ABSTRACT
When people in crisis appear unwilling to engage in a conversation, crisis negotiators must create opportunities to engage rather than disengage. In this chapter, we introduce methods for getting a conversation started with a person in crisis. For example, we show how withholding institutional affiliation is counter-productive: when confronted with questions like “who are you?”, negotiators are better off being upfront about their institutional identity (e.g., “I’m with the police”) than to hide it (e.g., “I’m just here to help”). A key takeaway of this chapter is learning how to ask questions from the very start of the negotiation, specifically questions that are within the person in crisis’s domain of knowledge without challenging their choices. By the end of this chapter, readers will learn conversational strategies to get a person in crisis to engage with the negotiator productively, with a willingness to move beyond the conversation’s opening phase.
