Dr. Joshua Weiss is a leading negotiation and conflict resolution expert. He is co‑founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and President of Negotiation Works, where he advises governments, businesses, and organizations around the world.
Ahead of the N‑Conference 2026 in Zurich, wherethe central theme is “Failure Is Not an Option,” one of the most important contributions will come from Dr. Joshua N. Weiss. He will speak about something many leaders avoid discussing: failure in negotiation, how it happens, and how to learn from it.
Dr. Joshua Weiss is a leading negotiation and conflict resolution expert. He is co‑founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and President of Negotiation Works, where he advises governments, businesses, and organizations around theworld.
In this interview, N‑Conference Director Anna Cajot interviews Dr. Weiss about why negotiations fail, the psychology behind failure, and how leaders can turn failures into a source of learning.
Anna Cajot: Thank you for taking the time for this interview, Joshua. I work with many executives who always put tremendous emphasis on strategy in negotiations, yet negotiations still fail. What do most leaders misunderstand about the psychological aspect of failure in negotiations?
Joshua Weiss: It’s a pleasure to talk with you, Anna. In general, strategy is always important, but it doesn’t save the day every time. That’s because we’re always working with incomplete information, so a strategy has to be adaptable and flexible in nature.
It has to be something you can work with and shift with as the negotiation changes. When you’re preparing, you should really be thinking in terms of contingency planning rather than something very specific with a concrete plan. We never know everything that’s going to happen in a negotiation, which means our strategy has to have a clear end goal but has to be loosely structured for the unexpected moves and turns of the process.
From a psychological point of view, most people are very unaware of all the biases that impact their decision‑making, and that is a core reason why people run into problem and strategies can fail despite the best of intentions. There are biases, like the self‑serving bias, where we view ourselves as always right and the other side as the problem. Or the psychological problem of entrapment where we start down a course of action that begins to fail and instead of changing course we don’t shift from our strategy because our ego gets tied toit and we don’t want to look bad. People don’t account for these things and, importantly, they don’t learn about the different biases that impact them. As a result, biases take us down roads we don’t want to go, without us even realizing it.
Another reason strategies fail is due to our response to challenges or struggles. As I was researching my book Getting Back to the Table, it became very clear to me that there were three typical responses to failure. The first is blame and rationalization: we blame others in order to preserve our reputation. The second is that we experience a tremendous amount of anxiety from that failure. It’s a really bad experience and we don’t want to repeat it, and that absolutely impacts our approach to negotiation in the future. If we’ve failed once, and it is a really bad failure, it can be really debilitating. It can be challenging to let go of that and realize that the next negotiation doesn’t actually have anything to do with the previous one, but psychologically it weighs on us.
The third response, which is really what the book is all about and I think is essential, is: how do you genuinely learn from a significant setback or failure? One of the reasons I went down this road is that in trainings people would say, “That negotiation was a really great experience,” and when I asked them to tell me more, I realized they were missing a lot of the important lessons. They weren’t digging in the way they needed to. I saw my job as pushing them to make sure they really understood what had happened and what they could take away for the future. To learn the right lessons, not just any lessons.
Anna Cajot: In our negotiation concept, we emphasize that walking away is a deliberate strategy. It must be prepared and discussed thoroughly with your team before entering the negotiation. Yet many leaders I work with still view walking away as a personal or professional failure. How do you see it?
Joshua Weiss: I think people see it as a failure because of how they define what they're supposed to do in negotiation. If you ask people, "What's the purpose of negotiation?" many will say, "to reach agreement with the other side." From my perspective, that's not the purpose of negotiation.
The purpose of negotiation is to meet your objective as best as possible. If you can do that through an agreement, then it makes sense to proceed in that way. But if you can do better elsewhere, which of course is the whole concept of BATNA, then it is actually a smart negotiation strategy to walk away. Negotiation is one way of meeting your objective; of course, there are others.
If you do your homework before the negotiation and you're really clear, "This is our objective going into this situation," then the question is: what's the best way to meet that objective? If it means walking away to something else, then that is the right strategy. It's also important to lay that out and be clear internally about the point at which you won’t continue.
One big failing is that people still view walking away as a failure and don't want to consider it or talking it through. But if you don't do that with all avenues considered, you don't know what that walkaway point is or when you really should be choosing that approach.
Anna Cajot: When negotiations still fail despite good intentions, what are the main reasons you see? Is it mainly poor preparation and inflexible strategies, strong relationship dynamics with partners, or something else?
Joshua Weiss: Part of it is preparation - people aren't preparing properly. They're preparing in a manner that feels good and gives them a sense of comfort. If you walk in with a very specific plan, that plan can often take you down the wrong road. Further, if your plan shows signs of not working and you have not thought through other possibilities you run into trouble. That is when people make their biggest mistakes and give away more than they should – thinking they should just to reach a deal – one that they will come to regret. What people really should be doing is engaging in contingency planning where they still have a clear end goal but a number of different ways of getting to the same end. This process flexibility is really critical to avoid failure.
The other problem people run into is they're not really thinking through all of the different dimensions of the negotiation. They're not challenging their assumptions about what's possible. In the book, I talk about seven kinds of failure that you can experience in negotiation. Let me give you a sense of what these look like.
One kind of failure is what I call "Slipping Through your Fingers" where an agreement was very possible but other aspects got in the way. For example, imagine you and I are negotiating, we can see there's a zone of possible agreement, but I do something that insults you. I don't recognize that, I don't notice the intangible dimension that's going on, and I don't see that you're bothered and upset by it. I'm failing to recognize from an emotionally intelligent point of view that there are other things going on, and the deal ultimately falls apart.
Another kind of failure is called “What Were You Thinking”. In this example you agree to something worse than your BATNA or reach some kind of agreement regardless of whether it meets your objectives. Often when people do this they walk out of the room and metaphorically ‘kick themselves’ (AKA experience immediate regret) because they know the agreement they reached was a bad one and did not meet their objective, but now they are stuck.
So part of it is preparation and part of it is a lack of awareness of the different ways you can fail. When I laid out these seven ways of failing in negotiation, my goal was to help people pay attention to those dangers and notice, "Hey, this is one way I can fail and I should really be conscious of that," so they're not falling into that trap.
Finally on this issue, I would also go back to the psychological realm. So many people dig in and their ego becomes an incredibly important part of the negotiation. We often talk about face-saving and face preservation in certain cultures, but years ago I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review making the case that face-saving was part of every negotiation and you really need to be paying attention to that dimension. Nobody wants to be embarrassed at the end of a negotiation so you have to be very careful there.
In the end, that's the art and science of negotiation. The science is the preparation; the art is noticing when actions aren't matching words and other key indicators a process may not be succeeding. Too often people who aren't trained just push past those warning signs. They don't stop and say, "Wait a minute, this person just reacted in a certain way that's telling me something and there may be a problem. Maybe I should pause and check in with them." A lot of people are not good at picking up on nonverbals; they miss those clues and that leads to a collapse of the process.
Anna Cajot: In your book you developed a framework to help leaders analyze their failures and avoid repeating them. Could you briefly explain that framework step by step and how leaders could employ it to analyze past failures?
Joshua Weiss: Certainly. Happy to do that but let me first just say that when people experience a setback or failure the first thing they want to know is how bad it is. So, I created a magnitude scale to help people think that through. Number one on the magnitude scale is a setback where you can clearly see how to get back to the table. Two is a setback, but it's harder to see how you might get back and it will require some thinking. Three is between a setback and a failure – you're not quite sure if you can get back to the table and if you do it will require a lot of creative thinking. Four is an outright failure: some negotiations fail, relationships are damaged, you're not getting back to the table anytime soon, and you have to understand that.
OK so in terms of the framework, the very first step, which may sound strange but is really important, is accepting that the setback or failure has happened. Too often people don't do that. They are in denial, they double down, they think, "If I keep throwing money at this or take some other extreme action, it will turn around." If you don't accept your current reality you end up like a backed-up sink: nothing gets through and you can’t advance the process. What you need to say to yourself is, "This is not what I intended, this is not where I want to be, but this is where I am, and I have to deal with it." Face the cold hard facts.
Step two is doing a proper analysis of what happened. In trainings, when people tell me about a negotiation that did not go well and want to understand what happened, I begin to discuss it with them. What I typically come to understand is they usually don't know how to analyse what happened properly. I talk about the forest and the trees: taking a big-picture look at what happened: what type of failure did you experience and why; and then start looking at the trees, the critical moments or moves and turns in the negotiation. Those are the specific interactions where things began to fall apart. You want to be very clear about where the breakdown occurred so you can learn from it and see if there is a path back to the table.
Step three is learning the right lessons from what happened, not just any lessons. People often say, "That failure was difficult but it was a great learning experience." When I probe a bit deeper and ask what they took away, they are often missing many critical lessons. As a result, we have to go deeper in our analysis.
I find that many people have one primary approach to negotiation and want to apply the lesson from a failed negotiation to most, if not all, of their negotiations in the future. Sometimes that makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. People don't always account for differences between the previous negotiation and the next one: for example, in the previous negotiation there may have been multiple parties and in an upcoming one there are only two parties or there was a power asymmetry in the previous negotiation and not one in the upcoming process. The overarching point is to recognize the similarities and differences from negotiation to negotiation and whether lessons are applicable from one process to another.
This problem connects to a psychoanalytic concept called transference, where people apply previous experiences consciously and subconsciously. The subconscious realm is where our attitudes and approaches reside without us realizing it and can get in the way. We might say to ourselves: "This is how I learned to negotiate, so I will always do it this way." That's why we need to check whether we're applying the right lessons or taking ourselves down the wrong road again.
Step four may well be the hardest for many: I ask people to look candidly at the weaknesses they have in negotiation. What are the things they don’t do well? We all have them. Maybe you get anxious in high-stress environments; then you have to work on that, "go to the balcony," and so on. To get at this I ask people: What are the foundations of your negotiation strategy? What principles guide you? Then if you look at a failure in a negotiation, can you trace it back to one or more of those principles? Maybe many executives have a win-lose mindset. That might work in a one-off negotiation, but not in the long term when you need to negotiate with the same people and companies over time. Then I ask people to actively unlearn those things and replace them with something better, perhaps more creative and innovative. In the book, as but one example, I talk about unlearning the notion of compromise and replacing it with creative problem-solving.
Peter Drucker, the legendary management consultant, said, "If you want to learn something new, you have to unlearn something old," and that really struck a chord with me. I kept seeing that the core elements of people's approach to negotiation were part of the problem. People were rushing to compromise before they knew whether they needed to or not and whether compromise was still going to meet their objectives. All of this is not easy because it requires turning the mirror on yourself and asking, "What are the most important aspects of my approach to negotiation, and are they still serving me well, or are they outdated?"
Finally, the last step is taking all of that and thinking about going back to the table. If it's a setback, how do I re-engage? How do I renew talks? What do I need to do differently? What did I learn, and how do I apply it? If it was an outright failure, how do I really learn from it going forward?
Anna Cajot: Organizations often seem reluctant to discuss failed negotiations openly. How does this reluctance affect their ability to learn, and what mindset should leaders adopt instead?
Joshua Weiss: What I'm really trying to do is separate shame from failure. Failure is one outcome of negotiation. It happens. None of us are aiming for that. But it does. If you look at peace processes, as one category of negotiations, failure is the norm. It's not the exception. You go through 15-20 processes before you ultimately reach an agreement.
If you're working on hard negotiations, this is going to happen. And the question is: what do you do with it? Organizations often don't want to admit failure. They won't talk about it, and as a result they don't learn from it.
The best organizations that I have worked with over the years basically say, "Look, we obviously weren't setting out to do this. None of us wants to fail. But as an organization, if we can really learn from these things and what happened, then we become a much better negotiating organization." And that is the key. Those organizations are focused on growth and they know one of the best sources of that are things that don’t work out.
My book Getting Back to the Table came out of a conversation with somebody who said, "I love your book Real World Negotiations, but why did you write about successes? We all learn so much more from our failures." And when I looked around, I noticed there was not much written about the subject. We know we learn a lot from things that don't go well, they stay with us, they're very memorable. Yet we still avoid talking about them. And that, to me, is the real problem.
Anna Cajot: You end your book with the Japanese art of Kintsugi. How does that image relate to failure in negotiation?
Joshua Weiss: Kintsugi is all about imperfection. It’s about repairing broken pottery with precious metals and highlighting the cracks, rather than hiding them. When we own our imperfections, something powerful happens.
I can’t tell you how many times, after giving talks on this subject, people have come up to me and said how refreshing it is to hear someone talk openly about their failures. My view is, it is what it is, we can’t change history or the past. If we want to learn and grow, we have to really learn from what happened.
With Kintsugi, you almost wear your failures as a badge of honor. Many companies and executives recoil at that idea. But they have to find ways to encourage people to adopt this mindset and to share when something didn’t go well and how to prevent it in the future. If you don’t have that conversation, it will happen again. That’s the problem: executives may not want the world to know about failures, and I understand that, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be analysing and assessing them internally to make sure the same mistakes don’t recur. The only way I know to do that is to talk about them candidly and encourage people to bring these issues to the forefront.
About Joshua Weiss
Dr. Joshua N. Weiss is a negotiation and conflict resolution expert, co‑founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University, Senior Fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and President of Negotiation Works, where he trains and advises companies, governments, and non‑profits worldwide. He is the author of several books on negotiation, including Real World Negotiations and Getting Back to the Table: 5 Steps to Reviving Stalled Negotiations.
Getting Back to the Table: 5 Steps to Reviving Stalled Negotiations
In his latest work on failure in negotiation, Joshua explores seven forms of failure, a four‑level magnitude scale, and a practical framework for analysing setbacks and failures so leaders can extract real lessons, unlearn unhelpful habits, and return to the negotiation table more effectively.
Learn more Joshua’s work: https://www.joshuanweiss.com/