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

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..The way we talk and listen expresses our relationship with the world. When we fall into the trap of telling and of not listening, we close ourselves off from being changed by the world and we limit ourselves to being able to change the world only by force. But when we talk and listen with an open mind and an open heart and an open spirit, we bring forth our better selves and a better world.

Adam Kahane is a partner in Reos Partners (reospartners.com), an international organisation dedicated to supporting and building capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems, and an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford. He is a leading designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to solve their toughest, most complex problems. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.