What roundabouts can teach us about negotiation
I grew up in Watford, Hertfordshire, and Hemel Hempstead was one of the places we knew well. I even learned to swim there, although that is probably more information than you need for a blog about negotiation.
There is, however, one thing people seem to remember whenever I tell them where I grew up. If they have ever driven to Swindon or Hemel Hempstead, sooner or later someone mentions the roundabouts.
In Hemel Hempstead, there is the Plough Roundabout, better known by its nickname, the Magic Roundabout. The name was borrowed from the famous children's television programme of the same name, which was on TV when I was growing up. It is not your average roundabout. There are six smaller satellite roundabouts arranged around a large central roundabout. You can travel around the big roundabout in either direction and, at its busiest, there are five lanes of traffic involved.
For someone who has never encountered it before, it looks completely chaotic. Cars seem to be coming from everywhere, disappearing in one direction and reappearing somewhere else. And yet, once you understand how it works, it actually works remarkably well. That has always struck me as a rather good metaphor for negotiation.
The straight road of negotiation
A lot of negotiations are conducted as if we were travelling along a straight road. We identify the issues, put them into an order and deal with them one after another. Price comes first, then delivery, then payment terms, then warranty, then perhaps service and implementation.
There are obvious advantages to this approach. It gives the negotiation structure, makes it easy to follow and creates a reassuring feeling of progress. We have dealt with price, so we can tick that off and move on to delivery. If the issues are largely independent of one another, this can work perfectly well. Sometimes a straight road is just a straight road.
The problem is that many negotiations are not like that. The issues are connected, and what happens on one issue can change the value of another. If we deal with everything in a strict sequence, we can sometimes close down possibilities before we have even discovered them.
The dishwasher problem
I use a very simple example when I talk about this in negotiation training: buying a dishwasher.
Imagine I go into a technical store because my dishwasher has given up the ghost. I am looking at the different models with somebody else, and then my partner asks the sales assistant whether there is currently a discount.
“No.”
So we have to leave.
But do we?
There are quite a few things I need to consider before deciding whether this is the right dishwasher for me. Obviously, there is the machine itself: its quality, performance, energy consumption and, in my case, how quiet it is because I have an open-plan downstairs area.
Then there is everything around the machine. When can it be delivered? Will it be installed? What happens to the old dishwasher? Will it be taken away and recycled? Will somebody make sure it fits and works properly? And perhaps, if I am honest, I would quite like somebody to explain how the thing works rather than handing me a manual and leaving me to work it out.
Suddenly, the price is only one part of the negotiation.
The €50 discount that isn't worth €50
Now suppose the sales assistant says, “Actually, I can give you €50 off.”
Great. Except they cannot deliver it for seven weeks.
If my dishwasher has just broken, that €50 may be almost irrelevant. I might happily pay €50 more to have the machine tomorrow. Or perhaps delivery is not urgent, but installation and removal of the old machine are particularly important to me.
The point is that the value of one issue depends on what happens with the others.
That is why negotiating the price first, agreeing it and then moving on to delivery can hide potential trades. I may have agreed a price before I know what the supplier can do on delivery, installation or disposal. And the supplier may have more flexibility on some of those things than on price.
Perhaps they cannot reduce the price at all, but they can deliver tomorrow, install the dishwasher and take the old one away. That might be a much better deal for me than €50 off a dishwasher that arrives in seven weeks in a cardboard box.
Enter the roundabout
This is where I like the roundabout as a metaphor.
The roundabout approach does not mean abandoning structure. It means accepting that the best route through a negotiation is not always a straight line. Instead of taking the issues one at a time and trying to finish each before moving on, we put the important issues on the table and explore how they relate to each other.
We may start with price, move to delivery, discover something about installation and then come back to price because we now understand the overall deal differently. We are going around, but we are not going around in circles. We are learning.
That distinction is important. We revisit an issue because something has changed: new information has emerged, we have discovered an interest, another variable has been introduced or we have realised that an earlier position looks different when combined with something else.
The question is not simply, “Have we discussed this already?” The better question is, “Do we understand it differently now?” If the answer is yes, it can make perfect sense to come back to it.
The real power: packages
For me, the biggest advantage of the roundabout approach is the opportunity to build packages.
Instead of asking, “How much can I get them to concede on price?”, I can ask, “What combination of things would make this a good deal for me, and what combination might work for them?”
With the dishwasher, perhaps one package is a lower price but a longer delivery time. Another might be the standard price, delivery tomorrow, installation included and the old dishwasher taken away. A third might be a slightly more expensive, quieter model that can be delivered immediately and includes everything I need.
Suddenly, we are no longer arguing about €50. We are comparing packages.
The same thing happens in business negotiations all the time. Price, volume, delivery, payment terms, service, contract length, warranty and implementation are rarely completely independent. Changing one can create possibilities on another. The trick is to discover those connections before we close the individual issues.
But roundabouts have dangers too
The roundabout approach is not automatically better than linear negotiation. One danger is losing structure. If we constantly jump from one topic to another, the other party may wonder whether anything is actually being agreed. Another is creating so many variables and possible combinations that neither side is quite sure what the current deal looks like.
There is also a danger of avoiding commitment. Some negotiators are very good at generating options but remarkably bad at choosing one. There is always another possibility to explore, another package to consider or another issue to reopen.
Eventually, somebody has to take an exit. That is an important part of the metaphor: a good negotiator needs to know when to keep going around and when to leave the roundabout.
So how do we use the roundabout?
For me, it starts with getting the issues onto the table rather than immediately working through them in a rigid sequence. We need to understand what actually matters to both sides, including the things that may not initially appear to be important. Asking “What else?” can be surprisingly powerful because the first answer is rarely the complete answer.
Then we look for connections. If we change delivery, does that affect price? If we increase volume, does that create room elsewhere? If payment terms change, does that make another concession possible? If we extend the contract, what does that do to the overall value?
This is where the negotiation starts to move around the roundabout. We are not abandoning the issues; we are understanding them in relation to each other.
From there, we can build packages. Put several things together and see what happens. Offer combinations rather than isolated concessions. Give the other side choices where appropriate. The objective is not to make the negotiation more complicated. It is to discover whether there is a better deal hiding between the individual issues.
And then, finally, take the exit.
Once we have found an arrangement that works, we need to stop exploring for the sake of exploring. Summarise what has been agreed, check that both sides have the same understanding and make the next steps clear.
The roundabout is there to help us find the right route. It is not somewhere we are supposed to live.
Sometimes the straight road is exactly right
I do not think the lesson is that linear negotiation is bad and roundabout negotiation is good. Good negotiators need both.
Sometimes the straight road is exactly what you need. If an issue is simple, independent and easy to resolve, deal with it and move on. There is no prize for making a simple negotiation unnecessarily complicated.
But when the issues are interconnected, when different interests sit underneath the positions, or when there is potential for trades and packages, a purely linear approach can leave value on the table.
Perhaps that is why the Magic Roundabout has stayed with me. Growing up in Watford, I knew Hemel Hempstead and that rather extraordinary piece of road from an early age. It looked chaotic, but it was not random. There was a system underneath it.
And perhaps negotiation is a bit like that.
From the outside, a good negotiation can sometimes look as though people are jumping from one topic to another, revisiting things they have already discussed and changing direction. But underneath, there is a logic. The negotiators are discovering what connects to what, working out where the value really lies and creating different routes through the problem.
The trick is knowing when you are still discovering possibilities — and when you are simply driving past the same exit for the fourth time.
That is the theory.
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