Why Uncertainty Belongs at the Negotiation Table

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

“A bend in the road is not the end of the road unless you fail to make the turn.” Helen Keller

Wherever you are in the world and whatever business you operate in, the pace of disruption makes risk a negotiation issue, not just an operational one. Whether the concern is the lingering effects of Brexit on supply chains and labour, the next round of US/China trade restrictions, or growing exposure to cybercrime, risk management deserves a seat at the table well before any final agreement is signed.

For many leaders, risk management has historically meant mitigation: reduce downside, accept the cost, protect the business. Effective negotiation training challenges that reflex. The sharper question is how risk can be identified, priced and traded as part of a wider commercial strategy.

The cost of protecting only the downside

An earlier thought piece on risk pointed to supply chains as a clear illustration. Negotiating across multiple suppliers raises average unit cost, but it buys resilience. Many international businesses, particularly in the auto sector, failed to make that trade and paid for it after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. General Motors had to temporarily close a US truck plant because parts from the affected region simply stopped arriving.

The longer-term effect of that experience is worth noting. Supply chain risk is now a strategic issue inside GM, with embedded risk officers in procurement, product development and every other critical function. The lesson is not that disruption is rare. It is that the cost of ignoring it usually exceeds the cost of preparing for it.

Risk as a tradable variable

There is another way to look at risk: as an opportunity for value creation rather than something to be insured against. Value is created in negotiation by identifying high-value, low-cost variables and trading them between the parties. There is no reason risk should not sit on that list.

As with every variable, the key lies in understanding both your own position and that of the counterparty. That requires basic risk tools (an impact and likelihood matrix is enough) used during planning, not after the fact. Once relevant risks are plotted, the question becomes where your tolerance sits and what to do with the risks that fall outside it. A useful starting point is the four T’s:

Terminate the risk by ceasing the activity entirely.

Transfer the risk to another party as a tradable variable.

Treat the risk with an appropriate mitigation strategy.

Tolerate the risk because the upside is significant or contingency has been built in.

Approached this way, risk becomes a route to creating additional value, building trust by absorbing exposure on behalf of the other side and developing a stronger competitive position through structured risk-taking. It is also where good negotiation consulting earns its keep, by forcing leaders to look at risk from both sides of the table rather than just their own. For wider context on the soft skills underpinning these conversations, this analysis of emotional intelligence and business negotiation is a useful companion read.

Negotiating the unknown unknowns

Foreseen risks are one thing. What about the risks that cannot be foreseen? Donald Rumsfeld captured the distinction in 2002:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns, that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Brexit remains a useful example. Short and medium-term risks can be mapped. For anyone signing longer-term contracts with European exposure, the unknown unknowns are real and uncomfortable. By definition you cannot list them, and even if you could, planning around every scenario is impractical.

What you can do is contract well for the known knowns and the known unknowns, then build a resilient operation prepared to absorb the unexpected. The combination creates the capability, the headspace and the relationship needed to handle whatever does arrive. Or, as Helen Keller put it, a bend in the road is not the end of the road unless you fail to make the turn.

A live example from the Arab Spring

A more extreme example of treating uncertainty as opportunity surfaced during the Arab Spring in 2010. As unrest spread, many multinationals (particularly in Oil & Gas) evacuated their expatriate workforce quickly, often without a structured assessment of the actual risks on the ground.

A small number of companies took a different view. With robust risk management strategies already in place, they delayed evacuations or staged them carefully, keeping operations running until the last safe moment and in some cases throughout. The outcomes are now part of the case literature: deeper trust with local partners, a stronger competitive position relative to firms that left in haste and clear value creation in the rebuilding phase.

The opportunity, in hindsight, was visible earlier. Had those firms treated their risk capability as a negotiation asset rather than an operational fallback, they could have priced it into commercial conversations from the outset. This is the kind of thinking that separates mature negotiation courses from generic communication workshops: risk becomes a strategic lever, not a defensive one. A related view on holding a line when commercial pressure mounts can be found in this piece on negotiating with a customer you can’t afford to lose.

Building risk into the preparation, not the post-mortem

As with most successful negotiations, the win comes during preparation. Risk strategy belongs in the room when stakeholders align on objectives, not in the debrief after something has gone wrong. That means involving the people closest to operational reality, pressure-testing assumptions about the other side’s exposure and being honest about which risks the business is genuinely willing to carry.

Done well, risk stops being a force to fear and starts to function as one of the more useful variables in the deal. That is the perspective consistently brought by The Gap Partnership, a global negotiation consultancy specialising in commercial negotiation training, and one that more boards are now adopting as standard practice. Further commentary on the subject is collected on the firm’s insights hub.

Uncertainty is not going to ease in the short term. The leaders who treat it as a negotiable asset, rather than an enemy of progress, will be the ones still making the turns when others run out of road.

About the author

John Higgs has over 20 years of commercial experience across diverse sectors and geographies, establishing himself as a seasoned sales leader, strategist, consultant and people manager. He has a proven track record of delivering measurable results for clients, partners and stakeholders, as well as scaling and leading high-performing teams. Having lived and worked in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, John brings a global perspective to P&L management, strategy and sales leadership.

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