Halloween is upon us once more, along with the last-minute panic-buying of industrial quantities of sweets for the trick-or-treat hordes. There are many origin stories explaining the practice of touring the neighbourhood on Halloween, demanding confectionery from all and sundry (or at least those who’ve signalled their tolerance with Halloween décor around their front doors). One of them comes from – appropriately enough for a Scotwork blog – Scotland, where the practise was (and still is in many places) known as “guising”. Children roam from door to door in costume (or “disguise”), earning treats in exchange for a song or a rhyme.
And it’s the idea of disguise I’m interested in from a negotiating perspective. On Halloween, the purpose is pretty obvious – it’s entertainment value, and helps strangers feel better about dispensing those crucial treats. Disguise also has some pretty formidable strategic value. The Trojan Horse is one of the earliest – and still one of the most notorious/successful – examples. The Greeks built a very large wooden horse, deposited it outside the gates of Troy and then appeared to leave, defeated. Under the impression that the horse was a gift, the Trojans hauled the horse into the city. However, under the cover of darkness, Greek soldiers hidden in the horse clambered out to open the gates for the returning Greek army. History is strewn with examples of disguise being used to achieve outcomes, and the idea of disguise (or misleading, or deceiving) comes up regularly on the courses we teach. There is a certain fascination with the idea that misdirecting your counterparty might open up a route to achieving your objectives, and this appears to be amply supported by millennia of evidence. However, on further examination, I think I’d take a healthy pause to consider the risks involved.
Firstly, the vast majority of examples of disguise being a successful strategy take place in a military context. It’s worth noting that by definition, armed conflict is adversarial – you are, quite literally, out to kill your opponents. That is – luckily enough – not true for commercial negotiators. In fact, for most negotiators, longer-term interests are frequently better served by building an atmosphere of cooperative discussions. Deceiving your counterparty in order to take advantage is unlikely to result in a congratulatory note expressing admiration for your cunning. What it’s far more likely to do is to encourage retaliatory deception (or at best the withholding of information), irritate or anger them and worst of all, erode trust. And conducting negotiations in the absence of good faith is one of the harder challenges negotiators must occasionally face – I’d have to ask, why be responsible for creating that situation in the first place? I think I’d need very good reasons indeed.
Secondly, once trust is lost, it is incrementally harder to rebuild. It’s hard to imagine why a short-term outcome might outweigh the longer-term benefits of mutual trust – possibly where the relationship is of little or no consequence, or unlikely to be lasting for other reasons. Sometimes an abundance of power can lead one party to de-prioritise trust – a workable strategy, granted, but only for as long as that power balance endures.
Thirdly, disguising your objectives or intent is most frequently not rational – if your counterparty is unaware or unsure of what you want, I’d suggest it’s going to be a lot harder for you to get it. Unless it’s your lucky day, and they guess right.
Finally, memories are long. It’s unlikely that the Greek military strategists coming up with the wooden horse idea gave it a lot of thought, but had they understood that 3,000-plus years later the phrase “beware Greeks bearing gifts” would still be in common usage to describe treachery, I wonder whether they’d have at least tried out one or two alternative strategies. So keep guising for the Halloween celebrations – it’s unlikely to deliver any treats at the negotiating table.
