Adam Kahane has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 15 ratings. The most-rated is Collaborating with the Enemy.
Collaborating with the Enemy
Summary
We're trying to get something done that really matters to us. To do this we need to work with others. But these others include people we don't agree with or like or trust, so working with them seems impossible - like collaborating with the enemy. What can we do? International consultant Adam Kahane, whose work has been praised by Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Juan Manuel Santos, has faced this challenge many times in working both on big issues, like economic restructuring, climate change, and civil war, and on ordinary issues within organizations and families. He has come to understand that everything we think we know about collaboration - that it requires a harmonious team that agrees on where it's going and how it's going to get there - is wrong. On the contrary, the only way to get things done with diverse others is to abandon harmony, agreement, and control and to learn to work with discord, experimentation, and genuine cocreation. Kahane proposes a new approach to collaboration - stretch collaboration - that is built on this insight. He offers examples of how he's helped people apply it in all kinds of tough situations throughout the world. This approach requires stepping forward with openness and commitment, as in the words of poet Antonio Machado, "Walker, there is no path. The path is made by walking." As our societies have become more polarized and globalized and our organizations have become less hierarchical, more of us need to collaborate across more heterogeneous groups than ever before. This means that increasingly often we face situations where conventional collaboration does not work. Kahane's book offers a proven and practical approach to getting things done in such complex and conflictual contexts. It could not be more timely.
©2017 Adam Kahane (P)2017 Adam Kahane
Transformative Scenario Planning
Summary
People who are trying to solve tough economic, social, or environmental problems often find themselves frustratingly stuck. They cannot solve their problems in their current context; the larger system within which they are operating is too unstable or unfair or unsustainable. They cannot transform this system on their own or by working only with their friends or colleagues; the system is too complex to be grasped or shifted by any one person or organization or sector. And the actors whose cooperation would be necessary to transform the system don't understand or agree with or trust each other enough to work together. This book describes a powerful new methodology for dealing with this increasingly common set of challenges. Transformative Scenario Planning is a creative and constructive way for actors from across a whole system to work together to transform that system. It is a way for them to get unstuck and to move forward on solving their tough problems. Transformative Scenario Planning takes the well-established methodology of adaptive scenario planning-rigorously constructing a set of stories of alternative possible futures-and turns it on its head. It uses scenarios not only to understand and adapt to the future but also to challenge and change it. It offers a way for us to transform ourselves and our relationships with one another and thereby to transform the systems of which we are part.
©2012 Adam Kahane (P)2012 Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change
Summary
War is no way to resolve our most problematic group, community, and societal issues, but neither is a peace that simply sweeps our problems under the rug. To create lasting change, we have to learn to work fluidly with two distinct, fundamental drives that are in tension: power - the single-minded desire to achieve one's solitary purpose - and love - the drive toward unity.... They are seemingly contradictory but in fact complimentary. As Martin Luther King put it, "Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic." Using revealing stories from complex situations he has been involved in all over the world - the Middle East, South Africa, Europe, India, Guatemala, the Philippines, Australia, Canada, and the United States - Kahane reveals how to dynamically balance these two forces. Just as when we are toddlers we learn to shift from one foot to the other to move ourselves forward, so we can learn to shift back and forth between power and love in order to move society forward.
©2010 Adam Morris Kahane (P)2012 Berrett-Koehler Publishers