How Hostage Negotiation Tactics Can Also Help Win Corporate Battles

News

1. Intel Courts Apple, TSMC After Nvidia’s $5 Billion Lifeline

2. Google Introduces Gemini Robotics 1.5 for Safer, Smarter Robots

3. Alibaba Takes Aim at Rivals With Qwen3 Max at 1 Trillion Parameters

4. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Partner for 5 Data Centers Under Stargate

5. Towards Superintelligence: Nvidia Puts $100B in OpenAI

6. India’s Next GCC Hubs May Rise Outside Big Cities

After a successful summit in New Delhi last month, MIT Sloan Management Review India is taking the Strategy Shift Forum to Bengaluru on 25 September. The gathering will bring together MIT professors, global AI experts, and business heads to equip Indian leaders with critical insights into navigating the next wave of AI transformation. For more details, speaker announcements, and to request an invitation, visit here.

From life-or-death negotiations to corporate boardrooms, Scott Walker has spent his career navigating high-stakes conversations where trust and composure determine the outcome.

A former hostage negotiator turned adviser to global businesses, Walker argues that the same principles that secure the release of hostages—clarity, empathy, and emotional control—are just as critical in closing multimillion-dollar deals.

In this conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review India, Walker explains how leaders can find calm in chaos, avoid classic negotiation mistakes, and combine human instinct with AI to emerge stronger from every high-pressure exchange.

At the Strategy Shift Forum in Bengaluru, Walker will join a fireside chat titled “The Leadership Equation – Bias, Behavior & Better Decisions,” alongside Ravi Raman, Publisher, MIT Sloan Management Review India, and Patrick Fagan, bestselling author and Chief Scientific Officer at Capuchin Behavioural Science.

Edited excerpt:

You’ve moved from negotiating with hostage takers to negotiating in boardrooms. What’s the one principle that cuts across both worlds? And what’s a hostage tactic you’ve seen win corporate deals?

Trust. In other words, doing what you say you’d do when you said you’d do it. Without trust, the deal is more likely to collapse, often at the last minute. This applies to all forms of deal making. It’s also the only reason why there is a 93% chance of hostages being released in what is the most dangerous, ungoverned industry in the world.

Crises demand emotional stamina. Where do business leaders most often crack under pressure, and how does that mirror what you saw in life-and-death situations?

My role in a kidnapping, a crisis or even a high-stakes business negotiation is to bring calmness and clarity to what can be a volatile and highly emotional situation. In each case, about 80% of my time is spent dealing with my ‘own side,’ i.e., the family of the hostage or the client (usually the company the hostage worked for). In a business negotiation, it’s often our own team. Under pressure, egos, internal politics, silo thinking, competing demands, and other pressures, usually show up and get in the way. Dealing with the kidnappers or customers is easy in comparison.

Emotions can make intelligent people say and do stupid things, which is why leaders crack under pressure when they allow themselves to be hijacked emotionally. They then make flawed decisions.

However, we’re feeling creatures that think, not thinking creatures that feel. And because emotions are contagious, the world’s best negotiators can recognize and regulate their own hot buttons. They also realize emotions are not obstacles to a successful negotiation; they’re actually the means.

Your book ‘Order Out of Chaos’ is full of field stories. What made you want to bring them to a business audience, and what are three lessons executives should steal immediately?

More than 15 years and 300 cases, I had a ringside seat into human psychology. Specifically, what made people think, feel, and act when under pressure. I recognized themes, patterns, and techniques that worked every time, regardless of geography, industry, sector, culture or language. I also saw how the crossover and relevance to business and life was starkly evident. All of us negotiate every day, because a negotiation is simply a conversation with a purpose, and we’re all constantly looking to influence or persuade others. So the principles and techniques that secured the release of hostages work just as well in securing an important business deal, building workforce engagement, and persuading your kids.

Three lessons for executives are:

• It’s not about you. First, seek to understand before being understood.
• Bring more curiosity than assumption to the situation and people involved. Assumptions are like earplugs and will prevent you from understanding what’s really going on.
• Embrace difficult conversations rather than avoiding them. When having them, be fast, be direct, and be clear.

You call the calm in chaos the “Red Centre”. What’s your advice to leaders on how to get there when everything feels urgent?

The ‘Red Centre’ is the physical nerve center of a kidnapping negotiation. It’s also a metaphor for an inner fortress and resilience we all have that we can rely on when we’re faced with pressure and overwhelm. Because nothing is ever so urgent that a leader can’t buy themselves time to access their Red Centre. This applies in life-or-death kidnap negotiations, combat, as well as in business. We do so by applying a 3-step immediate action (IA) drill:

• Interrupt the Pattern: Buy yourself time, even for a few seconds. Do something that interrupts your current overwhelming thoughts or feelings. If you’re sitting down, stand up; take a couple of deep breaths, go outside, have a drink.
• Ride the Wave: When something is presented as being ‘urgent’, your body releases chemicals including adrenaline and cortisol. These course through your body for about 90 seconds. Once you’ve interrupted the pattern, you need to ‘feel the feeling but drop the story’. In other words, notice in your body where the tension is e.g., churning in your stomach or tightness in your shoulders. Crucially, let go of the reason (‘story’) as to why you’re feeling it. There is a tendency to blame, name, or shame someone or something else for causing this uncomfortable feeling. If you’re still feeling it after 90 seconds, it means you’re just repeating the pattern over again!
• Ask Better Questions: Now that that feeling has dissipated, you’re in a much better situation to ask better questions, which you wouldn’t have been able to while riding the wave. Such questions may include: ‘What is the real issue here?,’ ‘What makes this so urgent and important?,’ How can I best prioritize?,’ ‘What support do I need right now.’

In your experience, what’s the classic mistake executives make at the table? How do you coach them to avoid it?

They treat negotiations as a win/lose game and will rush to try and solve problems they see getting in the way of that. I coach them to frame their approach as one of cooperation or collaboration and to identify the real drivers and obstacles to a successful, long-term outcome. This includes ensuring you don’t lower the status or threaten the ‘identity’ of the other side. While you may still get an agreement if you do, it will be short-lived, and they will resent you and feel like you’ve exploited them. Ensuring all parties to a negotiation are able to walk away having saved face is essential.

Empathy, trust, and active listening don’t sound like hardball tactics, yet they can flip a negotiation. Do you recall a moment where these softer skills turned the tide?

Hardball tactics don’t work long-term, which is why I train leaders and their teams how to become masters of the conversation beneath the conversation. They can only do this by listening at Level 5, which involves words (surface messages), needs (hidden drivers such as control, belonging, etc.,) and feelings (emotional tone).

AI is taking over parts of decision-making. How can principles from crisis negotiation such as psychological safety, trust, and judgment guide leaders as they bring Al into high-stakes talks?

Psychological safety is an often misunderstood concept in today’s workplace. At its worst, it involves people simply nodding along, suppressing any doubts about what they may be thinking or feeling. Embracing tension and conflict can be healthy if managed properly.

That said, AI is a game-changer when it comes to negotiation. Just like in a kidnap negotiation, we’d never walk in unprepared. Every angle would be rehearsed and every move anticipated. Business is no different. And AI can help with preparing.

Treat AI as your new negotiation sparring partner. When I train leaders to negotiate under pressure, we drill scenarios until nothing surprises them. We incorporate AI into this training to help role-play and stress-test both their own and any counterarguments.

A caveat is that while AI can sharpen your edge, if you lean on it too hard, you can lose the two assets that close deals: trust and judgment. AI is not replacing negotiators, and the winners will combine human instinct and machine intelligence. Remember, we decide emotionally and justify logically afterwards. If you feed AI from frustration, greed, or fear, then the output will amplify the problem.

If a company wants to embed your methods into leadership training, where should they start? What’s the one drill or habit that builds crisis-proof negotiators?

The primary thing I teach leaders and their teams is my 5-Step Negotiation Framework. The first part of this is learning how to master emotional self-regulation and develop sensory acuity that enables them to read a room, adapt their communication, and ultimately be able to influence others often without having direct authority over them. Why is this important? Because we’re all in sales, whether involving products and services, or ideas and vision. And if you can’t remain calm, grounded, and focused when under pressure or faced with a crisis, then you’ll fail to be the successful leader you could be.