Imperfect Paradise: The Gen Z Water Dealmaker: Part 4

Antonia Cereijido: You’re listening to “Imperfect Paradise,” the show about hidden worlds and messy realities. I’m Antonia Cereijido.

Antonia Cereijido: [music in] Is there someone you negotiate with most in your life?

Victoria Medvec: [laughs] I negotiate with a lot of people in my life.

Antonia Cereijido: This is Victoria Medvec, a negotiations expert.

Victoria Medvec: I'm very comfortable negotiating in my everyday life with a hotel or with a grocery store. So I negotiate a lot.

Antonia Cereijido: If you’ve been listening to “Imperfect Paradise” for the last three weeks, then you’ve been hearing a lot about one of the most epic negotiations that is currently going on here in the U.S. - the battle over Colorado River water. A quick recap: The Colorado River is a vital source of water for seven states in the West. But climate change and overuse are drying up the river, and quickly. Our series, “The Gen Z Water Dealmaker,” has been following JB Hamby - the 28 year old upstart lead negotiator for California who has the daunting task of reaching a deal with the other six states to reduce water usage enough so that deadpool is avoided. Deadpool is as scary as it sounds. It’s when water in the dams gets so low that none flows out - a complete collapse of the river. [music out] [theme music in] A major reason we at “Imperfect Paradise” wanted to tell this story is that this is a story about how humans can work together to avoid a nightmare scenario.

Tom Buschatzke: If there's no water, there's no water for everybody.

Antonia Cereijido: And that means that everyone in this story has to be really good at one thing - negotiating.

JB Hamby: If the river continues to shrink, this needs to be a shared responsibility of both basins moving forward.

Becky Mitchell: There continues to be a look upstream to solve a problem that we did not create.

Antonia Cereijido: Negotiating skills are going to become increasingly important in the future, as climate change complicates our access to, and the availability, of resources like water. And to be honest, we could all use advice on how to negotiate better in our personal lives. So on today’s episode of Imperfect Paradise, a conversation with Victoria Medvec, author of “Negotiate without Fear” and professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Victoria Medvec: As I approach a negotiation, I need to anticipate that most people will have that egocentric bias, that [AC: Mm hm.] most people will be focused on themselves.

Antonia Cereijido: She’s gonna break down some key takeaways on how to best reach an agreement in all scenarios.

Victoria Medvec: If I put those storytelling issues on the table, I've totally changed the conversation.

Antonia Cereijido: And she’ll give us her expert opinion on the approach of these Colorado River water negotiators.

Victoria Medvec: That approach of going in with one firm offer and standing firm is definitely an approach that leads more likely to an impasse than an agreement.

Antonia Cereijido: That’s coming up on “Imperfect Paradise: The Gen Z Water Dealmaker.” [music out]

Antonia Cereijido: Thank you so much for joining me.

Victoria Medvec: Antonia, I am delighted to be with you today. Thank you.

Antonia Cereijido: How would you describe a negotiation to someone who's new to the term and the practice?

Victoria Medvec: I think it's really important to distinguish negotiation from a topic that I think it often gets confused with, which is debate. In a debate, and many of us were on debate teams in high school or college, we're trying to win the argument. That is not the goal in negotiation. In negotiation, we have multiple parties, we each have interests, and what we're trying to do is come up with a solution by identifying tradeoffs across those multiple interests. I think that's a key difference because I don't need to convince you or win the argument that I'm right. What we need to do is find the solution.

Antonia Cereijido: I asked Professor Medvec why she wanted to write a book about negotiation strategy.

Victoria Medvec: So, I wanted to write the book for a long time. And I think it's so interesting because I think that expert negotiators have fears just like amateurs do. Experts fear losing the deal. Experts fear damaging the relationship. Experts fear having the other side walk away. There's fear that all of us have when we approach a negotiation. And I really believe that if I could get rid of that fear with the right strategy, people would be more effective in all of those conversations.

Antonia Cereijido: Professor Medvec’s negotiating strategy number 1: [bell rings] Don’t just think about what you want.

Victoria Medvec: Part of being well prepared is putting the right issues on the table. And the number one reason why we don't put the right issues on the table is egocentric bias. Egocentric bias leads me to focus on myself rather than the other side, and what I need to do is make certain that I'm thinking about the other side's needs, their challenges, their problems, and how I am uniquely positioned to address those needs because if I don't do that, I actually end up putting the wrong issues on the table.

Antonia Cereijido: California’s negotiator JB Hamby changed a lot over the course of his time in water politics. When he ran to be on the board of the Imperial Irrigation District in 2020, his platform was all about keeping the Valley’s water out of the hands of cities.

JB Hamby: [campaign ad audio clip] Protecting our water is a piece of cake. It just takes the right person. I'm JB Hamby and I'm running for IID Division 2 to keep our water here in our valley.

Antonia Cereijido: But when he became lead negotiator for California in 2023 and learned more about how dire the drought had become on the river, he started to change his tune, and view climate change as the enemy, not cities.

JB Hamby: There is no user, no state, no country, no basin that can stand up and say, We're out. This is a basin wide problem, but we're not part of it.

Victoria Medvec: In the episodes number two and three, what I heard in there was a really interesting change in JB, reducing that egocentric bias, you know, being really, really aware of a change in his frame from what was needed in the Imperial Valley or needed in California, to a real focus on the needs of the other states and the needs more broadly for water conservation. And I think you see that as this reduction of that egocentric bias.

Antonia Cereijido: It's interesting to me because you're totally right that JB Hamby did change his point of view. I'm curious like, what happens when one person shifts to a less egocentric [VM: Yeah, Yeah.] position, but the other negotiators don't.

Victoria Medvec: As I approach a negotiation, I need to anticipate that most people will have that egocentric bias, that [AC: Mm hm.] most people will be focused on themselves. But I want to realize that I can be more effective if I eliminate that egocentric bias. And this is not an altruistic move. This is a strategic move that I make. And it only requires that I do it to be effective. Everybody else doesn't have to reduce their egocentric bias and probably won't to be honest. But if I am doing it, it will make a change in the issues I put on the table, the way I approach the discussion.

Antonia Cereijido: [music in] When we come back, more insight from negotiations expert Victoria Medvec, like the sort of un-intuitive advice that to get what you want on something really important, you should bring up a totally separate issue. We’ll break that idea down, coming up on “Imperfect Paradise.” [music out]

Antonia Cereijido: Welcome back to “Imperfect Paradise: The Gen Z Water Dealmaker.” I'm Antonia Cereijido. [music in] Before the break, negotiation expert, author of “Negotiate without Fear,” and Northwestern University Professor Victoria Medvec explained that the first step in negotiating better is to start thinking about what others need, not just what you need.

Victoria Medvec: I can be more effective if I eliminate that egocentric bias. [music out]

Antonia Cereijido: Which brings us to strategy number 2: [bell rings] Get what you want by bringing new issues to the table.

Victoria Medvec: It's really hard to get an agreement if our preferences on one single thing are totally opposing. The key is to [AC: Yeah.] put more issues on the table where we can identify differences in our preferences. And so I think it's really key to try to broaden the list as much as possible. In any negotiation, [ ] could sort of divide the issues we're discussing on a two by two matrix where that X axis, that horizontal line, is really about what's important to me and that Y axis, the vertical line, is about what's important to the other side. [AC: Mm hm.] If you think about that, it creates four quadrants. There's that quadrant that's high on X and high on Y. Those are the really contentious issues and I think that one of the things that happens is that a lot of times we only end up discussing those contentious issues, things that are super important to me and super important to the other side. And that will never go away. We will never get rid of those issues in any [AC: Mm hm.] negotiation. But what we want to do is to make certain that we're sort of filling up that quadrant that is high on Y and low on X.

Antonia Cereijido: So, Victoria Medvec says that there are several kinds of issues in any negotiation. The issues that are important to everyone are called contentious issues. The issues that no one really cares about are, well, non-issues. There are tradeoff issues, which are things that are not important to the other side, but matter a lot to you. But Professor Medvec thinks that we should focus on what she calls storytelling issues. Those are issues that are not that important to you but are really important to the other side. And you can leverage those storytelling issues to gain more for yourself.

Antonia Cereijido: Could you give me an example?

Victoria Medvec: I would say that in the Colorado River situation, [AC: Mm hm.] a contentious issue is clearly about the amount of water usage that each area will receive, right? And I think a tradeoff issue is probably about how there will be curtailment and at what water limits there will be curtailment. But one of the things that I think is a storytelling issue that is sort of missing from a lot of the discussion are the other things that different places could do. Like in the storytelling quadrant, there might be education on water usage. There might be updates on how our water usage has changed. I don't think everyone would know the definition of deadpool or what the implications are for their own lives, right? Like, imagine that one of the issues that we are negotiating is education.

Antonia Cereijido: About just more people knowing the issue.

Victoria Medvec: About deadpool [AC: Yeah.] and an alert of how far we are away from deadpool. Imagine that that was what we talked about. Like imagine if we just changed the frame, right, and we had a different discussion. And I think that there might be other issues, like California is the biggest user of water, right, [AC: Mm hm.] and the Imperial Valley is the biggest grower of food that is going to be used for winter vegetables. That ensures that we think about food supply and the impact of that to your community. We might think about the ability to get that supply to different markets and think about if those were some of the storytelling issues, rather than just water. And so it wouldn't be then that the California water usage is California's problem. The California water usage provides the vegetables that all of us consume. So imagine if it were broadened out to focus on that.

Antonia Cereijido: In other words, by addressing more issues that matter to the other side, you can expand the scope of the deal and find more areas of agreement, and use that as leverage to get the things, or at least SOME of the things, that are really important to you.

Antonia Cereijido: So are you suggesting that because these negotiations are so limited to this very difficult issue, it's harder for them to come up with a good negotiation?

Victoria Medvec: Whenever a negotiation is limited to very narrow issues that are very contentious, it will be harder to come to an agreement.

Antonia Cereijido: Can you give me an example of a negotiation that did get broadened out and then it solved some of these issues? Like, how does that work in practice?

Victoria Medvec: Yeah, so let's just take a very simple example that everyone will relate to. So imagine if I were having a conversation with a customer of mine and imagine that I'm a manufacturing company. My customer said, I want a price reduction for next year. Then they've just narrowed the issues down to price and only price. And what we're talking about is a threshold of last year's rates or below. That's what we're discussing. But imagine if instead, I led, and I went in and I said, You know, if the pandemic taught us one thing, it's about the importance of security in your supply chain. And I want to talk to you about how we're uniquely positioned to ensure the security of your supply chain because we have eight different plants across the United States. So we can ship from different locations all within the U. S. We don't have any geopolitical risk. We don't have any risk of weather or risk of some kind of disaster shutting down our plants. Notice how I've changed the nature of the discussion by broadening the set of issues. I've totally changed the conversation, and I have more issues to work with to get what I want on those contentious issues.

Antonia Cereijido: Like – next year’s price. [pause] Negotiating strategy number 3: [bell rings] Offer the first deal.

Victoria Medvec: If I were giving advice to JB, I would say in the negotiations, it's really important to lead the conversation and not to follow. We want to be the one who goes in and makes the first offer. And then I would recommend to him- is that he go in with multiple offers rather than a single offer. And I mean multiple offers all at the same time. Because doing that will allow him to make certain that he has a stronger starting point advantage with a stronger anchor that might be really really important to the other states.

Antonia Cereijido: [music in] Coming up, how to create a sense of urgency during a big negotiation.

Victoria Medvec: When we have a huge problem out there, we are far more likely to act immediately, so we have to make more vivid, that risk.

Antonia Cereijido: More from expert Victoria Medvec on “Imperfect Paradise.” [music out] [break]

Antonia Cereijido: Welcome back to “Imperfect Paradise: The Gen Z Water Dealmaker.” I'm Antonia Cereijido. [music in] Before the break, negotiations expert Victoria Medvec gave three pieces of negotiating advice: Know what your opponents want. Don’t just focus on the most consequential issues–bring other issues to the table. And offer the first deal. [music out] That brings us to negotiating strategy number 4: [bell rings] This is a big one. If you want your opponent to drastically move their position, they need to feel a sense of urgency. Let’s use the Colorado River negotiations as an example. There’s a lot of fear about deadpool but in the last year, there was a lot of rain and so at the moment the situation doesn’t feel so dire. There is less pressure to get a big deal done.

Victoria Medvec: If we translate it to the negotiation table, the thing we want to think about is, if I'm trying to get someone to do something new, move off the status quo, do something different, I'm asking them to take a risk. Doing something new or different is risky. Doing what we've always done is not risky. So my mantra is always: Highlight gain to maintain the status quo. Highlight loss to move off.

Antonia Cereijido: So highlighting gain to maintain status quo would mean to talk about how things are going ok now, so there’s no need for drastic change. Whereas to get an opponent to change on something, they need to feel a sense of urgency.

Victoria Medvec: This year, it has been determined that the conservation that they've done in the short term and the abundant rain and snow, according to the experts have said, you know, We've staved off an immediate threat. It's a gain frame, right? And loss creates a sense of urgency that gain doesn't. When we have a huge problem out there, we are far more likely to act immediately. So what people are saying, right, is we've staved off the immediate threat, but we have this long term risk. But what we have to do is make more vivid, that risk.

Antonia Cereijido: On the Colorado River, all sides feel a strong sense of urgency, and all want to make big changes. The issue is they disagree about who, exactly, should do what. [pause] And finally, strategy number 5: [bell rings] Know your opponent’s worst case scenario.

Victoria Medvec: I think that one thing we have to consider is, does every state see no agreement with an equal lens of massive failure? Or would some states see that as a bigger problem than other states do? I think so often when we go into a negotiation, we mistakenly always believe that everybody at the table wants to get an agreement. They think everybody wants a deal. Well, sometimes people don't want a deal. People sometimes want an impasse and they're engaging to distract. They're engaging to take up the time. They're not engaging to get to agreement. And the only way you know that, is by really thinking about what is their best outside alternative? What happens if we don't get an agreement, to them? And what does it mean for them?

Antonia Cereijido: What Professor Medvec is talking about is making me think about how JB and Becky Mitchell, from Colorado, define failure really differently.

Antonia Cereijido: Colorado has like, brought up what JB calls like, the nuclear option, like when the Supreme Court gets invoked, it is by Colorado. It does seem like Colorado is much more open to it going to the Supreme Court than the Lower Basin states.

Victoria Medvec: Right. And that's important to understand, right? That's the importance of thinking about what happens if we don't get an agreement.

Antonia Cereijido: Is it more beneficial to be like a JB who is, you know, really highlighting the ways in which he's making concessions? Or is someone like a Becky, who has this very firm stance, like, ultimately more beneficial?

Victoria Medvec: The question you have to ask yourself is, what's the goal of each negotiator? Is it agreement or is it impasse? Because that approach of going in with one firm offer and standing firm is definitely an approach that leads more likely to an impasse than an agreement. So maybe it's something where they're trying to say, If we can't get that, then we would prefer to take it to court, because maybe they perceive that if we can't get that, court is a better alternative. And I think it's worthwhile to consider, you know, to what extent is agreement really desirable by each of the locations?

Antonia Cereijido: I think if I were in JB Hamby's position, I'd be very frustrated knowing how I am in negotiating with others. I don't like when I feel like I am considering the other person's position and they are not considering mine. [VM: Yeah.] That's like always the part, like, I feel like in interpersonal spats that I've had, that's always where I start to feel very despondent.

Victoria Medvec: I think that is such a normal reaction. I don't like it that I'm focused on them and they're not focused on me! [AC: Yes! Yes, that’s how I feel.] I don't like that at all! Um, but I think that that is very normal, but this is where I would distinguish the idea that it is more strategic. I want people to hear that you will get more for yourself when you focus on the needs of the other side and you think about how you're uniquely positioned to address them. That it's not just about me. Looking like I'm more focused on them- it's actually a position that gives me an advantage because I will put more issues on the table that will address their needs and let me get more on my issues that I really want. So I always say, don't feel irritated that they're not focused on you. Think about the fact that you focusing on them is gonna get you a better outcome.

Antonia Cereijido: Okay. So some selfish empathy.

Victoria Medvec: Uh huh. That's exactly, you know, it is, you're empathetic, but it actually has a goal of accomplishing more for you.

Antonia Cereijido: [music in] Once again, Professor Medvec's book is called, “Negotiate Without Fear.” Thanks for joining me on Imperfect Paradise.

Victoria Medvec: No, thank you so much.

Antonia Cereijido: So to recap - these are the five strategies Professor Medvec recommends to be an effective negotiator: 1. Reduce egocentric bias. 2. Broaden the issues at the negotiating table and especially add issues that are important to the other side and are easy for you to offer. 3. Make the first offer and lead the conversation. 4. Highlight urgency and risk if you want your opponent to make big changes, but if you don’t want big changes, emphasize how things are pretty stable. And last, know your opponent’s worst case scenario. [music changes] Climate change is terrifying. It’s something over which it feels like we have no control, but learning about negotiating can put things into perspective. There are clear tangible tools and resources for a path forward. This whole series is about negotiators and negotiating, how people can solve the problem. And focusing on those strategies is a way to look at the climate change problem as something we can manage, rather than something we simply get overwhelmed by. [music out]

Antonia Cereijido: Next time on “Imperfect Paradise”… [music in] We’re sharing with you a very special, new podcast from LAist Studios and the NPR Network: “Inheriting” – a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families that explores how a single event can ripple through a family for generations.

Carol Park: Seeing all this violence without being able to understand it or contextualize it…

Antonia Cereijido: Hosted by NPR’s Emily Kwong, “Inheriting” kicks off with the story of Carol Park and the 1992 L.A. Uprising. [music fades out] Carol was just 12-years-old. Her mom – stuck in the chaos at their family’s gas station in Compton.
Emily Kwong: [music in] [phone dialing] And what'd she say to you on the phone?

Carol: There's too many people here. I gotta go. [dial tone] [music out]

Antonia Cereijido: It would take Carol years to confront her past and to understand the full story.

Carol Park: It's the biggest question we always have. Why? And I didn't get to answer that question until I was an adult.

Antonia Cereijido: “Inheriting” – our new podcast from LAist Studios. We’ll bring you more next week on “Imperfect Paradise.”

Antonia Cereijido: [theme music in] This episode of “Imperfect Paradise” was written and produced by me, Antonia Cereijido and Minju Park. The rest of the series was written and reported by Emily Guerin. Catherine Mailhouse is the executive producer of the show and our director of content development. Shana Naomi Krochmal is our vice president of podcasts. Meg Cramer is our editor. Jens Campbell is our production coordinator. Luke Runyon is our editorial advisor. Fact checking by Gabriel Dunatov. Mixing by E. Scott Kelly. Original music by E. Scott Kelly and Andrew Eapen. “Imperfect Paradise” is a production of LAist Studios. This podcast is powered by listeners like you. Support this show by donating now at LAist.com/join. This podcast is supported by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. Additional support from the Water Desk at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. [music out]