.
And I think again in our negotiations.
It forces us to think a little bit more creatively, because it's easy to get into that mindset of learned helplessness where we say well, I'm up against the big dogs here and I don't have a leg to stand on.
So I just have to accept the fact that they're going to, they're going to punish me in this negotiation, but if you think creatively, you can find a unique source of leverage that you can use to get a little bit more at the table.
Yeah i, i've heard it's a common story, but i've heard uh it's, it's probably uh sort of a given out there.
Women will say that when it comes to cars, buying cars or getting cars repaired And the data backs this up.
They just can't get as good a deal as men can.
And that's a sad truth.
But part of the reason is the bias that those businesses have against women, because they know they can take advantage of them and bully them.
Although they tend to bully in a nice way because they've learned that that works, but it's still bullying.
Let's be clear about that.
So the thing for anybody who's in that position, male or female, needs to do is develop alternatives, because the alternatives give you leverage.
And you know.
The alternative could be quotes from three different shops while you're talking to the fourth shop, or it could be saying you have quotes from two or three different shops even if you don't, while you're negotiating with the fourth shop.
Just using, finding leverage, using leverage will almost always get you a better deal.
Absolutely.
No, those are great examples.
And with the time we have remaining, because I feel like we could have spent the rest of the time talking about that, which means Dave, you know you're going to be back on to explore some more of those ideas.
Let's move to the second part of the interview where we're talking about the practical tools.
And the two tools that you wanted to focus on were the empathy map, number one, and then the why-how lattice.
So let's start off with the empathy map.
Yeah, so one way that we this tool is intended to do what I spoke about earlier, which is to take lawyers and and other negotiators and break them out of their mindset of how am I analyzing this case and get them in the preparation of a negotiation.
How do I analyze this case?
How does my client see this case?
This is how we're going to go into the negotiation, or a mediation even, and get them to think about how the other side views the case.
Now sometimes, if it's a big case, the team will appoint a devil's advocate.
Tell us the other side's argument.
That doesn't get it done, in my view.
That's only part of the answer.
You can use that tool.
The empathy map is a tool that's designed to force us to walk through the steps to discern ultimately what we believe, develop a hypothesis for what we believe is truly motivating the other side of the negotiation.
And basically you can envision it this way.
Imagine a bullseye, three concentric rings, large, middle, small.
So what we do is we use the outer circle first, and we call that the say slash do circle.
When you sit down and prepare, you write down, we use post-it notes at the d.school.
We love our post-it notes and they do work in this situation, but you can do this on your desk.
Just draw the circles on a piece of paper and write down in the outer circle what you know the other side has said or done.
And if it's a company, you know this company has acquired X patents or X companies in the last one to five years.
The CEO has said these things in public statements or these things they have the company has said in their public filings.
Just what you're doing is you're capturing data.
You're capturing information that's highly reliable from the other side and you're getting as much data, as many data points, as you can in that outer circle.
Now you can set the data aside for the moment.
You're going to draw inferences.
You're going to make reasonable inferences from those data to try and figure out what the individual decision makers at the company this is probably somebody in the c-suite who's going to be at the negotiation table, one of the key decision makers, if not the ultimate decision maker, an influencer so sometimes they'll send the gc to negotiate.
The gc will go back to the cfo ceo and say this is what's going on, we should do this, we shouldn't do that.
And try and figure out what that decision maker or that influencer is thinking and feeling about this negotiation by inferring those emotional states from the data.
So if it's a company and I gave the example the other night if it's a company that has filed a 10-Q that has showed serious cuts in personnel,
Well, I can infer pretty easily from that that they are reducing either innovation work RD, or product development work, or sales work.
But I can draw inferences about what the company plan is based on some of these facts.
I don't know for sure, but I can draw reasonable inferences.
So then in the inner circle, I'll write out six or eight solid inferences in the middle circle.
And then in the bullseye, I'm going to put anywhere between one to three motivations.
I'm going to distill from my inferences a hypothesis.
These are the motivations of this counterparty, in this instance, a company that's coming to the table.
What are the motivations?
What do they really, really want that they may not be telling us?
They may be telling this great story about a deal that's going to go five years, eight years, downstream.
They're going to do this partnership with us.
They're either going to be a vendor or we're going to do a strategic partnership, whatever.
But That story is what the story they want us to believe.
What I want to know is what do I really think their motivations are?
Because everything in a negotiation emanates from the true motivations of the individuals at the table, across the table from you.
Now, those hypotheses might not be 100% accurate.
I may find things in the negotiation that make me shift my assessment of my hypothesis or let go of it altogether or shift to another hypothesis.
But this process which you can train yourself to do with the empathy map and then, after five or ten times, you don't need the map anymore.
The idea is to create a schematic in your brain where, every time you prepare for a negotiation, you walk through the steps.
Let me look at the facts.
Let me infer some of the emotions of the people at the table and then let me drive down and figure out what I think their motivations are.
And then from those motivations you can shape a strategy to work with those motivations, either directly, straight on or maybe from an angle, and probably improve your ability to either get a deal or get a better deal in the negotiation.
I think this is great because we always say empathize, empathize, empathize.
But first of all, what does that really mean?
And even if you get the definition of empathy where, in the context of a negotiation, trying to get a better understanding of how they see, think and feel about the situation,
Okay, great.
I understand that theoretically.
Now, how do I do that?
Because it doesn't always come naturally to people.
And I really like the fact that this empathy map gives us a systematic approach to empathizing on an effective and strategic level.
So the next thing is the why.
How lattice?
Because it pivots right off of the motivations from the empathy map.
So what I'm going to do is look at the motivations that I've developed in the empathy map, pick one And I'm going to park it basically let's call it in the center of the sheet of paper.
I'm going to go in a couple of directions in this sheet of paper.
So take your eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper, write the motivation smack in the middle.
I did one of these last night and just it happened to be needs greater respect from colleagues, was the motivation of an employee in an employee situation, employee conflict situation.
So now you go in two directions why and how?
So you start by going asking this the question why does this person again?
We're in this person's mind, not our mind, we don't have to agree with them, but we're, we're expanding and extrapolating from uh, their point of view.
So why does this person feel like they need more uh, more respect?
And we answer the question, we go up a level and we write an answer.
Well, because she's the only woman in a male-dominated uh division and this happened to be software engineering.
So it happened to be true.
Thank you very much, susan fowler.
Um, and then you ask The next question above that why is that the issue?
And you go up higher because the company itself is biased in its hiring.
And you take steps up to answer, why does she feel that way?
And then you go down below and you ask how.
And so, from respect gaining more respect, you drop down one and you ask how can we accomplish her getting more respect?
And then you hypothesize an answer.
Well, we can hire more women into the division, or we could pay her equal or more than the men, or we could give her perks that balance out the fact that, you know, if she's a woman in a cube farm of 20 men, maybe we should give her a private office where she can spend a few hours a day, just get away from the harassment that she's suffering and is documented, that sort of thing.
So you ladder up with the question why, you ladder down with question how.
Then you look at all of those responses and you can pull them together.
We used to call it the why how ladder, and then i decided to call it the lattice, because You take those results and then you start to build a lattice, which is, you know, you can envision a lattice of most any kind, which is the beginning of a strategy.
Based on the motivation, it starts to create a structure for the strategy of why she wants it and how you can make it happen, including what can my client, what can I do if I'm the GC in the company?
Or what can my client If I'm outside counsel for the company?
What can my client do to help her achieve the answers to how and have those things meet the why?
And so now you've developed from just basic facts at the outer ring of the empathy map, you've taken yourself all the way to a fully human centered, user centered evaluation of what you and your client can do to help solve the real issue that you believe is being brought to the table by your counterparty.
I love this.
And I think this is just a great example of design thinking applied to negotiation, because it's so systematic and you can see it's a very clear process.
And some people might say, I'm not empathetic.
I'm not creative.
Well, this gave you a very simple way to hack empathy and come up with creative solutions.
I really like this.
I like that.
I've never used that term before.
I am going to steal it. mercilessly right now.
It is yours, my friend.
Let me add this, which is using the tools.
And I've seen this firsthand.
And I've seen this firsthand with students who come into class who say, I'm not creative.
I don't really feel like I have a lot of empathy.
They use the tool.
You know what?
It develops their empathy.
We all have it.
Some people express it more than others.
Some people access it more than others.
Some people don't use it a whole lot, but we all have it.
Unless you're, you know, a stone cold sociopath.
And I hear tell there are a few of them running around the states today, but I just don't pay attention to them.
Exactly.
They don't exist.
And with the time we have left, let's touch on the negotiators matrix and see how, how deep we can go, because I have Joe Navarro in the in the waiting room.
OK, I don't want to step on Joe's toes.
OK, so quickly, the idea of a two by two matrix comes to me from Intel.
I had a guest speaker at my class, once the general counsel of Intel, the big semiconductor company that was founded by Andy Grove.
Andy Grove was famous when he started the company as the founder CEO for never using his founder CEO office.
He made it his mission to sit in the cube farm with all of his engineers.
He also came up with what they call Grove-isms or Andy-isms.
One of them one of many that is still around today is If you have something technical that you want to explain to people and have them understand it, you should be able to reduce it to a two by two matrix.
So I came up with the idea of the designer's negotiation by design matrix, let's call it that.
And, if you can imagine, a matrix, and this is going to apply particularly to lawyers.
So watch out, because I am a little bit critical of the legal education system as it is right now.
So imagine a two by two box.
OK, the upper left quadrant in this particular matrix is the word logic.
And so above that box on the horizontal axis is the word reasoning.
And on the vertical next to that box is the word data.
So the quadrant sets up as the merger of reasoning and data gets you logic, and that's where lawyers live.
We are trained from the jump to use information and we get trained in the case method and we read a lot of cases and we look for the facts of the case and then we reason and apply the rule of the law of the case and we try and arrive at the result.
We criticize the opinion if we got it right, etc etc etc.
That's where lawyers live in that upper left-hand quadrant, and my hypothesis is there are three other quadrants of ways that we could think about problems in the world, including but not limited as lawyers including, but not limited to negotiators that can expand how we think about problems and improve our results.
So, from that left-hand quadrant, if you take data which is in the vertical upper left And you go all the way across to the upper right hand quadrant and you put over the top,
So next to reasoning on the vert, on the horizontal sorry next to reasoning to the right is empathy.
So the right hand quadrant is empathy and data.
And I put heightened awareness.
In that box, heightened awareness is my phrase for the athlete's notion of being in the zone.
Heightened awareness is my personal takeaway.
If you've ever listened to David Foster Wallace's commencement famous commencement speech called This is Water
And I recommend it to anybody who just look it up on YouTube.
There are excerpts of it and you can find the text online as well.
2005 commencement speech by David Foster Wallace.
And the big takeaway from his speech is that we have a choice about how we want to see the world.
And he says it takes a heightened sense of awareness of the world around us to be able to discern all the possibilities in the world, so that we can then exercise our agency and make choice.
So I dilute that, not dilute that, I distill that down to heightened awareness is in the upper right hand quadrant.
Now go with me to the lower left quadrant, underneath the vertical of reasoning and the horizontal.
Now we're going to put intuition.
So If you take reasoning and intuition, that quadrant is the why how lattice that we just discussed.
We're using some intuition to make inferences and we're using some reasoning in building out the, building out the how to solve the problem and why the person wants the problem solved in a certain way.
That leaves the fourth quadrant, the far right lower corner.
That is then empathy and intuition.
That's the empathy map.
It's the, the, the emphasis on empathy and intuition to infer a motivation for the other side.
So you have logic, upper left hand corner, heightened awareness, upper right hand corner.
So we start, I think we all start sort of in, Home turf, upper left hand corner logic.
I'm pointing at you and I shouldn't be.
I apologize.
It feels like I'm pointing at you.
Logic.
You shift over to heightened awareness to improve your ability to see the world larger.
You go down to the empathy map, which is a tool that allows you to see your counterparty or your partner or an employee or anybody that you're dealing with in a more empathetic way.
And then over to the left.
You use the why-how lattice to apply reasoning and intuition to developing a solution for whatever the problem might be.
That is, the negotiators lawyers, businesspersons design matrix for expanding your ways of thinking about solving problems.
This is great.
This is great.
And again, I like the fact that that This is a tool that can be used for lawyers and negotiators everywhere to have a more holistic approach to negotiation, because I think naturally some of us will be more inclined to find ourselves in one part of the matrix more so than others.
And so this is a good check to put on ourselves to consider other positions as well.
So I think that's really important.
Yeah.
Well, when we find ourselves in the matrix, we all know that Kwame is the one.
Thank you, my friend.
I think that's a good place to end, Dave.
So I appreciate this.
And thank you so much for coming on the show.
And before you go, can you let the listeners know about how they can get in touch with you, learn more about your work and your courses too?
Yeah, if you go to the d school website, uh just google stanford d school, you'll see my bio and, i think, uh an email.
Uh, you can reach me at in and you can.
And if you're interested in design at all that, that website alone.
We have a public library.
It is a wealth of information, including videos that you're free to use.
A lot of the material is uh, uh copyright, uh common copyright and um usable with attribution.
So feel free to do a deep dive on that website.
That's great.
Dave, thank you so much, my friend.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Take care.
Thank you.
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