Deal fatigue
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Negotiation Anatomy™
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Deal fatigue
/diːl fəˈtiːɡ/ (n.)
The point at which an activity’s intrinsic tedium becomes so intolerable that it dawns on participants that the ditch in which they have been stubbornly insisting they will die is really just a rut on the side of an ugly hill leading nowhere in particular, doesn’t look an especially comfortable place even to lie down in, let alone bid a final adieu to this fragile existence, and that there is more fun to be had threatening to die in other ditches, on other hills, on other days, by passing up the opportunity to actually die, today, in this one. This revelatory moment happens spontaneously for all concerned participants, and often at about the same time. Usually on a Friday in the middle of the afternoon.
Commercial transactions all have a “point of deal fatigue” — it is more or less linear — at which point everyone goes sod it, forgets about typos, gives preposterous indemnities and just signs the damn contract.
Asymmetric deal fatigue as a negotiation gambit
The canny legal eagle keeps enough dry powder to box on when her opponent is catatonic. Hence, the negotiation tactic of raising issues over time, rather than up front. As each successive blow lands, ditch tolerance in the opposite side is stunted. This is, of course, bad faith, deteriorates the commercial relationship between the principals, while only the lawyers stand to benefit.
A modern negotiator must thus regard herself as some kind of endurance athlete. We recommend a Spartan workout regime of ascetic sleep deprivation, to build up the strength to resist this shoddy tactic
Bureaucracy never sleeps
On the other hand, bureaucratic processes imposed by middle management cannot reach the point of deal fatigue. Policy will not allow it. It is a conceptual impossibility: the potential “fatigue curve” for bureaucratic tasks is thereby curved into a new dimension of tedial space-time; but in the flat, three-dimensional geometry of normal bore-space, the fatigue point for bureaucracy is asymptotic. It gets close — very, very close — to that line, but never crosses it. Instead, yawns away to an infinitely distant point (the “boredom heat death of the universe”) and those poor souls — subject matter experts, usually — who are compelled to follow that policy curve are trapped, wrung out and plastered for all infinity at the event horizon of utter dreck — a Schwarzschild radius around which many of us orbit quite closely enough already, thank you very much.