Black Swan Discovery

Identify the hidden unknowns that will determine whether your negotiation succeeds or fails before you ever make an offer. Use when someone asks "why is my counterpart acting irrationally?", "why does this deal keep stalling for no apparent reason?", "what am I missing about this negotiation?", "how do I find out what the other side really wants?", or "why won't they just say yes when the deal is clearly good for them?" Also use for: diagnosing a stalled sales cycle where the prospect keeps deflecting, investigating why a candidate rejected an offer that seemed strong, uncovering hidden constraints before entering a high-stakes contract renegotiation, mapping leverage before a complex partnership discussion, or rebuilding a broken negotiation relationship. Produces a black-swan-report.md with a hypothesis map of unknown unknowns in all three categories (worldview mismatches, hidden constraints, hidden agendas), a leverage inventory across all three leverage types, and a prioritized bank of investigation questions to surface what you do not yet know. Pair with counterpart-style-profiler (to refine worldview hypotheses by type) and calibrated-questions-planner (to convert investigation questions into a deployment-ready set).

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Install

Claude CodeClawhHubnpxCursorCodexGemini CLI

1. Add marketplace

› /plugin marketplace add bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills

2. Install plugin

› /plugin install never-split-the-difference@bookforge-skills

3. Use the skill

› /black-swan-discovery

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Source Book

Never Split the Difference

Chris Voss

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