Sales · The internal advocate who sells in your place, In complex B2B sales, a software vendor stuck facing a hostile purchasing department relies on an internal champion, the business user convinced by the demo. The latter defends the project in committee as an operational need, not as a purchase. The literature on major-account selling (Miller Heiman, "Strategic Selling") formalised this logic of the internal coach: the supplier no longer pushes the offer, it equips it so that a credible third party can carry it. The conversion rate rises because the sender of the message is no longer suspected of self-interest.
Political · The Kennedy-Dobrynin back-channel (Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962), At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, no public agreement was possible without making one of the superpowers lose face. Two indirect channels defused the crisis: journalist John Scali acted as an unofficial relay with Soviet agent Alexander Feklisov, while Robert Kennedy secretly met ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to signal that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be withdrawn, but that this could not appear in any public agreement. Indirect negotiation allowed Khrushchev to back down without humiliation, illustrating the face-saving function of the detour channel.
Diplomatic · The Oslo Accords: Norway as a discreet relay (1993), Israel and the PLO could not negotiate openly: contacting the PLO was an offence in Israel, and dealing with Israel was seen as a betrayal on the Palestinian side. Norway then opened a secret channel, run by academic intermediaries and by diplomats such as Jan Egeland and Johan Jørgen Holst. Away from the spotlight, the most explosive questions, including mutual recognition, matured, while Washington publicly handled the less sensitive matters. The process led to the mutual recognition of the PLO and Israel, a textbook case of the back-channel studied by Anthony Wanis-St. John.
Judicial · Civil mediation as third-party negotiation, In a commercial dispute where the parties dig into their positions and communicate through lawyers, the judge steers them towards mediation. The mediator, a neutral third party, conducts separate meetings ("caucuses") and shuttles between the parties. They carry each side's figures to the other, reframing them without the accusatory charge of direct exchanges. This institutionalised indirect negotiation, encouraged in France through conventional and judicial mediation, reaches agreements where a courtroom clash would have frozen positions and driven up costs.
Business · Behind-the-scenes labour pre-negotiation, Before a sensitive reorganisation, a human resources department talks upstream with a moderate union representative to calibrate acceptable support measures. The sticking points are adjusted discreetly, so that the official session ratifies a compromise that has already been pre-negotiated. This practice, documented in the sociology of labour relations, speeds up the agreement and allows the representative to defend it before their base, provided the channel remains legitimate and is not perceived as collusion, which would immediately discredit the relay.
Everyday life · The relative who reopens family dialogue, During an inheritance settlement, two heirs no longer speak: every direct exchange degenerates. A third sibling, deemed neutral, agrees to carry the proposals from one to the other. By reframing the offers without the accumulated emotional weight, they lower the tension and re-establish a channel. This spontaneous recourse to a trusted third party, which William Ury theorises under the name of the "third side", shows that indirect negotiation is not reserved for diplomacy: it also saves private relationships threatened by the face-to-face.
