CHAPTER 5
TRIGGER THE TWO WORDS THAT IMMEDIATELY TRANSFORM ANY NEGOTIATION
In August 2000, the militant Islamic group Abu Sayyaf, in the southern Philippines, broadcast that it had captured a CIA agent.
The truth was not as newsworthy, or as valuable to the rebels.
Abu Sayyaf had kidnapped Jeffrey Schilling, a twenty-four-year- old American who had traveled near their base in Jolo Island. A California native, Schilling became a hostage with a $10 million price tag on his head.
At the time I was a Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) attached to the FBI’s elite Crisis Negotiation Unit (CNU). The CNU is the equivalent of the special forces of negotiations. It’s attached to the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). Both are national counterterrorist response assets. They are the best of the best.
The CNU is based at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The FBI Academy has come to be known by the one word, “Quantico.”
Rightly or wrongly, Quantico has developed the reputation as one of the centers, if not the center of knowledge, for law enforcement.
When a negotiation is going badly and the negotiators involved are directed to call and find out what “Quantico” has to say, the CNU is who they call.
CNU developed what is a powerful staple in the high-stakes world of crisis negotiation, the Behavioral Change Stairway Model (BCSM). The model proposes five stages—active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral change—that take any negotiator from listening to influencing behavior.
The origins of the model can be traced back to the great American psychologist Carl Rogers, who proposed that real change can only come when a therapist accepts the client as he or she is—