What's the Best Plan B in a Negotiation?

I was recently in a public-speaking class on negotiation, and I ran into a piece of advice: always have a plan B. It supposedly gives you a sense of confidence and a kind of independence from how things turn out.

As someone who built his own algorithm for running negotiations when closing deals, I found the claim interesting. Every negotiation is unique and there’s no universal script for success — but I’ve come to think that, right up until the moment things actually hit a wall, the best plan B is almost always to take a pause and put the decision off until the next round of conversation.

First, it helps to separate a plan B from your desired-outcome scenarios. The desired outcomes are a range — say, from fifty to two hundred percent of your goal. A plan B is a completely different goal, and so a completely different result.

Often, thinking through a plan B quietly drags us into visualizing the bad outcomes, into more anxiety, into demonizing the other side before anything bad has even happened. And sometimes, just gathering information without always matching it to the context, we work ourselves up into believing we’re being treated especially unfairly.

On top of that, the other person may read your plan B as blackmail or manipulation. A seasoned negotiator can sense it intuitively, and it turns us into the enemy before the conversation has even started.

Even preparing a plan B can spark a conflict if the other side finds out. Asking for a raise while quietly holding a competitor’s offer over your employer’s head, for instance, can trigger anger and a feeling of betrayal.

Having a plan B is like walking into a meeting with a loaded gun: the mere fact that the weapon is there can set off the shooting — especially when emotions run hot and you’re defending your position. From my own experience, the information I walked into negotiations with often turned out to be wrong or distorted. Reacting on the basis of a plan B could have led to irreversible things I’d have regretted. But after new input from the other side, a pause, and a look at the facts, my view often flipped completely.

Learning to take pauses is easier than inventing a fresh plan B every single time. It saves time, energy and nerves, it helps you stay emotionally steady, well-disposed toward the other person, and energetically focused on getting to the outcomes you actually want under plan A.

We often feel a negotiation can’t be postponed, that there’s pressure to decide right here and now. But even heads of state and hostage negotiators — when lives are literally on the line — use pauses to reach better outcomes. And in an age of phones and video calls, we’re not even bound by the need for physical presence to keep a conversation going.

Why rush? A plan B is better built once you have all the information you need, with a cold calculation and a clear head. Foreseeing different scenarios is useful, but fixating on them only feeds the anxiety — while in practice the bad outcomes happen less often than we imagine.

And what if, in the end, there’s nothing left but to carry out plan B? Then it’s worth letting the other side know (where that’s relevant) and doing what you set out to do. If it has come to that, it’s time for action, not negotiation. At times, plan B turns out to be the best thing that could have happened to us.

Here’s to reaching your goals in any negotiation! 😎