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

by Adam Kahane

They either don’t get solved at all—they get stuck—or they get solved by force.

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 people involved can talk and listen to each other and thereby work through a solution peacefully.

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.

Our most common way of talking is telling: asserting the truth about the way things are and must be, not allowing that there might be other truths and possibilities. And our most common way of listening is

not listening: listening only to our own talking, not to others.

a complex problem can only be solved peacefully if the people who are part of the problem work together creatively to understand their situation and to improve it.

I have learned that the more open I am—the more attentive I am to the way things are and could be, around me and inside me; the less attached I am to the way things ought to

be—the more effective I am in helping to bring forth new realities.

the more I work in this way, the more present and alive I feel. As I have learned to lower my defenses and open myself up, I have become increasi...

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 o...

We understood that there is only one right answer.

I assumed that the people at the top were smarter and more informed than the rest of us.

I went to some of their meetings in the enormous, oak—paneled boardroom on the top floor. Here, conversations were polite, reasoned, and completely under control.

The world did not work the way my one-right-answer textbooks said it did.

I now knew that every trend had a countertrend, every argument had a rebuttal, and every solution produced a new problem. I knew that there was no longer one right answer.

Trevor Manuel, head of the ANC’s Economics Department, introduced me to the group as “a representative of International Capital.” I could see that this scenario meeting was not going to be like the Shell ones I was used to. We were not working on an ordinary problem of organizational strategy but on an extraordinary national transformation.

I asked them to use the Shell convention and to talk not about what they or their party wanted to happen—their usual way of talking about the future—but simply about what might happen, regardless of what they wanted.

The listeners in the plenary were not permitted to shout down the story with “That couldn’t happen” or “I don’t want that to happen.” They could only ask “Why would that happen?” or “What would happen next?”

The team found this scenario game to be fabulously liberating. They told stories of left-wing revolution, right-wing revolts, and free market utopias.

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.

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.

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 in such a scenario. His presentation produced a long, intense, self-critical discussion among the PAC leaders. Soon after this meeting, the PAC changed their economic policies and then decided to abandon their armed struggle and join the constitutional negotiations.

I was delighted and fascinated by all of these impacts of the Mont Fleur team’s work. This was the first time that I had descended from observing complex problems from above and outside as a researcher and corporate planner, to engaging right up close with a group of people who were in the middle of working through solutions.

The essence of the Mont Fleur process, I saw, was that a small group of deeply committed leaders, representing a cross-section of a society that the whole world considered irretrievably stuck, had sat down together to talk broadly and profoundly about what was going on and what should be done. More than that, they had not talked about what other people—some faceless authorities or decision makers—should do to advance some parochial agenda, but what they and their colleagues and their fellow citizens had to do in order to create a better future for everybody.

The Mont Fleur team’s fundamental orientation—and the primary message they gave to the leadership groups they engaged with—was that more than one future was possible and that the actions they and others took would determine which future would unfold.

The team did not believe they had to wait passively for events to occur. They believed they could actively shape their future.

They understood that one reason the future cannot be predicted is that...

One of the most important roles we can play individually and collectively is to create an opening, or to “listen” to the implicate order unfolding, and then to create dreams, visions, and stories that we sense at our center want to happen….

Using scenarios in this way can be an extraordinarily powerful process—helping

At Mont Fleur the team was not only doing something essentially different from anything I had ever seen, but they were doing it with an oddly different spirit. They were working on big, serious issues over which they had been engaged in life-and-death struggles for decades. But they were doing this openly, creatively, and lightheartedly, having fun with their ideas and with each other.

The more I worked with the team, the more impressed I became with them, and as I opened up, this inspired reciprocal opening by them. One team member later said to me, “When we first met you, we couldn’t believe that anyone could be so ignorant. We were sure that you were trying to manipulate us. But when we realized that you really didn’t know anything, we decided to trust you.”

These actors participated in the forums because they believed they were facing problems that none of them could solve alone through ordinary, established processes.

The dramatic overall political and constitutional settlements that South Africans achieved in 1994 rested on the relationships they built through these many dialogic processes.

A popular joke at the time said that, faced with the country’s daunting challenges, South Africans had two options: a practical option and a miraculous option. The practical option was that we would all get down on our knees and pray for a band of angels to come down from heaven and fix things for us. The miraculous option was that we would continue to talk with each other until we found a way forward together. In the end, South Africans, contrary to everybody’s predictions, succeeded in implementing the miraculous option.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. This apartheid syndrome occurs in all kinds of social systems, all over the world: in families, organizations, communities, and countries.

How can we solve tough problems peacefully?

by opening up our talking and listening.

“How does one learn good judgment? Experience. And how does one gain experience? Bad judgment.”

this simple opening-up turned out to be far more subtle and challenging than I would ever have imagined.

As one local peace researcher explained to me, “A conflict that does not move positively, moves negatively.”