Three phrases we use as one. They are not!
Two cousins once fought over one bedroom during a family trip.
Only one bedroom had an attached bathroom.
“Give it to me,” said one. “I got here first.”
“No, give it to me,” said the other. “I have a bad back.”
Everyone assumed only one of them could win.
Then someone asked a simple question.
“Why does only one person need the room all four nights?”
They swapped.
Two nights each.
Problem solved.
The room was fixed. The negotiation wasn’t.
We do this more often than we realise
Sometimes resources really are limited.
If there is one bar of chocolate and I eat more, you get less.
That’s a fixed pie. No clever negotiation is going to manufacture more chocolate.
But many of life’s negotiations aren’t chocolate bars.
Yet we treat them as if they are.
Behavioural researchers call this the Fixed Pie Bias – our tendency to assume that the interests of two sides are directly opposed.
If you get more, I must get less.
If you win, I must lose.
And once we frame the problem that way, guess what we start doing?
Fighting over slices.
Fixed Pie, Zero Sum and Win-Win aren’t the same thing
We often use these three expressions interchangeably.
They’re not.
A zero-sum game describes the actual situation. One person’s gain genuinely equals another person’s loss.
A Fixed Pie Bias is what happens when we assume we’re in such a situation – even when other possibilities exist.
And a win-win becomes possible when we stop arguing only about the obvious constraint and start looking for other things that can change.
Sometimes we can make the pie bigger.
Sometimes we can cut it differently.
And sometimes, as my cousins discovered, we can simply eat our slices at different times.
The data centre problem
Here’s a rather more consequential example.
AI needs massive data centres.
Data centres generate enormous amounts of heat.
That heat has to go somewhere.
And cooling has traditionally required substantial amounts of water.
So particularly in drought-prone regions, the argument can quickly become:
Do we want data centres – or do we want water?
Framed that way, somebody has to lose.
Except engineers have been changing the question.
Newer approaches to data-centre cooling increasingly use technologies that can substantially reduce water requirements.
The constraint hasn’t disappeared.
The engineering has changed what’s negotiable.
The International Energy Agency’s work on AI and energy highlights just how rapidly data-centre infrastructure is expanding as AI grows.
So the interesting question isn’t: “AI or water?”
It’s: “How do we design AI infrastructure that uses dramatically less water?”
The water constraint may be real. But that doesn’t mean the entire problem is fixed.
We make the same mistake at work
Suppose you’re negotiating a new job.
You want ₹30 lakh.
The company says its budget allows only ₹27 lakh.
And now the negotiation gets stuck.
₹30 lakh. ₹27 lakh.
₹30 lakh. ₹27 lakh.
Both sides are fighting over one slice of the deal.
But what do you actually want?
Perhaps it’s more money.
Or perhaps it’s greater flexibility. More leave. A joining bonus. Stock options. A better title. Remote working. An earlier salary review.
And what does the company actually want?
Perhaps it genuinely can’t breach a salary band – but can move on several of those other things.
The salary may be constrained. The employment deal isn’t.
Or consider something even simpler
Two colleagues both want next Friday off.
The immediate question is: “Who gets it?”
But that’s a question about their positions.
Both want Friday off.
Their underlying interests might be completely different.
One needs to attend her daughter’s school function in the morning.
The other is travelling out of town that evening.
Suddenly, other possibilities appear.
- Could one work from home?
- Could someone swap a shift?
- Could the supposedly “urgent” Friday task move to Monday?
- Could they each take half a day?
Nobody knows until someone asks.
Why don’t we ask?
Because fixed-pie thinking is cognitively convenient.
Once I’ve decided that what you want conflicts with what I want, the problem becomes wonderfully simple.
I don’t have to understand you.
I just have to beat you.
Max Bazerman and Margaret Neale have spent decades studying how people negotiate. Their work shows how assumptions about opposing interests can cause negotiators to overlook opportunities that would benefit both sides.
Their 1992 book Negotiating Rationally devoted an entire section to what they called the “mythical fixed-pie.”
And that’s where an important distinction comes in.
Positions are what people ask for. Interests are why they want them.
We usually negotiate the first without understanding the second.
So before your next negotiation…
Before fighting over slices, ask three questions.
1. What’s genuinely fixed?
Budget? Time? Quantity? Deadline?
Some constraints are real. Identify them.
2. What does each side actually want?
Not just what they’re asking for.
Why do they want it?
3. What else can we change?
Timing? Scope? Method? Location? Convenience? Risk? Recognition?
Because the moment another variable enters the conversation, what looked like a zero-sum problem may stop being one.
Back to that bedroom
There really was only one bedroom with an attached bathroom.
That constraint never changed.
What changed was the question.
The cousins began with: “Who gets the room?”
Someone else asked: “Why does one person have to get it for all four nights?”
And suddenly there was another variable… Time.
That’s the thing about many negotiations.
One part of the problem may genuinely be fixed.
We make the mistake of assuming that means everything else is fixed too.
So before fighting over the slices, ask:
What else can we change?
You might discover there was more pie than you thought.
Or simply another way to cut it.
Well, now you know it too!
(Where have you assumed someone had to lose for you to win? I’d love to hear your story in the comments.)
