This week I almost missed meeting a friend for coffee because we both made an assumption about where we would meet up that was slightly wrong.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy tells of a war between two distant galaxies accidentally caused by a dreadful insult originating from Earth. When the war torn galaxies finally discover their mistake they send a joint battle fleet to destroy our galaxy.
"For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
They also made a wrong assumption and suffered terrible consequences!
In contract negotiations making wrong assumptions about, for example, the motivation of the other side to enter into the contract in the first place can have equally disastrous effects. If a supplier thinks the customer is really motivated by cost savings, when in fact they are determined to obtain a quality service to replace a poor one, it will adversely affect how the contract negotiation is approached.
A simple and often forgotten way to avoid working under the misapprehension of a wrong assumption is simply to find out what motivates the other side. Asking is an obvious way of doing this - which in this case will have the dual benefit of persuading the customer that the suppler is actually interested in what they might want.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy tells of a war between two distant galaxies accidentally caused by a dreadful insult originating from Earth. When the war torn galaxies finally discover their mistake they send a joint battle fleet to destroy our galaxy.
"For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
They also made a wrong assumption and suffered terrible consequences!
In contract negotiations making wrong assumptions about, for example, the motivation of the other side to enter into the contract in the first place can have equally disastrous effects. If a supplier thinks the customer is really motivated by cost savings, when in fact they are determined to obtain a quality service to replace a poor one, it will adversely affect how the contract negotiation is approached.
A simple and often forgotten way to avoid working under the misapprehension of a wrong assumption is simply to find out what motivates the other side. Asking is an obvious way of doing this - which in this case will have the dual benefit of persuading the customer that the suppler is actually interested in what they might want.
RSS Feed
