title: Identifying the game description: (reference) Classifying a stuck deal as a hostile negotiation, a resource fight, or a financial abstraction, and the counter-move each one implies.
Identifying the game
Some blockers are not qualification problems, and qualification logic prescribes the same wrong move for all of them: follow up harder, escalate, discount.
Run this only when a blocker has already survived a straightforward attempt to clear it. First failure means do the obvious thing properly. Repeated failure usually means the deal is a different kind of contest than it appears.
Output: one line at the top of the maneuver's orient phase — the game, and the reframe it implies. Nothing else from this page reaches the artifact.
The routing table
| Signals in the context layer | The game | The reframe it forces | Cycle-1 shape |
|---|---|---|---|
| A stakeholder went dark after real engagement; procurement stonewalls; concessions extracted with no reciprocity; communication has gone one-directional | Hostile negotiation | From chasing a decision to making it safe to say no | Name their unspoken position for them, accurately and without defence, and let them correct you |
| Budget freeze or reallocation; internal consolidation; your line item against another function's; a sponsor who wants it but cannot free funds | Zero-sum resource fight | From convincing your sponsor to changing what the rival claimant gets | Find the structure where the competing claimant gains from your winning — shared line, shared measure, or sequencing that serves them first |
| Value is time-to-value, risk reduction, or optionality; the buyer agrees with the logic and does not act; "we'll revisit next quarter" with no objection attached | Financial abstraction | From defending your price to pricing the delay | Quantify the cost of the waiting period itself — what it forecloses, what it makes more expensive later |
| None of the above | Ordinary qualification gap | — | Proceed with standard construction; skip this page |
The last row is the common case. Most stuck deals are stuck because nobody asked a question, not because a mental model was missing.
What each game changes in practice
Hostile negotiation. A stakeholder who has stopped responding is usually avoiding a conversation they expect to be unpleasant, not avoiding you. Stating their likely conclusion out loud — that you are too expensive, that this slipped down the list, that they have already chosen someone else — makes correcting you easier than continuing to avoid you. The counterintuitive part is that pressure produces more silence, so the move de-escalates and asks the other side to fill the gap.
Applied: procurement silent for three weeks after a pricing exchange. Standard play is a fourth follow-up. Instead: "I expect you've concluded this is priced above what you can approve this quarter, and that it's easier not to reply than to say so. If that's right, tell me and I'll close the file." What comes back is frequently not the objection you assumed — often the budget moved, which is a different dimension entirely and a different play.
Zero-sum resource fight. Two claimants on a fixed pool default to competing even where cooperation serves both. Arguing your case harder is playing the game as posed; the productive move changes the payoff so the rival claimant is not harmed by your winning.
Applied: your project and another function are competing for the same budget line. Rather than strengthening your sponsor's case, find the outcome both functions are measured on, or sequence delivery so the rival's need is met first. The deal stops depending on your sponsor winning an internal argument, which is the part you cannot control.
Financial abstraction. When the buyer's alternative is doing nothing, and nothing costs them nothing on paper, no amount of value articulation moves them. The object to quantify is the delay, not the solution — what a quarter of waiting costs, what it forecloses, and what it makes more expensive later.
Applied: "we'll revisit next quarter" with no objection you can address. Price the quarter: the volume of the problem that accrues in it, the work that has to be redone if the decision lands later, the option that expires. The number under discussion becomes the wait rather than the price.
The terminology lock — non-negotiable
Borrowed vocabulary never reaches the rep, the artifact, or the deal review. Map it back before anything is written down.
| Borrowed concept | Write it as |
|---|---|
| Accusation audit, labelling | Risk mitigation discovery |
| BATNA, walk-away alternative | Cost of inaction |
| Payoff matrix, defection | Competing internal priorities |
| Option value, carry cost | Cost of delay |
Two reasons. A rep who repeats negotiation-theory vocabulary in front of a buyer sounds like they are running a technique, which destroys the effect the technique depends on. And an artifact that mixes vocabularies stops being reviewable — a manager cannot compare deals when each speaks a different language.
Compatibility check
Before accepting a play derived this way:
- Does it bypass a stakeholder whose validation the deal requires? Then it fails, however elegant.
- Does it depend on a dimension currently scored 0? Close that unknown first — a borrowed model applied to unverified facts is confident and wrong.
- Can this rep deliver it credibly? A move that only works when performed well is worse than a plain one performed badly. Where the answer is no, use the ordinary play and coach the technique separately.