2006 Authentic Leadership Summer Program

Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities with Adam Kahane, Grady McGonagill & LeAnne Grillo

How can we solve our tough problems without resorting to force? How can we overcome the apartheid syndrome in our homes, workplaces, communities, and countries, and globally? How can we heal our world’s gaping wounds? To answer these questions is simple, but it is not easy. We have to bring together the people who are co-creating the current reality to co-create new realities. We have to shift from downloading and debating to reflective and generative dialogue. We have to choose an open way over a closed way.

In this module, we will explore, experience, and practice an advanced problem-solving approach for people in business, government, and civil society who are committed to working together across sectors on addressing complex, “stuck” situations. We will work with practices of paying attention, suspending judgment, empathetic listening, redirecting, engaging, humility, presencing, crystallizing, prototyping, and embedding.

These practices will be applied to a current and real social challenge in Nova Scotia as a case example. Through pre-program briefings, in-class reports by stakeholders, and interviews within the larger community, participants will apply the practices of solving tough problems to Nova Scotia’s healthcare challenge. We will also identify ways in which these practices can be applied to the other “tough problems” that participants are engaged in.

Adam Kahane is a founding partner of Generon Consulting and of the Global Leadership Initiative. He is a leading designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can solve their toughest, most complex problems. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerillas, 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 (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004). 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.”

During the early 1990s, Adam was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch/Shell in London. Previously he held strategy and research positions with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (San Francisco), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Vienna), the Institute for Energy Economics (Tokyo), and the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia, California, and the Western Cape.

In 1991 and 1992, Adam facilitated the Mont Fleur Scenario Project, in which a diverse group of South Africans worked together to effect the transition to democracy. Since then he has led many such seminal multi-stakeholder dialogue-and-action processes throughout the world. He was one of the sixteen outstanding individuals featured in Fast Company’s first annual “Who’s Fast” and is a member of the Commission on Globalisation, the Aspen Institute’s Business Leaders’ Dialogue, the Society for Organizational Learning, the Global Leadership Network, and Global Business Network.

Adam has a B.Sc. in Physics (First Class Honors) from McGill University (Montreal), an M.A. in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California (Berkeley), and an M.A. in Applied Behavioral Science from Bastyr University (Seattle). He has also studied negotiation at Harvard Law School and cello performance at Institut Marguerite-Bourgeoys. Originally from Montreal, he lives in Boston and Cape Town with his wife Dorothy and their family.

Grady McGonagill has been an independent consultant for over 20 years.  He joined Generon Consulting in 2005 as Director of Learning. Grady is an experienced facilitator of multi-stakeholder dialogues. In 1993 he created the Northern Forest Dialogue Project, which for several years brought together key stakeholders in the debate over forest management in New England to explore common ground. And from 1995-1999 he was the lead facilitator of the Maine Forest Biodiversity Project, which fostered candid communication and relationship-building among parties who had historically found it difficult to talk to one another.

Grady’s workshops on leadership, coaching, conflict management, and influence skills have been offered through a number of executive programs, including Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, Babson College’s Center for Executive Education,  Brandeis University’s Heller School of Management and the Center for Management Research.

Grady holds an Ed.D. from Harvard University, an M.A. from Stanford University, and a B.A. from the University of Texas. He is a contributor to the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, edited by Peter Senge et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1994) and the author of a chapter in Executive Coaching, edited by C. Fitzgerald and J. Berger (San Francisco: Davies Black Publishing, 2002).

LeAnne Grillo joined Generon Consulting from Pegasus Communications, Inc. LeAnne was vice president and conference director for Pegasus and spent over ten years designing conferences and gatherings that brought people together using a systems thinking lens to address issues that mattered to their organizations, communities, and the world. The Pegasus Conference is known for its finely-honed integration of content with design that creates the container in which deep learning can happen. Designing and managing large events has given her the project management skills she needs in her multi-faceted position at Generon.

Before going to Pegasus, LeAnne spent ten years working for Patriots' Trail Girl Scout Council, in Boston, in a variety of management positions. She has always felt strongly about working for values-based, mission-based organizations. Helping girls grow into confident, competent, and caring young women is important to her, and she continues to volunteer for the Girl Scouts.

LeAnne was president of the New England Chapter of Meeting Professionals International, a professional association for members of the meeting industry, and held other MPI board positions as well. She is a certified master trainer through Girl Scouts of the USA, and has her bachelor's degree from Kenyon College in drama (set and lighting design).

“We do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.”
—Edgar Schein

Pre-requisite reading:

Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future by Peter Senge, Claus Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers (2004)
Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities by Adam Kahane (2004)

From endorsements for the book Solving Tough Problems:

“It has been my privilege to work with Adam [Kahane] for the past decade, as part of a growing community of intrepid explorers around the world looking for alternative paths to catalyze and sustain profound, systemic changes. Through this time I have come to appreciate Adam as a consummate craftsman, a deeply pragmatic person not given easily to hyperbole or naïve expectations.”
—Peter Senge, author, The Fifth Discipline, coauthor, Presence

“Adam Kahane is one of those all too rare ‘warriors for peace’ who is willing to immerse himself totally into our world’s most intractable conflicts.”
—Barry Oshry, author of Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life and Leading Systems: Lessons from the Power Lab

”This generative dialogue approach offers real opportunities for governments to engage with stakeholders to build trust and create exciting new resolutions to multi-faceted social and governance challenges.”
—Clare Beckton, Asst. Deputy Attorney General of Canada

“Adam Kahane is one of those rare action-intellectuals who combines a deep theoretical understanding of social change and group process with actual experience in situations of conflict and turmoil, where people are desperate for solutions but unable to secure what they need. Adam brings the catalyst for change.”
—Jim Garrison, President of State of the World Forum and author, America as Empire

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