Podcast · Niinku asia on #sinnu 50 · 2021-05-26 · 45:37 · In Finnish
Negotiation, Social Situations and Reading the Other Person — Sami Miettinen on Niinku asia on
Published as “Neuvottelutaito, sosiaalisen tilanteen ja toisen ihmisen ymmärtäminen (Sami Miettinen) | #sinnu 50”
Hosted by: Sinnu Savola
Psychologist Sinnu Savola interviewed Sami Miettinen for her podcast Niinku asia on on the social and psychological side of negotiation. The two had recorded an episode for the Neuvottelija channel immediately beforehand, on personality testing, recruitment and intelligence; this is the companion half.
The insight that mattered most. Asked what has genuinely changed how he negotiates, Miettinen names the Martti Ahtisaari interview conducted for the first version of the book while he was living in London. He had assumed strong negotiators worked as self-directed individuals. Ahtisaari, negotiating independence for entire nations, ran a fifteen-person team including three specialist lawyers and several political experts. The realisation: negotiating as a team is very hard, many people are good individually and almost nobody is good in a group. At the time the interview struck him as idealistic and almost naive; listening back, he considers it the best of the original set, which also included Björn Wahlroos.
Emotion as a function of pressure. The sociability chapter of the book deals with own emotions, the counterpart’s, the team’s, the information passing between them, and the decisions made on that basis over time. Miettinen’s mental model is a curve: stress begins as eustress, which holds you in flow and produces a good performance, and passes a distress point close to anxiety and to what Daniel Goleman popularised as the amygdala hijack — after which pressure pushes you into fight-or-flight and instability. The same curve is running on the other side of the table. Helena Åhman’s contribution, from her work on performing under pressure, is that pressure is not in itself bad: buffalo walk into the sandstorm, and the negotiator’s job is to be able to operate at full capacity inside the discomfort.
Personality models: crude but useful. Miettinen prefers Big Five as the validated model while conceding DISC is handier, because a Jungian four-field of introversion and people-orientation can be read quickly in the room and then used to shape how information is delivered. He is scathing about Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots as a caricature that flatters the reader — the author’s own “red” type is the task-focused extrovert, while the introverted, people-oriented “green” is drawn as a doormat.
Why the weak-looking role can win. From Simo Routarinne and from Keith Johnstone’s improvisation work, Miettinen took the lesson that the natural role is not alpha. In an expert organisation, demonstrating superiority is an invitation to be challenged. The “green” posture that looks like a loser’s strategy can be the winning one, because it is what gathers the most information.
Alpha, beta, gamma. The principal, holding the money and the decision, is the quiet alpha. The agent — Miettinen’s own natural role — is the beta: openness at full throttle, creating options, answering hard questions under pressure without freezing. The gamma is the observer and scribe, recording both what was said and how people reacted. A practical trick: ask a difficult question and watch whose way the heads turn, and you have found the hidden decision-maker. Needing to “check with my principal” is also a deliberate escalation route. Most teams, he notes, arrive with three people and no agreement about who says what, and the extrovert simply talks whether or not they should.
Culture and the trust account. Rather than broad cultural generalisations, Miettinen points to in-group and out-group dynamics — strong in China and Brazil — and to how hard it is for an outsider to rise into the in-group. Japanese hierarchy makes it near-impossible for a senior figure to adopt the informal beta role even if they wanted to.
Cameras on. Citing mentalist Pete Poskiparta on micro-expression analysis, Miettinen argues that people who keep their camera off in remote meetings give up a real advantage: if you never build a video-based mental model in other people’s heads, your persona there stays weak. Having produced something like a hundred hours of unevasive speech on his own channel, counterparties arrive with a strong model of him already formed.
Negotiation versus manipulation. The line Miettinen draws is authenticity: say what you mean and mean what you say. Playing a persona purely for effect is manipulation and it is bad business, because reputation and the trust account run across negotiations. Without integrity you are selling used cars, and your reputation follows. He is also sceptical of importing hostage-negotiation technique into business: a hostage taker is usually a person in psychological crisis, and advice like “wait for the other side’s anchor” does not generalise to a commercial table. Björn Wahlroos’s point stands against the stone-faced ideal — genuine feeling and direction have to show through, with role technique only as cream on the cake.
Can it be learned? Personality is plastic and negotiation is technique plus self-reflection, so yes — but it is taught almost nowhere, which means people inherit their supervisor’s habits, good or bad. Practise roles where the stakes are low; fake it till you make it until the behaviour integrates and stops being a performance.
The conversation closes on artificial intelligence. Miettinen recalls interviewing Timo Honkela, author of Rauhankone, who envisioned AI as a negotiator of meaning — surfacing the underlying interests each side conceals, so that two such systems could pre-negotiate. The gamma role, he notes, is the easiest to automate. The dystopian version already exists where privacy does not, and Harari’s Homo Deus supplies the frame: dataism, in which the human defers to the machine because it decides better, against techno-humanism, in which the human stays in control and the machine makes them better at being human.
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