What a former FBI hostage negotiator can teach us about audit conversations that actually move things forward
By William Englehaupt
By the time an auditor walks into a difficult conversation—a pushback on a finding, a tense remediation discussion, a stakeholder who has “been through this before”—most of the outcome has already been shaped by what happened in the first few minutes of listening.
Or the failure to listen.
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Chris Voss spent decades negotiating hostage releases for the FBI. His book, Never Split the Difference, distills that experience into a single governing idea: the fastest way to move any high-stakes conversation forward is to make the other person feel genuinely heard. He calls it tactical empathy—understanding the other person’s perspective well enough that they stop defending their position and start engaging with yours.
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