Have you ever thought about how you make decisions in negotiations? Over the course of a complex negotiation, there are hundreds of decisions you make. Most are probably done unconsciously; others require some deliberate thought. But on what basis do you decide? Do you follow your gut? Toss a coin? Discuss in your committee and vote? List the pros and cons? Research to get more information? Or, by not making any decision at all – which is also a decision?

One thing is certain in any negotiation: you will never have all the information on the table. What does the other party's thought process look like? Is their board really as unified as it appears, or do internal politics in fact distract their decision-making? The answer is, you will never know for sure – you will need to find out.

This is where decision-making as a core skill of any savvy negotiator kicks in. Decision-making usually boils down to analysis vs. intuition. This might be right, but it's vague and doesn't answer the question of how organisations incorporate their decision-making into a process (spoiler: most don't). So, let's have a closer look at the two approaches to decision-making.

Annie Duke, a former professional poker player and author of the book Thinking in Bets, lays out an interesting approach to decision-making. Duke's hypothesis is, in essence, that every decision we make is a bet – a bet on a set of possible outcomes in the future, informed by our beliefs. In other words, we typically decide our next move in a negotiation based on what we believe will make our organisation (or ourselves, for that matter) better off in the future. Duke's approach focuses on probabilities. Like in a game of poker, where you can never determine 100% what is going to happen, the same applies in negotiations: how will your counterpart respond to a certain move?

Duke's approach would be to say "I am 6 out of 10 on this" or "I am 80% confident." Adding a number forces you to identify your perceived level of uncertainty. This requires you to first think about what you don't know. Jeff Bezos and the late former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell are both well-known for making decisions with around 40 to 70 percent of the information at hand. At the same time, organisations often teach employees to reduce uncertainty in the face of adversity. This is where Duke's approach fits right in –as a method to reduce your level of uncertainty, provided that your inquiry is done with honesty, care, and seriousness. The rabbit hole, however, is that adding more juice to the pot rarely creates better juice. After a certain point, uncertainty is often no longer reducible, only leadable. How an organisation deals with such uncertainty is in fact a good indicator of its negotiation culture.

What struck me is that Duke – contrary to mainstream managerial belief – explicitly embraces expressing uncertainty by saying "I'm not sure." That said, openly stating "I'm not sure" needs courage and a culture that allows expressing such uncertainty. The reality is often the other way round: being certain is good; uncertain is bad. But can you really reduce your uncertainty with a few more PowerPoint slides?

If you stayed with me until here, you might be thinking: OK, but I don't need probabilities, nor do I need to acknowledge my uncertainty – I usually know what to do. Fair enough. You're not completely wrong here, but as with most things, it's a little more nuanced than this.

This is where the other approach comes into play: Gary Klein's The Power of Intuition. Klein researched how decision-making is rooted in intuition. First of all, intuition – in this context – is not simply following your gut feeling or an extrasensory perception like a sixth sense or a supernatural ability. Intuition, as per Klein, is "the way we translate our experience into action." Your intuition is shaped by your past experiences, which you've built up over time by accumulating large amounts of patterns in your job. Through your past negotiations, you learned what usually works, what doesn't, or how your counterpart typically replies when you're asking for that discount.

The bad news is that: a) if you want to improve your intuitive decision-making skills, you have to actively push for it. Just passively acquiring more experiences won't automatically result in you becoming a better intuitive decision-maker. You have to work for it, just like a professional athlete. You need goals, feedback, variability – a structured process. And b) your intuition isn't always right. It might well be that you've actually learned some things in negotiations in a bad way. Remember that negotiation course from business school twenty years ago? In addition, don't underestimate the element of luck. It may be that your counterpart reacted in a certain way not because of your seemingly cunning tactic but because he or she had, in fact, other priorities. This is where the subtle cues you need to learn to pick up kick in as a tool to really master intuitive decision-making – or the ability to spot anomalies, for example in situations where, despite evidence to the contrary, you feel something is off. This is extremely hard and rare. And let's not forget that you have a job to do, the one you've actually been employed for.

The real question for organisations who want to become better at negotiations is not which method is better than the other. Of course, you need both. It depends. But more importantly, both miss the actual point. Both approaches look at decision-making from an individual standpoint when, in fact, renegotiating a strategic contract or a new partnership deal is usually a team effort. These negotiations do not happen in a 1:1 vacuum but in a complex business environment where people, departments, and stakeholders interact with different cultures, hierarchies, and structures.

Two stakeholders may well have different opinions on their probabilities. There's usually no space to synthesise these divergent views. Political dynamics often override analytical clarity. Saying "I'm 70% confident" means absolutely nothing if there's no supporting governance around who decides at what threshold. Intuition varies wildly in organisations based on individual backgrounds, experiences, and approaches to negotiation. Key stakeholders might lack the specific skills or experiences needed (not least because negotiation, surprisingly, is not viewed as a strategic capability in a lot of organisations). Given all the uncertainties, it's easy to resort to analysis as a safe harbour to reduce uncertainty.

The real skill for organisations who want to excel is, therefore, not choosing between analysis and intuition but embedding decision-making into a structured, repeatable negotiation process altogether. Or, put differently, the question isn't how you decide – it's whether your organisation has the structure to make those decisions work in the face of uncertainty.