Coaching practices for Zero Sum Thinking
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Zero Sum Thinking, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’m walking into this dead certain it’s one fixed pie
- Every time I try to weigh whether to keep going, the years and money I’ve already poured in flood right back in and drown out the actual question
- I’m walking into this thing braced for a fight, certain that whatever they get is coming straight out of my pocket
- Every option I’m weighing is just a tweak on what already exists
- I keep grinding to engineer the perfect outcome and getting nowhere, and it just occurred to me I’ve never once flipped it around and asked what would absolutely guarantee this blows up
Practices that may help
- Negotiate from abundance, not scarcity
Question the assumption that what one side gains the other must lose.
The Third Alternative, Made Practical - Zero out past investment before evaluating the forward decision
Explicitly set prior investment to zero and evaluate only what each future path offers from here.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: Escaping Bad Investments - Reject the fixed-pie assumption
Stop assuming your gain must be their loss — most negotiations have hidden joint gains.
Win-Win Thinking: Expanding the Pie - Define the ideal final result first
Describe the perfect outcome as if the solution already exists and costs nothing, then work backward to what could enable it.
TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions - Use inversion as the first model in every problem
Before solving a problem, ask what would guarantee failure — then avoid those things.
Mental Models: Charlie Munger’s Latticework Approach - Adopt a "not-knowing" stance before problem-solving
Delay solution-generation by first articulating what you genuinely do not know about a problem.
Beginner's Mind (Shoshin), Made Practical - Use "none" when "some" is harder
A clean zero is often easier to sustain than a tightly rationed "a little."
Bright-Line Rules: When "None" Beats "Some" - Provocation (PO): make a deliberately absurd statement to escape the pattern
Prefix an impossible or absurd idea with "PO" to signal it is a provocation, not a proposal — then follow it to see what it unlocks.
Lateral Thinking, Made Practical - Reverse brainstorm: solve the opposite problem first
Ask "How would we guarantee the worst possible outcome?" — then invert every answer.
Lateral Thinking, Made Practical - Win-Win Thinking: Expanding the Pie
Win-win (integrative) thinking treats negotiation as a chance to create value before dividing it, instead of fighting over a fixed pie (distributive bargaining). By trading across differences in what each side values, both can come out better than a simple compromise — a well-supported idea in negotiation research, though it requires the right conditions to work.
Related concerns
- Zero Sum Assumption
Stop assuming your gain must be their loss — most negotiations have hidden joint gains.
Reject the fixed-pie assumption
- Expand The Pie Negotiation
Expanding the pie means trading across issues that the two parties value differently, so both sides gain more than any fixed compromise would allow. Malhotra and Bazerman’s research shows that most negotiators leave joint gains on the table because they treat every issue as a zero-sum battle.
- Expanding The Pie Negotiation Beyond Splitting The Difference After A Loss
Expanding the pie means trading across issues that the two parties value differently, so both sides gain more than any fixed compromise would allow. Malhotra and Bazerman’s research shows that most negotiators leave joint gains on the table because they treat every issue as a zero-sum battle.
- Expanding The Pie Negotiation Beyond Splitting The Difference After A Setback
Expanding the pie means trading across issues that the two parties value differently, so both sides gain more than any fixed compromise would allow. Malhotra and Bazerman’s research shows that most negotiators leave joint gains on the table because they treat every issue as a zero-sum battle.
- Expanding The Pie Negotiation Beyond Splitting The Difference At Work
Expanding the pie means trading across issues that the two parties value differently, so both sides gain more than any fixed compromise would allow. Malhotra and Bazerman’s research shows that most negotiators leave joint gains on the table because they treat every issue as a zero-sum battle.
- Expanding The Pie Negotiation Beyond Splitting The Difference During Conflict
Expanding the pie means trading across issues that the two parties value differently, so both sides gain more than any fixed compromise would allow. Malhotra and Bazerman’s research shows that most negotiators leave joint gains on the table because they treat every issue as a zero-sum battle.
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