Negotiating When There Is No Plan B

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In a perfect world negotiators always have a plan B. In the negotiation literature this is called a BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement), a term introduced by Roger Fisher and William Ury in their 1981 book, Getting to Yes. The concept has several key implications: You shouldn’t agree to any deal if there’s a better alternative; you shouldn’t expect the other party to agree to your deal if it has a better alternative; you should seek to improve your BATNA; and you should at least consider if and how to weaken the BATNA of your negotiation counterpart.

In many of the most important and challenging business negotiations, however, there’s no obvious solution other than a deal with a specific party. Because of that, it feels as if there’s no plan B.  Indeed, knowing what to do when there seems to be no plan B is one of the unique strengths of the most experienced and skilled dealmakers. In high-stakes negotiations there often are creative work-arounds, unilateral actions you can take to improve your leverage, and partial alternatives that can shift the balance of power.  In this article the authors take us through the right ways to approach this challenge.

The Power of Partial Alternatives.  When negotiators map out their BATNA, they often search for a complete alternative that addresses every problem. But in many cases such a solution simply doesn’t exist. Instead, the breakthrough comes from identifying options that may not fully replace the deal on the table but can open up new possibilities. These partial solutions, even if limited, can change negotiation dynamics in meaningful ways.  The more complex the negotiation and the more dependent you are on the other party, the more important it is to seek out partial alternatives.

Don’t Negotiate from a Place of Fear.  When you feel as if you have no alternative, it’s natural to focus on your own vulnerability and overlook the chinks in the other side’s armor. Even experienced negotiators can fall into this trap, fixating on who “needs the deal more” and missing opportunities to gain leverage. But when you broaden your perspective—analyzing not just your own BATNA but also the other party’s alternatives—you often discover hidden strengths in your position.  Even if your alternatives look bleak, it may still be rational for the other side to make concessions. Dependence in negotiations is rarely one-sided, and feeling vulnerable doesn’t mean you lack leverage.

Seek Temporary Alternatives and Tacit Consent.  In situations where the search for a plan B continues to come up empty, expanding your analysis to consider what you can do, even just temporarily, without the agreement of the other side is often the key. When a powerful counterpart says, “Take it or leave it,” even highly experienced negotiators often feel pressured to agree to an unfavorable deal or to walk away and face the equally unattractive consequences of no agreement. But there’s virtually always a third alternative, at least for a while, to decline to agree but not outright reject the other side’s demands. Even when the other party views a refusal to immediately agree as equivalent to permanently walking away, you can usually reframe your response as simply declining to agree right now. Of course, aggressive negotiators will often couple a demand with a deadline. In our experience it’s almost always possible to extend such deadlines, especially with a reasonable justification, often some variation of “We need more time to evaluate and consider.”  It can also be useful to explore ways to move forward without explicit agreement. Ultimately, you can’t have a deal unless the other side agrees. But there are different kinds of consent, and in practice we’ve found that distinguishing between active and tacit consent is very useful. Not every action in a negotiation requires the other party’s formal approval. In many cases you can act as long as your counterpart doesn’t object. Understanding when you can rely on tacit acceptance rather than waiting for a clear “yes” gives you more room to maneuver.

Focus on the Players and the Process.  When there seems to be no plan B, negotiators should consider literally anything they can do unilaterally that will help yield a more favorable outcome. The authors call these procedural alternatives, as opposed to alternatives to an eventual agreement. To uncover them, you need to keep the principal-agent distinction top of mind—that is, distinguish between the company you’re negotiating with and the individual people you’re dealing with.

Reframe Threats as Warnings.  Communicating walk-away alternatives during negotiations is a delicate art. If a negotiator says something like “We’re considering deals with other partners,” it usually leads to a downward spiral of arguments over who has a better BATNA and then devolves to “take it or leave it” threats.  So people working on high-stakes deals face a tension between signaling that they’re able and willing to walk away and trying to draw the other side into a collaborative negotiation process. The solution to this quandary is to frame the possibility of alternatives as warnings, not as threats. The latter are coercive (“If you don’t agree, we will immediately cut off all shipments to you”) and invariably trigger defensiveness and counterthreats. Warnings, in contrast, are focused on self-protection, not harming the other side, and thus are far less likely to evoke an adversarial reaction. (“We can’t afford to pay the price you’re demanding. Unless we can negotiate something more reasonable, we’ll be forced to find someone else.”) The distinction is simple, but its application is nuanced.

When All Else Fails, Try Fairness.  Negotiations are often framed as a zero-sum game: “Whoever cares least about the deal has the power.” But when the stakes are high, that mindset is limiting. If you don’t care, why negotiate at all? The real challenge isn’t caring less—it’s finding ways to make the other side care more.  One effective approach is to shift the conversation from power to fairness, which is a surprisingly compelling human motivator. While it has been proven in experiments that dealmakers often will walk away from agreements that make economic sense if they perceive them to be unfair, experience shows the flip side holds true, too: People will sometimes make concessions when forced to acknowledge that they’re treating the other party unfairly.

Ideally, you’d be able to identify a viable plan B for all your deals. But when there really isn’t one, adopting an expanded view of power and alternatives can make all the difference. Even if you absolutely must end up with a deal with a specific counterpart, you still have options, and there are often ways to reduce (albeit not eliminate) your dependence on the other side. The best negotiators are those who look beyond the obvious and find creative sources of leverage to influence the negotiation process and their counterparts.

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