Facilitating Breakthrough, With Adam Kahane

In his forward to Adam Kahane’s book Facilitating Breakthrough, Edgar Schein writes, “The key to this book is the second word in its title: breakthrough. With powerful stories from around the world, Adam Kahane tells us how he and his colleagues have worked with groups, both within organizations and across larger social systems, that are stuck in complexity and conflict. This book provides us with profound insight into how transformative facilitation helps such groups get unstuck and move forward: to collaborate to make progress toward shared goals.” In this podcast, Adam joins Managing Editor Brian Gorman to discuss what he has learned about three modes of facilitation and what it takes to facilitate truly transformative change.

Tune in to get Adam Kahane’s answers to questions such as:

• What is meant by “facilitating breakthrough?”
• How do love, power, and justice come into play when facilitating organizational change?
• What are the differences between vertical, horizontal, and transformative facilitation?
• You describe transformative facilitation as both rational and intuitive. Why is intuition so important in this process?
• Can you give an example of how you have applied this type of facilitation within an organization?

About Adam Kahane:

Adam Kahane is a Director of Reos Partners, an international social enterprise that helps people move forward together on their most important and intractable issues.

Adam is a leading organizer, designer, and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address such challenges. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.

Adam is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities, about which Nelson Mandela said: “This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.” He is also the author of Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust, and Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together.

www.reospartners.com/adamkahane