Third Story

Introduced in Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (1999) by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project. The book built on Roger Fisher and William Ury's Getting to Yes (1981), also from the Harvard project, which introduced principled negotiation. Stone, Patton, and Heen proposed that beginning from the "Third Story" — the account a neutral observer would tell — bypasses defensiveness and establishes shared ground before either party's personal narrative is heard.