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Why negotiation strategies fail – and what to do when they do
Joshua N. Weiss, co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University, sat down with Anna Cajot to discuss why negotiations fail, the psychology behind failure, and how leaders and negotiators can turn failures into a source of learning.
Rapid read:
- Negotiations fail before they start when leaders mistake agreement for success. Effective negotiation is about achieving objectivesânot closing deals at all costsâand requires clarity on goals and a clear walkâaway point.
- Rigidity and bias undermine outcomes. Overâreliance on fixed plans, unchallenged assumptions, and cognitive biases (e.g., sunkâcost entrapment) reduce adaptability and lead to value erosion; strong negotiators plan multiple pathways and actively manage bias.
- Failure is a learning asset, not a liability. Highâperforming organizations normalize negotiation failure, separate shame from outcomes, and systematically analyse, unlearn, and reâengageâbuilding resilience, adaptability, and better future results.
Many leaders equate a successful negotiation with reaching an agreement, but according to Weiss, the purpose of a negotiation is to meet your objective as best as possible.
1 – Misunderstanding the purpose of a negotiation
Many leaders equate a successful negotiation with the reaching of an agreement, but according to Weiss, the purpose of a negotiation is to meet your objective as best as possible. Sometimes, he said, that means walking away.
âIf you are really clear on your objective going into a negotiation, then the question shifts from how do we reach agreement, to what is the best way to meet your objective? It is important to be clear internally about the point at which you wonât continue. If you donât know what that walkway point is, then you already have a weak negotiation strategy,â said Weiss.
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2 – Lack of flexibility and planning the correct way
A well-prepared strategy is important, but an overreliance on a specific plan that comes out of that strategy or an unwillingness to deviate when that plan is not working can spell trouble.Â
âIf you walk into a negotiation with a very specific plan, then that plan can sometimes take you down the wrong roadâ, Weiss said. Itâs often the turning point at which people give away more than they should, thinking a deal must be reached, but rigid strategies create blind spots, and when conditions shift, as they inevitably do, negotiators need a contingency plan. The goal can remain the same, but you need to develop multiple pathways to get there and that is how you plan best. âYou need to run through all of the different dimensions of the negotiation and have a number of different avenues that you can take that process down in case one approach is blocked. As you do this it is also important to challenge your own assumptions of what is possible,â he continued. âSometimes we limit our thinking unnecessarily. With a contingent approach that happens much less.â
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3 – Limited awareness of bias
Bias is something we must deal with in negotiation, and it has the potential to be an inherently harmful dimension that can lead to unfair practices, discrimination, and distorted decision-making. So, how do we manage this significant challenge?
According to Weiss, the first thing you need to do is become aware of the many biases that covertly impact us. One example is the psychological notion of entrapment, when often, leaders fail to step down from a failing negotiation due to sunken costs or concerns about ego. Once we become aware of our own biases, we need to create mitigating steps that prevent them from derailing a negotiation. If you often find yourself entrapped for example, you should draw clear lines from the beginning of the negotiation which define the conditions in which the approach is no longer working in your favor. As Weiss states, this is âthe walkaway pointâ. Biases need to be proactively managed which requires a level of self-awareness.
4 – Fear of failure
Failure in negotiation is not an exception or a rarity, but despite this, organizations treat it as something to be avoided at all costs. When conducting research for his book, Getting Back to the Table, Weiss uncovered three typical responses to failure: 1. Blame and rationalisation – blaming others to preserve our reputation, 2. Anxiety – allowing a bad negotiation experience to impact future endeavours, and 3. Learning – genuinely learning the right lessons from a significant setback or failure.
The aim of the book was to bring realism to the conversation about negotiation. He said: âFailure is one potential outcome of negotiation; it happens quite a bit and is not simply an exception. The more important question is, what do we do with failure when it happens? Organisations that do not want to admit failure often wonât talk about it, so people hide it. And as a result, they wonât learn from it. The best organisations I have worked with over the years take the opposite approach. They go right into the heart of what happened and figure out how to learn from those negotiations, so they do not happen again. A big part of what these organizations do is separate shame from failure so people can openly grapple with what happened. Resilience and growth are both needed and key components of becoming better negotiators.â
So, how can organizations learn from their failure?
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Denial leads to extreme action and drives poor decision-making, whereas acceptance leads to a productive re-evaluation of what went wrong.
5 steps to better negotiations Â
1. Acceptance and determining the magnitude
Acknowledge and accept the failure. Denial leads to extreme action and drives poor decision-making, whereas acceptance leads to a productive re-evaluation of what went wrong.
In addition, negotiators need to assess the magnitude of the failure. When people experience failure, they often want to know how bad it is. This is why Weiss created a magnitude scale, to help people think this through. The scale ranges from one to four, with one being a setback where you can see a clear path back to the table, and four being an outright failure with damaged relationships. This negotiation may never be recovered (or at least not for quite some time).
2. Analyze what really went wrong
âFollowing a failure, most negotiators do not know how to analyze what really happened. They think they do but they often miss critical elements of what happenedâ, added Weiss who also speaks with his clients about the forest and the trees. This, he explains, means taking a big picture view of what happened – the type of failure experienced and why – and then looking at the trees, the critical moments or moves and turns of a negotiation. These are the specific interactions where things began to fall apart. As Weiss concludes, âYou need to be clear about where the breakdown happened so you can learn from it and see how far from the table you are.
Step three is lesson time â but, as Weiss notes, not all lessons are correct or transferable.
3. Drawing the correct lessonsÂ
Step three is lesson time but, as Weiss notes, not all lessons are the correct ones or transferable. Connecting to the psychoanalytic process of transference âpeople often want to apply lessons from a failed negotiation to all negotiations in the future. Sometimes that makes sense and sometimes it doesnât. People donât always account for the differences between the previous negotiation and the next, for example, in the previous negotiation there may have been multiple parties and in the upcoming one; there are only two or, there was a power asymmetry in the previous negotiation and not in the upcoming process. The overarching point is to recognize the similarities and differences from negotiation to negotiation and see if the lessons are applicable.â
4. Relearning Â
The hardest part of the process is turning the mirror on yourself and considering what you might need to relearn. As Weiss quotes the management guru Peter Drucker, âIf you want to learn something new, you must unlearn something old.â In many cases, underlying weaknesses lay in outdated assumptions or entrenched habits that are no longer serving a negotiator well. As but one example, Weiss speaks about unlearning the notion of compromise, defined as the giving up of something of great importance, and replacing it with creative problem-solving, where a focus is alternatively on meeting underlying interest.
5. Returning to the table
If there is a way back to the table, re-engagement should be intentional and informed. This final step is about rerouting back to the table with a plan of how to renew talks, what different approaches need to be taken, what the learnings were, and how to apply those to the new discussions. And if getting back to the table is not possible, stepping back and really learning from the process for the future should be the goal.
Part science, part art
âNegotiation is part science and part art. The science is the preparation; the art is the noticing. When actions don’t match words and other key indicators, a process may not be succeeding. Too often, people push past those warning signs; they don’t stop and check for other behaviours or markers. We are not intrinsically good at picking up on nonverbals, and when people miss those clues, it leads to a collapse of the negotiationâ, Weiss said.
Effective negotiation is not defined by whether an agreement is reached, but by how well it serves your goals. As Weiss highlights, the ability to walk away, adapt strategies, challenge biases, and embrace failure as a learning opportunity is what separates strong negotiators from the rest. When negotiations break down, the response matters more than the outcome itself. By accepting failure, analysing its causes, extracting the right lessons, and unlearning outdated approaches, individuals and organisations can rebuild with greater clarity and confidence.
Joshua Weiss will be a keynote speaker at the 2026 Negotiation Conference on 22â23 October in Zurich.
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