Bringing Out the Best of Ourselves, Part 4: Adam Kahane

In Part 4 of Bringing Out the Best of Ourselves, host Marcia Hyatt explores how to integrate power and love for healthy community dialogues.  She speaks with Adam Kahane, author of Power and Love, as well as Dr. Ginny Belden Charles who shares regional success stories of integrating power and love.  Finally, Marcia weaves these themes together to examine how to find forgiveness to move our community forward.

About Adam Kahane:

Adam Kahane is a partner in the Cambridge, Massachusetts office of Reos Partners www.reospartners.com, a social innovation consultancy that addresses complex, high-stakes challenges around the world.

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 and Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future.

During the early 1990s, Adam was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch Shell in London. He has 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 Oxford, Toronto, British Columbia, California, and the Western Cape.

In 1991 and 1992, Adam facilitated the Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise, in which a diverse group of South Africans worked together to effect the transition to democracy. Since then he has led many such seminal cross-sectoral 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 Global Business Network, the International Futures Forum, and the World Academy of Art and Science.

Adam has a B.Sc. in Physics (First Class Honours) from McGill University (Montreal), an M.A. in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California (Berkeley), and an M.A. in Applied Behavioural Science from Bastyr University (Seattle). He has also studied negotiation at Harvard Law School and cello performance at Institut Marguerite-Bourgeoys.

Adam and his wife Dorothy live in Montreal and Cape Town.