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

by Adam Kahane

Nelson Mandela once said, “One effect of sustained conflict is to narrow our vision of what is possible. Time and again, conflicts are resolved through shifts that were unimaginable at the start.”)

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...

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 real...

are in fact listening only to themselves, to the tapes they play over and over in their heads about why they ...

My partner Otto Scharmer calls the kind of talking that takes place in these situations “downloading” because the speaker is reprod...

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.

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.

There are two ways to try to unstick a stuck problem. The first is for one side to act unilaterally—to try imposing...

The second way to unstick a problem is for the actors to start to talk and listen in order to find a way forward together.

Dialogue cannot be forced, and so peacemakers must wait patiently for an opening.

IN ORDER TO UNSTICK a stuck problem peacefully, the people involved in the problem have to talk with and listen to one another.

there is more than one way of talking and listening, and some ways hardly help at all. I observed such hardly helpful communication in the problem—ridden context of Paraguay. Paraguayans seem to enjoy telling awful and bizarre stories about their country.

“An optimist in Paraguay,” someone quipped, “is someone who says, ‘Things are good! We are better off today than we will be tomorrow!’”

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.

The root of not listening is knowing. If I already know the truth, why do I need to listen to you? Perhaps out of politeness or guile I should pretend to listen, but what I really need to do is to tell you what I know, and if you don’t listen, to tell you again, more forcefully.

All authoritarian systems rest on the assumption that the boss can and does know the one right answer.

I had never noticed the parallel between political dictatorship and organizational authoritarianism because authoritarianism was the water I had always swum in. When I joined Pacific Gas and Electric, it never occurred to me to question the strict reporting lines. Until I attended the Management Committee’s retreat, I had assumed that the bosses at the top were smarter and so rightfully at the top. Furthermore, I had always had elite jobs, close to the bosses, and the degenerative consequences of authoritarianism are hard to see from the top. It was only later, when as a consultant I interviewed both bosses and their employees, that I realized how much more oppressive these systems look and feel from bel...

Dictatorship did not just coerce Chileans; it also corrupted them.

Organizational authoritarianism also produces silence and subservience, through coercion, seduction, and corruption. I once worked on an innovation project with the management team of a successful Fortune 100 communications company. Its founder and CEO was a brilliant man, and a bully. His very highly paid senior managers admired and feared him. They spent a lot of their time looking over their shoulders, worrying about how to keep him happy and panicking when they heard that he wasn’t. They would second-guess themselves, skirting areas where they knew he had strong views, start down one path, and then suddenly change course if he frowned on it. This is the corporate version of the apartheid syndrome: management of a complex system by force and fear. Business writer Harriet Rubin once said to me that it surprised her that people were willing to accept being free citizens on the street but serfs at work.

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.

Unfortunately, the authoritarian approach, with its severe limitations, is the foundation of practically all private and public sector strategic planning. Strategists direct, and others follow. Kees van der Heijden, my former boss at Shell, noted that most of the literature on strategic planning falls into “the rationalist school,” which codifies thought and action separately. The tacit underlying assumption is that there is one best solution, and the job of the strategist is to get as close to this as possible, within the limited resources available. The strategist thinks on behalf of the entire organization, and works out an optimal strategy as a process of searching for maximum utility among a number of options. Having decided the optimal way forward, the question of action (known as the “implementation issue”) is addressed. … The (somewhat unlikely?) assumptions underlying the rationalist school are: predictability, no interference from outside; clear intentions; implementation follows formulation (thought independent of action); full understanding throughout the organization; and reasonable people will do reasonable things.

My job as a PG&E planner was to come up with the optimal strategy for the company, convince my boss and the Management Committee to approve it, and then somebody else would implement it.

The authoritarian pattern of talking is that bosses and experts talk down—dictating and telling—and everyone else talks cautiously. This is the closed way. To solve complex problems, we have to find a more open way.

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 a...

Talking only about concepts is one way of...

Unconsciously we therefore kept our conversation safe, conceptual, and polite. The conclusions we agreed on were dispassionate and neutral: we did not take a stand for anything but prudence.

Our fear and politeness ended up smothering change.

The young Quebecker stood out because he did not follow these rules. He spoke personally, not conceptually; he was passionate; he took a stand for what he believed in.

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.

These polite dynamics also play out in ordinary family settings. When my brothers and I go home to see our parents, we all talk politely, staying away from sensitive subjects (or talking about certain subjects only with certain people), keeping things under control. Sometimes I am afraid that if I say what I am really thinking, others will be hurt and upset. I am afraid that I will rupture the family whole—which anyway isn’t so bad. So we all say what we alway...

As long as the status quo is working, we can afford to remain polite. But when we see that the status quo is no longer working, we must speak up.

When people walked by the speakerphones, they gave them a wide berth, afraid to get too close. Some of the participants were frightened of retribution for what they might say to the guerrillas. When I mentioned this fear, one of the guerrillas replied, “Mr. Kahane, why are you surprised that people in the room are frightened? The whole country is frightened.” Then the guerrillas promised they would not kill anyone for anything said in the meetings. Once the threat of force had been removed, the team was able to agree to a set of ground rules for their conversations. They agreed to “call things by their name”; to express their differences without irony; to assume the good faith of others; to be tolerant, disciplined, and punctual; to be concrete and concise; and to keep confidences.

They were proud of these ground rules because they knew that in the midst of much lawlessness and violence, it was essential to construct a safe space for talking and listening.

The first step along an open way—the first step out of the apartheid syndrome—is for the actors in the system to speak up. Often this is extremely difficult. People hesitate to say what they are thinking for many reasons, not only extraordinary but also ordinary: fear of being killed or jailed or fired, or fear of being disliked or considered impolite or stupid or not a team player. Around the time I was working in Colombia, I was taking a part-time master’s degree in applied behavioral sciences at Bastyr University in Seattle. I thought that I had gone as far as I could go as a facilitator with an education only in physics and economics, and that I needed some professional training in leadership. I quickly found out that learning to lead means learning how I as a

leader function—including my own fear of speaking up. The core learning process of the program was a kind of awareness training based on the Training Group, or “T Group,” pioneered at the National Training Laboratories in the 1960s. In this process, six of us sat in a circle and talked for twenty minutes or so, observed by the teacher and the rest of the class. The only rule was that we could only talk about the “here and now”: what we were thinking, feeling, sensing, or wanting at that very moment, in response to what somebody else had just said or to something that was arising within us.

This process produced conversations that were utterly banal: “I am feeling flushed and angry after your remark about Mary’s tone of voice.” At the same time the experience was extremely rich, because in this safe classroom space, we got feedback from our classmates that was immediate and straightforward. I learned a lot from these T Group sessions about my own patterns of behavior. At the beginning, I tended to hang back, observing and making smart comments. I was told I came across as distant, closed, and condescending—not at all what I wanted. I realized that I was stuck in a personal version of the apartheid syndrome. I hesitated to speak openly because I was afraid that if I said what I was really thinking, the others would be angry and would distance themselves from me, there would be a conflict, and th...

I also learned how my patterns of behavior had their roots in the dynamics of relationships in my family. As a child, I had learned to distance myself from conflict as a way of pro...

Extra-ordinary circumstances turn ordinary people into heroes.

communities—if we want to change the status quo. We must speak up.

TALKING OPENLY (as I observed in Colombia) is better than talking guardedly (Paraguay) or politely (Canada) or not at all (Basque Country), in that it allows us to see more of the problem and understand it from multiple perspectives. But by itself, talking about a problem does not change anything. Something more is required.

Most conventional approaches to solving problems emphasize talking, especially the authoritarian, boss or expert, way of talking: telling.

The additional element that is required to create something new, and that is ignored in most conventional approaches, is listening.

Tough problems can only be solved if people talk openly, and in many situations this takes real courage. But this is not enough. The next step, listening openly, is even harder.

IF TALKING OPENLY means being willing to expose to others what is inside of us, then listening openly means being willing to expose ourselves to something new from others.

They were afraid that a more diverse group would be both more awkward to work with and unnecessary. Businesspeople had previously figured out amongst themselves what was best for the city, and they could continue to do so.