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

by Adam Kahane

Not talking and not listening are common; they are not limited to troubled nations. As I drafted this chapter, my twenty-seven-year-old daughter Pulane and I were enacting this same pattern. She was home for the holidays and had stayed out all night without telling Dorothy and me where she would be. So we fought about her “irresponsibility” and my “interference,” downloading an argument we had had on and off for years. Each of us knew with certainty that we were right and the other was wrong. “If she won’t listen to me telling her that she is wrong,” I thought, “then why should I bother to talk to her? And if she is going to continue to talk nonsense about my being wrong, why should I bother to listen to her?” Sometimes we yelled, and sometimes we politely avoided the subject. In our own way, we were as stuck as the Basques.