Suppose you and Bobby the car salesman are haggling over the price of a car. You could try saying that you won’t pay more than $3k, but Bobby can equally retort that he won’t sell it for less than $4k. If you guys manage to negotiate a sale, it will probably be at more than $3k (and involve revealing both of you as liars).
Now imagine the same situation, but you only have $3k and Bobby knows it. Now, if $3k is actually ok for him, you win and get your price.
Now imagine you are rich but you have a boyfriend at home who has only agreed to a $3k expenditure on a used car at this time, and thinks any more would be crazy. It’s shared money, so to pay more you would need to go away and get his permission, and it wouldn’t be easy. If Bobby believes you, then your situation is much like being poor again, and you win.
My guess is I read about this in Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict when I was a teenager. The general observation is that being more constrained can often be helpful in a negotiation. Which is a bit shocking because it undermines the seeming truism that more power—more options, more resources—is always better for getting what you want.
A less general observation that also stuck with me about this is that you can trivially arrange to have such constraints through having an associate, such as a stubborn and spending-conscious boyfriend. (Ok, finding one of those is not trivial, especially if you have other desiderata.)
This is all background. The thing I want to point out is that being part of an organization rather than a free agent means creating and using this effect all over the place.
This is most obvious with timing and deadlines. I am a relatively free agent, and I am quite good at making deadlines for myself and then taking them seriously. But I feel like other people I casually negotiate with about how to spend time, aka my friends, often feel like deadlines I make are not very real, since I could just ignore them. Because it’s just an agreement with myself, it’s up for negotiation with myself. And if I insist on respecting these lines I drew myself that have no legible consequences, then it feels like I’m being weird and stubborn and unfriendly or perhaps charmingly neurodivergent. So I often don’t—once it’s a negotiation, then negotiating hard for my own goals, against my friends, doesn’t feel very friendly to anyone.
Now consider a friend working in an org. They can casually throw out that they have this thing due tomorrow, and everyone will take it as a hard constraint. I will take it as a hard constraint. I might even offer to help get it done, even though I have other things I want to do. Whereas if I had not only insisted on my imaginary deadline but hoped for any help in fulfilling it, I think that would often feel unreasonable of me.
The org believably cuts off the person’s options, like the boyfriend, and so the person implicitly wins many negotiations (or what would have been negotiations), all in the direction of doing more for the org, and without seeming unfriendly to their friends.
My own difficulties with this are partly a me problem—I’m probably not very good at ‘defending boundaries’. But my point is that if you are a solo human then there’s a whole skill-requiring task of ‘defending boundaries’ that just becomes trivially easy if you have an org around you to cut off certain possibilities. And also if your boundaries are ‘I am going to do this project tonight definitely regardless of if you want me to do something else’ then that will land a way with other people that reporting on your org’s boundary policing—‘I have to do this by tomorrow, alas’—will not.
I think this ‘service’ and making use of it is rarely intentional, but I’d guess it’s very effective, and is a dynamic that makes people more likely to join orgs rather than being solo. It just looks like ‘it’s harder to get things done on my own’ and a component of ‘it’s harder to structure my time’ and ‘I find I keep on doing stuff other than my work’.
Image by Matthias Zeitler from Pixabay
From the title and first half, I thought this was going to propose an org that provides you with an unreasonable boyfriend on demand.
My wife serves this negotiating role for me sometimes. She'll throw out a demand and I'll, ingratiatingly, explain that's the standard I need to meet. I wouldn't say she's unreasonable though, just demanding.
For example, a while back Costco made a mistake with and ordered the wrong tires for our car. This, after having neglected to call us to let us know when the tires we ordered had arrived. The tire shop manager came out and said in his judgement, they'd probably get her safely to LA and back the next day. She told me I needed to get that in writing or they needed to get us tires. Tire shop manager didn't want to put that in writing. His boss most definitely didn't want to put that in writing, for exactly the reason she wanted it. Ultimately they noticed their most expensive tires for our car, _were_ in stock. So they gave us those at the price we'd previously paid. Given all the inconvenience, I don't think it was an unreasonable conclusion, but saying "this is is what my wife has tasked me with" made it much easier to negotiate for while keeping things friendly. People respect "my wife wants this".