Experience has taught great negotiators that they are best served by holding multiple hypotheses—about the situation, about the counterpart’s wants, about a whole array of variables—in their mind at the same time. Present and alert in the moment, they will use all the new information that comes their way to test and winnow true hypotheses from false ones.
In negotiation, each new psychological insight or additional piece of unknown information that arises heralds a step forward and allows one to discard some hypothesis in favor of another. You should engage the process with a mindset of discovery. Your goal at the outset is to extract and observe as much information as possible. That, by the way, is one of the reasons that really smart people often have trouble being negotiators—they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover.
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