What I've Been Reading

When a true opening of the heart develops collectively, miracles are possible. 

This is perhaps the most difficult point of all to accept in today's cynical world, and I will not try to argue abstractly for what Adam illustrates so poignantly. 

By miracles I don't mean that somehow everything turns out for the best with no effort or uncertainty. 

Hardly, if anything, the effort required greatly exceeds what is typical, and people learn to embrace a level of uncertainty from which most of us normally retreat. 

But this embrace arises from a collective strength that we have all but ceased to imagine, let alone develop: the strength of a creative human community grounded in a genuine sense of a creative human community grounded in a genuine sense of connectedness and possibility, rather than one based on fear and dogma. 

- Forward by Peter Senge

Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities by Adam Kahane.

Max's holiday card for 2024 was quoted from this brilliant 20 year old book. 

We in America think that the political and ideological problems here are unsolvable because of polarization and people don't even look in each other's eyes, leave alone talking to each other. 

Adam beautifully explain in this book,  how even people who wanted to kill each other, worked together for a better future. 

This book teaches us that: 

A transformation in our ability to talk, think and act together. 

These are actual events from countries much worse than most countries in the world. We are talking about South Africa after Mandela's release, drug lords ridden Colombia in early 2000's, Argentina post their economic fallout to Guatemala.  

We are not talking abstract "hope" here but actual transformative events. If these people in these countries can do it, anybody in any country can do it. And we can do it at home too. 

In order to embark on that better future, read the quote from Max's holiday card. 

There are three kinds of complex problems: 

• Dynamically complex—Causes and their effects are separated by space and time, making the links between them difficult for any one person or group to identify.

•  Generatively complex—They are unpredictable and unfold in unfamiliar ways. A problem that is generatively complex cannot be solved with a prepackaged solution from the past. A solution has to be worked out as the situation unfolds, through a creative, emergent, generative process. 

• Socially complex—The people involved are extremely diverse and have very different perspectives.

Our common way of talking and listening therefore guarantees that our complex problems will either remain stuck or will get unstuck by force. (There are no problem so complex that is does not have a simple solution ... that is wrong.) We need to learn another, less common, more open way. 

There are four different ways of talking and listening based on the work of Otto Scharmer of MIT: 

• Downloading: we merely repeat the story that’s already in our heads, like download- ing a file from the Internet without making any change to it. When we download, we are deaf to other stories, we only hear that which confirms our story. This is the kind of non-listening exhibited by fundamentalists, dictators,  experts, and people are arrogant or angry.

• Debating: When we debate, we listen to each other and to ideas (including our own ideas) from the outside, objectively, like a judge in a debate or a court room. 

• Reflective Dialogue: We engage in such dialogue when we listen to ourselves reflectively and when we listen to others empathetically - listening from inside subjectively. 

• Generative Dialogue: We listen not only from within ourselves or from within others, but from the whole of the system. 

There is a remarkable story in the video below. One can sense generative dialogue when: 

The team sensed that something important and special happened during that story telling. One story seemed to flow into another, as if the tellers were all telling parts of the same larger story. 

Time seemed to slow down: I wasn't sure how long the five minutes of silence actually lasted. 

The normal separation between people seemed lessen: the team shifted from listening to each other's individual perspectives to being, for a while, a whole collective "I".