We've all been taught never go into a negotiation without your batna, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

But what if your batna is actually the very thing stopping you from reaching your best deal?

In this episode, Derek Chevalier doesn't just challenge the rule. He explains why it's a trap and what to do instead if you want to unlock real creativity at the table.

My contention is that if an outcome is what you expected it to be before you went into the

negotiation, it's generally a sign that you left a lot on the table and that you did not evolve or create

what we call the highest and best outcome. How could you possibly have known what was possible

in that negotiation before you walked into the room? And that's one of the dangers we talk about when you look at

something like a batina. Yeah, having a best alternative to a negotiated agreement is a great

idea, but it's also a prison. Because if you go, you came up with that batna. So at the end of the

day, the baton that teaches you to negotiate with yourself.

The outcome you started with, you came up with it.

They had a batna, you had a bat an.

And then when you don't get there, you go, oh, could you drop back to my batna?

No, no, no, no, no.

An evolved negotiator understands that a batonet is a

place we're head but we're walking into the room to find out what we don't know not to negotiate

ourselves back into a place we decided to go to before we walked into the room. So if the outcome is equal to what our expectation,

it means that the outcome is not comprised of a significant amount of elements that we didn't know

before we walked into the room. That means we left a lot on the table.

This is a major paradigm shift because I think like the batina has been a sacred cow in

negotiation for what 30, 30, 40 years at this point.

And we never, ever stopped to think about how it could possibly be hurting us.

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