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

by Adam Kahane, Peter M Senge (Foreword)

Adam Kahane spent years working in the world's hotspots, and came away with a new understanding of how to resolve conflict in a way that seems reasonable - and doable - to all parties. The result is Solving Tough Problems. Written in a relaxed, persuasive style, this is not a ""how-to"" book with glib answers, but rather, a very personal story of the author's progress from a young ""expert"" convinced of the need to provide cold, ""correct"" answers to an effective facilitator of positive change - by learning how to create environments that enable new ideas and creative solutions to emerge. The book explores the connection between individual learning and institutional change, and how leaders can move beyond politeness and formal statements, beyond routine debate and defensiveness, toward deeper and more productive dialogue. Both tough and inspiring, the book explores models, technologies, and examples that foster and facilitate ""dialogues of the heart.""

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Leadership, Communication, Management, Relationships, Science

168 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2004

About the author

Adam Kahane is a Director of Reos Partners, an international social enterprise that helps people move forward together on their most important and intractable issues.

Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address such challenges. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.


Adam is a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2022 he was named a Schwab Foundation Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our thinking is built from assumed oppositions: emotional vs rational, personal vs professional, individual vs corporate. I've been chewing up a lot of books talking about building business that other people can run, and their model is the restaurant industry: minimum wage employees have to deliver consistent and excellent experiences for customers. Consequently the view of business is very impersonal: the people are interchangeable units and the business is the enduring structure built around them. A corporation is, literally, a body and the people inside it are subordinate to the larger entity's emergent wishes.

Within that mindset, a process should not depend on the unique properties of the person doing it. I mean, given a basic functioning human you should be able to drop them into the job and they function. They might need specialist knowledge, but they shouldn't have to be a specific type of person--if you need people to be greeted with a smile, that's something that the person in the job does rather than a job that requires only happy people.

Adam Kahane's book, on the other hand, is personal. He takes us through his history as an economist and scenario planner at Shell, finally into his work on conflict resolution after the scenario planning for South Africa led to significant breakthroughs. We see how much of what he's done and become is about himself: not just his skills, but also his approach and attitudes and insights. And that the system he's built, a way of getting people to sit down in safety and understand each other's positions and the consequences of their actions, is built on changing people. They don't occupy roles and rigid structures, this is about changing *them* and the people you get and what you do with them matters.

It's fascinating, well written, and thought-provoking. I'd love to be a part of one of his workshops.

The first brainstorming exercise produced thirty stories. The team combined these and narrowed them down to nine for further work, and set up four subteams to flesh out the scenarios along social, political, economic, and international dimensions. [...] They first addressed the nine scenarios in more depth and then narrowed the field to four that they thought, given the current situation in the country, were the most plausible and important. After that workshop, the team went back to their own organizations and networks to test these four scenarios. At a third workshop, in March 1992, the participants reviewed and refined the write-ups of the final scenarios and agreed how they would be published and disseminated. [...]

The team's final scenarios asked the question: How will the South African transition go, and will the country succeed in "taking off"? Each of the four stories gave a different answer and had a different message that mattered to the country in 1992. South Africa was in the middle of the contentious and risky transition negotiations. Nobody knew how or even whether they would succeed, or if the country would remain stuck, closed, embattled, and isolated. As a set, the scenarios provided a provocative road map for this transition.

There were three dark prophecies of futures to avoid: Ostrich, in which the nonrepresentative white government sticks its head in the sand to try to avoid a negotiated settlement with the black majority; Lame Duck, in which there is a prolonged transition with a constitutionally weakened government which, because it purports to respond to all, satisfies none; and Icarus, in which a constitutionally unconstrained black government comes to power on a wave of popular support and noble intentions, and embarks on a huge and unsustainable public spending program, which crashes the economy. Then there was one bright vision of a future to work towards: Flight of the Flamingoes, in which the transition is successful because all the key building blocks are put in place, with everyone in the society rising slowly and together.

Once the four scenarios had been agreed upon, the team introduced them into the national conversation. They inserted a twenty-five-page booklet into the leading weekly newspaper, arranged for the work to be discussed in the media, and distributed a cartoon video of the four stories. Most importantly, they ran more than 100 workshops for leadership groups of their own and other influential political, business, and civic organizations, where the four scenarios were presented and debated. President de Klerk reacted to Mont Fleur by saying, "I am not an Ostrich."

Icarus got the most attention. Here the leading economists of the left were warning their comrades of the dangers of irresponsible left-wing economic policies. Mosebyane Malatsi of the Pan-Africanist Congress, the ANC's main rival on the left, presented Icarus to his own top leaders. He said, "This is a scenario of what will happen if the ANC comes to power. And if they don't do it, we will push them into it." Malatsi was showing his colleagues both an unfamiliar and undesirable economic scenario for South Africa and the role that their own policies and actions would play.

How he thinks of problems:

My key insight was that South Africans had discovered an exceptionally effective way to solve tough problems. I proved this to myself with the painstaking logic of an ex-physicist. I knew that problems are tough because they are complex, and that there are three types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social.

A problem has low dynamic complexity if cause and effect are close together in space and time. In a car engine, for example, causes produce effects that are nearby, immediate, and obvious; and so, why an engine doesn't run can usually be understood and solved by testing and fixing one piece at a time. By contrast, a problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time. For example, economic decisions in New York affect the price of gold in Johannesburg, and apartheid-era educational policies affect present-day black employment prospects. Such problems--management theorist Russell Ackoff calls them "messes"--can only be understood systemically, taking account of the interrelationships among the pieces and the functioning of the system as a whole.

A problem has low generative complexity if its future is familiar and predictable. In a traditional village, for example, the future simply replays the past, and so solutions and rules from the past will work in the future. A problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable. South Africa, for example, was moving away from the peculiar rigidities of apartheid and into a new, post-Cold War, rapidly globalizing and digitizing world. Solutions to problems of high generative complexity cannot be calculated in advance, on paper, based on what has worked in the past, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds.

A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives. In a well-functioning team, for example, members look at things similarly, and so a boss or an expert can easily propose a solution that everyone agrees with. A problem has high social complexity if the people involved look at things very differently. South Africa had the perspectives of black versus white, left versus right, traditional versus modern--classic conditions for polarization and stuckness. Problems of high social complexity cannot be peacefully solved by authorities from on high; the people involved must participate in creating and implementing solutions.

My analysis gave me a neat answer to my first question: Why was the Mont Fleur work unusual and important? Simple problems, with low complexity, can be solved perfectly well--efficiently and effectively--using processes that are piecemeal, backward looking, and authoritarian. By contrast, highly complex problems can only be solved using processes that are systemic, emergent, and participatory. The Mont Fleur approach was important and unusual because it was exceptionally well suited to solving highly complex problems--to enacting profound social innovations. Our process was systemic, building scenarios for South Africa as a whole, taking account of social, political, economic, and international dynamics. It was emergent, because it recognized that precedents and grand plans would be of limited use, and instead used creative teamwork to identify and influence the country's critical current choices. And it was participatory, involving leaders from most of the key national constituencies. The mother of this South African invention was the necessity of its transitional vacuum: a highly complex system, in a fundamentally new context, in which no single authority had the wisdom or legitimacy to enforce solutions. With the practical option of intervention from "above" unavailable, South Africans had no choice but to rely on the miraculous option of working together.

My analysis also allowed me to recognize a widespread "apartheid syndrome." By this I mean trying to solve a highly complex problem using a piecemeal, backward-looking, and authoritarian process that is suitable only for solving simple problems. In this syndrome, people at the top of a complex system try to manage its development through a divide-and-con-quer strategy: through compartmentalization---the Afrikaans word apartheid means "apartness"---and command and control. Because the people at the bottom resist these commands, the system either becomes stuck, or ends up becoming unstuck by force.

On violence:

Gorka Espiau, an Elkarri staff member, explained to me the interaction between violence and nondialogue: "If I know that you, my opponent, would approve of my being killed, that you do not have a basic respect for human life, then how can I have an open, human dialogue with you? And yet without such a dialogue, how can we end the violence? We have to start with a political dialogue to reach an agreement to stop the killing. Then we can have the human dialogue that we need to resolve the deeper underlying conflict."

I met with an opposition member of the Basque regional legislature who told me that the violence had now undermined all communication among the politicians. Once-cordial working relationships in the parliament had broken down into acrimonious exchanges and stony silences.

On talking:

This pattern of not talking and not listening is a symptom of being stuck. Whether or not the actors are on speaking terms, they are not on listening terms. Like the Basque parliamentarians (and many parliamentarians elsewhere), they have made up their minds before their opponents speak. Even if they are silent and pretending to listen, they are really only "reloading," rehearsing their rebuttals. They are in fact listening only to themselves, to the tapes they play over and over in their heads about why they are right and others are wrong. My partner Otto Scharmer calls the kind of talking that takes place in these situations "downloading" because the speaker is reproducing an old file without alteration. The actors sometimes fight openly and violently, and sometimes cover their differences with politeness, skirting sensitive subjects in order to keep the peace. Either way, they are stunted, unable to express who they are in new ways and unable to take in what others are telling them. If they can change this pattern and start to talk and listen, they blossom.

On dictators:

I went to Paraguay to work with forty-five of the country's most open-minded and public-spirited politicians, activists, businesspeople, generals, judges, journalists, intellectuals, peasants, and students. They had agreed to talk together, but I was puzzled by how slowly our work progressed. Most of them seemed to be exceptionally suspicious, cynical, and pessimistic, and hesitant about speaking openly. They deferred to me even on questions for which I had no good answers. Conversations went in circles; understandings came unraveled; commitments were not kept.

I spoke about these patterns with Milda Rivarola, a member of the team and a respected historian. "You have to understand the impact that the dictatorship had on people," she explained. "We needed approvals and permissions for everything. No criticism of the government was allowed. The only way to have influence was to be a part of the government, the military, or the governing party. And by and large people acquiesced. Stroessner had a network of spies and informers (many of them had volunteered!) who set people against each other. Just like in other totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies, social fragmentation was and is severe. What you are seeing in this group--the low levels of trust and initiative--are the after-effects of this repression."

The director of our project was a civic leader named Jorge Talavera, who had worked for decades in adult education and leadership development. He was sanguine about the situation and patient with our slow progress. "Paraguayans aren't used to managing themselves," he explained. "They are always asking 'Who's the boss?' People say that President Wasmosy, our first civilian president after Stroessner, used to assert his authority by asking, 'Who's the penis here?' In this project we are asking people to value their own experiences and to have confidence that they can influence the future. So we are asking them to make a fundamental shift in their way of being. This will take time."

In a dictatorship, the dictator does not listen, and the people are afraid to talk. The results are pessimism and cynicism; lack of self-confidence and self-management; hesitation to speak up and stand up; and painfully slow innovation.
[...]
This description of the communications company managers echoes Rosenberg's description of the Chileans. I have noticed that many of the people in many of the systems I have worked with--including the presidents, CEOs, and generals--say these same words: "The people above me won't let me do anything." This is a symptom of the pervasiveness and internalization of authoritarianism.

The authoritarian approach to solving problems is that the boss, with his smart expert advisors and consultants, dictates solutions. For simple problems, this works wonderfully. Unilateral decision making is fine for a police officer directing traffic at a busy intersection. This problem has low dynamic complexity (cause and effect in the intersection traffic are nearby, immediate, and obvious), low generative complexity (traffic rules from the past apply perfectly well), and low social complexity (all the drivers share the same objective of smoothly running traffic and willingly defer to the officer's authority).

But the authoritarian approach does not work for solving complex problems. Consider a global computer company trying to sell into Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The CEO cannot successfully dictate the company's sales strategy. The development of the computer market is affected by decisions that are being taken far away (in Silicon Valley) and long ago (by Communist industrial planners), and so the sales "problem" has high dynamic complexity that can only be grasped as a whole--for which the CEO needs to think together with the company's front-line staff who are directly in touch with different parts of the system. The problem situation, in the midst of both political and technological revolutions, also has high generative complexity, which means that there is not one right answer that can be created in advance; the situation can only be addressed by working with it as it unfolds. And the problem has high social complexity because it can only be solved with the participation of the people who are part of the problem: global and local staff, customers, suppliers, government officials, and so on.

Unfortunately, the authoritarian approach, with its severe limitations, is the foundation of practically all private and public sector strategic planning.

On Politeness:

Politeness is a way of not talking. When we are being polite, we say what we think we should say: "How are you?" "I'm fine." We do not say what we are really thinking because we are afraid of a social rupture: "How are you?" "I'm terrible." When we talk politely, we are following the party line, trying to fit in and so keep the social system whole and unchanged, even though the whole may be diseased or counterfeit. Talking only about concepts is one way of being polite. Usually we are not even aware that we are following rules of politeness, but when we first enter a system with an unfamiliar set of rules--as when I entered PG&E and Shell--we notice them.
[...]
When somebody speaks personally, passionately, and from the heart, the conversation deepens. When a team develops a habit of speaking openly, then the problem they are working on begins to shift. By contrast, a habit of speaking overly cautiously obscures the problem and keeps it stuck. The Canadian team had a hard time agreeing on conclusions because our conversations did not go deep enough for us to find the ground that we truly had in common, and from which we could construct a way forward that we all believed in.

Facilitation:

I started working with a brilliant South African consultant named Louis van der Merwe. He taught me that the job of a facilitator is to help the participants speak up, listen up, and bring all of their personal resources to the work at hand. Our job is not to direct or control the participants. He also taught me that even though we were remaining neutral with respect to the substance of the participants' work, our process was not neutral: it embodied values of openness, inclusion, and collaboration.

Suggestions:
How can you get started? Here are ten suggestions:

1. Pay attention to your state of being and to how you are talking and listening. Notice your own assumptions, reactions, contractions, anxieties, prejudices, and projections.
2. Speak up. Notice and say what you are thinking, feeling, and wanting.
3. Remember that you don't know the truth about anything. When you think that you are absolutely certain about the way things are, add "in my opinion" to your sentence. Don't take yourself too seriously.
4. Engage with and listen to others who have a stake in the system. Seek out people who have different, even opposing, perspectives from yours. Stretch beyond your comfort zone.
5. Reflect on your own role in the system. Examine how what you are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are.
6. Listen with empathy. Look at the system through the eyes of the other. Imagine yourself in the shoes of the other.
7. Listen to what is being said not just by yourself and others but through all of you. Listen to what is emerging in the system as a whole. Listen with your heart. Speak from your heart.
8. Stop talking. Camp out beside the questions and let answers come to you.
9. Relax and be fully present. Open up your mind and heart and will. Open yourself up to being touched and transformed.
10. Try out these suggestions and notice what happens. Sense what shifts in your relationships with others, with yourself, and with the world. Keep on practicing.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quick read, valuable framing for community problem solving.

[Nicholas · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was disappointing. Basically the whole thing was "talk and listen." Nice sentiment, but I was hoping for techniques. Even the stories did not give techniques. They were basically, "Someone said something really profound and we were all changed." That was nice and all, but how did you balance the structure needed to move forward and the openness needed to be innovative? There is slight reference to some Art of Hosting concepts, but it is basically all hidden and only there for people familiar with Art of Hosting.

Even if the stories just contained more detail it would be useful. What activities did you do? What did the schedule look like? What did people talk about? I don't even really know what happened at the events that were discussed in the book. How does one implement scenario planning? The book did not ever say.

[Adam Shand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Kahane's Transformative Scenario Planning arrived in my letterbox as a surprise present from my friend Mel. Like several other books I've read recently, it was exactly the right book at exactly the right time. Adam's descriptions and methodology for approaching "stuck" problems struck a deep chord in me. Anyone who has talked to me in the last couple of months is probably well sick of hearing me talk about it.

Where "Transformative Scenario Planning" is more of a how to manual, "Solving Tough Problems" is the story of his personal journey. It's not a book which is going to teach you a process, but that's not its goal. What this book provides is a useful and rich context for understanding Adam's work.

The introduction has this to say:

Tough problems usually don’t get solved peacefully. They either don’t get solved at all— they get stuck—or they get solved by force. These frustrating and frightening outcomes occur all the time. Families replay the same argument over and over, or a parent lays down the law. Organizations keep returning to a familiar crisis, or a boss decrees a new strategy. Communities split over a controversial issue, or a politician dictates the answer. Countries negotiate to a stalemate, or they go to war. Either the people involved in a problem can’t agree on what the solution is, or the people with power—authority, money, guns—impose their solution on everyone else.

There is another way to solve tough problems. The people involved can talk and listen to each other and thereby work through a solution peacefully. But this way is often too difficult and too slow to produce results, and force therefore becomes the easier, default option. I have written this book to help those of us who are trying to solve tough problems get better at talking and listening—so that we can do so more successfully, and choose the peaceful way more often. I want talking and listening to become a reliable default option.

Problems are tough because they are complex in three ways. They are dynamically complex, which means that cause and effect are far apart in space and time, and so are hard to grasp from firsthand experience. They are generatively complex, which means that they are unfolding in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways. And they are socially complex, which means that the people involved see things very differently, and so the problems become polarized and stuck.

Talking more about the different types of complexity and how you have to engage differently depending on the type(s) of complexity in the problem you are attempting to solve:

To solve a complex problem, we have to immerse ourselves in and open up to its full complexity. Dynamic complexity requires us to talk not just with experts close to us, but also with people on the periphery. Generative complexity requires that we talk not only about options that worked in the past, but also about ones that are emerging now. And social complexity requires us to talk not just with people who see things the same way we do, but especially with those who see things differently, even those we don't like. We must stretch way beyond our comfort zone.<.i>

He talks about his involvement with the Destino Colombia project which attempted to find a political path forward through all the history of corruption and violence in Colombia. He seems to consider the project a partial success, but has this to say about why their decision not to include everyone in the process was detrimental:

One reason the Destino Colombia project had been less influential than it could have been is that the organizers decided to exclude any representatives of the administration of then-President Ernesto Samper, because his election campaign had been partly financed by drug traffickers. Manuel Jose Carvajal, the projects's convenor, said to me afterwards that he thought this attempt to be "antiseptic" had been counterproductive, because as a result, the Samper government had resolutely ignored the teams's ideas and its seminal work in constructing cross-boundary relationships. I talked about this with Max Hernandez, a Peruvian psychoanalyst and political activist. "Such a desire to be completely clean," he said, "is like an obsessive-compulsive disorder, where the patient is always washing his hands. It is not healthy to try and keep yourself away from everything unclean in the world."

One of my favourite quotes from the book follows shortly after:

Then Hernandez told me a story about one of his own experiences in Peru with cross-boundary dialogue. At one workshop, a businessman and a trade unionist left the meeting room and went for a long walk. Afterwards, the trade unionist told Hernandez: "I learned that this man's dreams are not my dreams. But nor are they my nightmares." "You have to remember," Hernandez told me, "that deep, dangerous conflict isn't usually the result of your rational argument verses my rational argument. It's the result of your rational argument hitting my blinds spot, and vice versa. Listening openly helps us defuse this dynamic."

And talking to John Elter a Xerox vice-president about innovation:

"My team worked hard to learn how to listen, without judging, to what the other person was trying to say—really to be there. If we listen in the normal closed way, for what is right and what is wrong, then we won't be able to hear what is possible: what might be but is not yet. We won't be able to create anything new."

The genesis of Adam's process was his work at Mont Fleur, the group that was formed in South Africa to try and chart a political path through the chaos which loomed as the apartheid regime came to an end. In an interview afterwards Howard Gabriels, one of the participants, had this to say about their initial brainstorming exercise:

"The first frightening thing was to look into the future without blinkers on. It was quite scary... In the first workshop of the project we came up with 30 stories. At the time there was a euphoria about the future of the country, yet a lot of those stories were like "tomorrow morning you will open the newspaper and read that Nelson Mandela was assassinated," and what happened after that Thinking about the future in that way was extremely frightening. All of a sudden you are no longer in your comfort zone. You are looking into the future and you begin to argue the capitalise case and the free market case and the social democracy case. Suddenly the capitalist starts arguing the communist case. And all those given paradigms begin to fall away. Those people that I thought were quite conservative were articulating very radical future... It was actually quite frightening in that one did not have to common base of a [shared political] manifesto, like your bible, that you could lean on.

An other favourite piece is this quote from Bill Torbert of Boston College, 'fixing' the old saying:

"If you aren't a part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution." If we cannot see how what we are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are, then logically we have no basis at all, zero leverage, for changing the way things are—except from the outside, by persuasion or force.

There's too many wonderful parts of this book to include them all in the review, get it out of your local library and read it. It's a fast, easy and provocative read.

In closing I'll leave you with this final quote where Adam is talking about some of the extreme difficulty (and bravery) he encountered working in Guatemala. This idea of "creating a clean, safe space" expresses everything that I believe to be true about leadership on both a small and large scale. We all need to learn more about what this means and how to cultivate these spaces.

I told the story of Vision Guatemala to Laura Chasin, Director of Boston's Public Conversations Project, who has facilitated several deep difficult dialogs, including an extended one between pro-choice and pro-life activists. She was silent for a while. "Your story", she said thoughtfully, "reminds me of something I learned two years ago, when my husband had a terrible accident. He was swimming in a lake and a motorboat ran over him. The propeller cut a gaping gash in his leg. We rushed him to the hospital, but the doctor said that the wound was too large to be sewn up. The only thing we could do was keep the area clean and dry. 'The two sides of the wound will reach out to each other,' the doctor said. 'The wound wants to be whole.'

> "The dialogs you and I are involved in are like that," Chasin continued. "The participants and the human systems they are part of want to be whole. Our job as facilitators and leaders is simply to help create a clean, safe space. Then the healing will occur."

[Oscar Duarte · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was reminded on common advice on problem solving. Very tangible examples that the author has himself lived through.

[Wiktor Dynarski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have very mixed feelings about this book. Like a few reviewers before me, I acquired it in order to see whether it provides strategies and exercises on how to change my approach to problem-solving. Instead, however, it turned out to be a heavily filtered memoir of the author and his involvement in helping different countries solve their political crises and transformations, especially in territories hurt by terrorism, civil war and authoritarian leaders.
And it wasn't necessarily bad that the book surprised me like this. What I did find mediocre was the very positive, sometimes almost lacking deeper reflection, approach to the issues. I also thought there would be more thinking about power dynamics within societies of the countries the author worked in, this could have been a lot more than it turned out to be.
I did, however, appreciate that the author was able to understand where his thinking and lack of training could have and sometimes did jeopardize some of his work.
Would not necessarily recommend it unless you are very much interested in how private consultants and experts get involved in peace talks and national conflict resolution. This book may provide an interesting insight, although it's better to not come in with high expectations.

[Jerry Jennings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kahane observes that, “Our most common way of thinking is telling: asserting that the truth about the way things are and must be, not allowing that there might be other truths and possibilities. Moreover, our most common way of listening is not listening: listening only to our own talking, not to others.”

He sees this as a problem when people face complex issues. Moreover, from my point of view, complex issues are very much the standard right now. So I read Kahane’s book with interest.

I found the book to be helpful. The struggles reflect the world we live in - where people who look at things differently don’t talk and listen to each other. The author points out that a “pattern of not talking and not listening is a symptom of being stuck.”

The book tackles how to get better at talking and listening so those involved can create new outcomes for very troubling situations.

I recommend this book to those who willing to stretch themselves to gain skills, dispositions, and knowledge about appreciatively working with the ‘other' in service of the common good.

[Fred Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just ok. There isn't much here except: listen, talk, discuss. The author was involved with the first post-apartheid discussions in South Africa. Clearly these went well, which built his reputation for life. But what they did exactly is never defined other than scenario planning techniques from the business world. There are enough other examples given that didn't work that make it seem it really depends on the participants and not the facilitator at all. But the book is a short read and his points are good, and worth reflecting on. For me, rethinking the use of scenarios for tough problems and the fact that solutions are never binary and maybe never completely solved, was worth it.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had some interesting anecdotes about conflict resolution, but it reinforced my preference for fiction. :)

[A.D. Hoang · Rating 4 out of 5]

The simplicity of Kahane's writing style is impressive, as is his ability to balance all the different issues in the book.

We might probably all been in the situation when we are trying to work through a challenging problem with a group of people we don't get along with. They've got an agenda, we've got an agenda, and it seems like the more we try to talk it out, the more people dig in their heels and refuse to budge.

Whilst the solution has to be found, no one is willing to give any single second to listen to what the other people are trying to say. Thus, we all receive a big gift of struggling in the middle of nowhere and nothing gets accomplished. No matter how big our teams or organizations are, we all can find these kinds of complex problems. Through this book, we get a primer on how to go about working through these annoying situations.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise and personal approach to highly complex problem-solving workshops. Kahane's approach provides a thoughtful and respectful philosophy towards collective planning and decision-making when top-down approaches fail.

In a nutshell: Fostering open communication and empathy between individuals unlocks the collective ability to overcome systemic failings of business, government and the civil sector.

This is a handy reference book for facilitators, community organizers, and anyone else who works to break down silos and bring people together to spark positive, lasting change.

[John Crippen · Rating 2 out of 5]

A slim volume with inspirational examples from many of the author's sessions in the 90s. Some scenario planning content, but his broader prescription included having the right people in the room, developing generative dialogue, and maintaining an open approach. Not a great stand-alone work, but the book does contain good supplemental material.

[Dorothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I expected given the title. There are interesting stories told from a high-level overview to illustrate his points re engaging in the tough problems. The gist of the book is in the last three pages summarizing the approaches/attitudes required to tackle tough problems. The rest is interesting storytelling.

[Wilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emphasizes the importance of getting the conversation going, of truly listening, and projecting possible futures grounded on the present. Discusses also the three types of complex problems and their anatomy.

Recommeded read for ethics.

[Jesse Kessler · Rating 3 out of 5]

While not necessarily a guide to solving tough problems, this easy to read book is filled with fascinating big league stories of high stakes community problem solving.

[Leo]

linked to Peter Senge (sys thinking)

[Alejandro Méndez Martínez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lo complejo es parte de vida misma. Los seres humanos, nuestras producciones y el mundo que construimos a nuestra medida no tienen soluciones simples ni plantean retos sencillos, pero en este libro se muestra que el grado de complejidad sube o baja por gracia de nuestra propia capacidad de entender lo que necesitamos como equipo, como especie, desde la individualidad pero a través del conjunto, para lograr solucionar los problemas sociales, comerciales, culturales, económicos más complejos. No es fácil, pero tampoco se trata de que todo es ingeniería de cohetes.

[Veek · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential read for diplomats, facilitators, organizational developers and social catalysts. Kahane is authoritative but never condescending. He relates his journey from physics and engineering to social facilitator for some very complex and interesting cross-cultural dialogues. Expounds the U-process, touches on T-learning. Otherwise very little jargon.

[Radhakrishnan Pb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author has organised his rich experiences in the field of solving tough problems. We are given insights to discover hope, possibilities, opportunities, and methodologies in the most difficult situations, irrespective of diversity of participants, their bitter enmities demonstrating that effective and correct communication can solve anything. Time to test the learnings in the real world!!

[Daniel Brandt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um livro sobre união, diálogo e resolução de problemas sociais complexos que trabalha a partir do papel do indivíduo no grupo. Excelente leitura.

Para ler minhas notas vá para / To read my notes on this book go to: https://esselivroeuli.blogspot.com/20...

[Orionjoss · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book relates some experience that change my perspectives of how talk, lesson and mainly understanding that different people and different way of thinking are really relevant when you want to solve a complex problem throught the real cause of the question. I really recommend it.

[Gene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Offers fresh and creative examples of engaging conflict using Theory U dynamics. Practical and Anecdotal and very readable.

[Johan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing! SA Leadership has a lot to offer. The importance of communication and the spiritual dimension.

[James Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kahane uses his experience in such diverse places as South Africa and Guatemala to explore conflict and ways to get beyond it. In this book he talks about the power of deep listening.

[Mills College Library]

303.69 K121 2007