Possible by William Ury

Author:William Ury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

SEND IN THE WIZARDS

In 1983, US arms control negotiator General Edward Rowny, one of our guests at the Devising Seminar, invited Roger and me to visit the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) between the United States and the Soviet Union in Geneva. I was excited to be there as the conflict between nuclear superpowers was the existential issue that had worried me ever since I was a boy in school—a school not far from where the talks were taking place.

After a morning workshop on negotiation for the US negotiators, Roger and I had lunch with them. I had a chance to ask:

“I’m curious. In the last years, there haven’t been any arms control agreements. But before then, there was a whole slew of them. Why then and not now? Can you help me understand?”

As soon as I asked the question, I realized it was a bit indelicate. The negotiators looked at one another to see who would answer. One older man, who had been quiet until then, spoke up.

“Oh, there are several reasons why we were able to reach agreements back then, but one of them was that we had an interesting process we called ‘the wizards.’”

“Oh,” I said, my curiosity piqued, “what were the wizards?”

“The wizards were two Americans and two Russians who had four characteristics: They were bilingual in English and Russian, so they could communicate easily. They were technically knowledgeable about the subject. They were lower level than the ambassadors. And hence they were disposable.”

As he said the word “disposable,” he cracked a little smile.

“Whenever the talks hit an impasse, these four would get together quietly, sometimes at a restaurant over dinner and sometimes on the ferryboat out in the middle of Lake Geneva. And they would just talk freely and informally.

“They would ask a lot of hypothetical what-if questions: What if we were to count the warheads this way? What if we were to count them that way?

“And the funny thing is that we got more good ideas for breaking impasses from the wizards than from any other source. The wizards never got any credit, which was the whole point.”

A few of his colleagues nodded knowingly. I found myself wondering if the speaker had perhaps been a wizard himself.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “I am curious: What do you mean by ‘they were disposable’?”

“Oh,” he answered, “if the conversations went too far, you could always ship them back to Washington or Moscow and say these conversations never took place. They were deniable.”

It was a lesson for me. I have noticed often in negotiations that creative ideas and potential breakthroughs rarely emerge in the formal talks, where the parties are guarded and wary. They happen most often between individuals who know and trust each other personally. They happen in corridors, during coffee breaks, over a meal, or in retreat settings like the ferryboat on the lake.

Creative ideas emerge more easily when people have gone to the balcony, when they have had a chance to pause, zoom in on what they really want, and zoom out to see the bigger picture.

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