Adam Kahane - Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities

Copyright 2004 by Adam Kahane

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Increasingly we face issues for which hierarchical authority is inadequate. No CEO can transform a company's ability to innovate, or single-handedly create a values-based culture. No country president can resolve intractable political stalemates that stand in the way of national development. It is painfully apparent that even the most powerful political leaders and global institutions are powerless in the face of issues like climate change or the growing gap between rich and poor that, if left unaddressed, will undermine the future we leave our children and grandchildren.

Faced with this reality, we see everywhere a growing sense of powerlessness and an increasing reliance on force. The former reflects awareness that the big issues are generally getting worse, not better; the latter, a desperate response to this awareness. Few of us do not shudder at the prospect of a continuation of today's escalating reliance on force. Adam Kahane's book poses a third option: a transformation in our ability to talk, think, and act together. I am convinced this is the only reliable path forward, not only for hierarchical leaders but for all of usas parents, citizens, and people at all levels in organizationsseeking to contribute to meaningful change.

While this third option is commonly dismissed as idealistic and unrealistic, Adam's belief in this possibility has been forged in the fire of some of the world's most complex and conflicted situations. As a young scenario planner from Shell, he found himself in 1991 helping formerly outlawed black political party leaders in South Africa develop strategies to guide their divided country. The problem was that they saw the world differently from one another and very differently from the white minority with whom they had to work. Remarkably, in little more than a year, this Mont Fleur scenario process resulted in a meaningful consensus on many of the country's core challenges and a way of talking and working together that united a broad cross section of the country. South Africa still faces immense challenges, but it is hard to imagine the country's transition to stable multiracial democracy without this process and others like it.