Making progress on complex, problematic situations requires a new approach to working together: transformative facilitation, a structured and creative process for removing the obstacles to fluid forward movement.
It is becoming less straightforward for people to move forward together. They face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people from across more divides. In such situations, the most common ways of advancingsome people telling others what to do, or everyone just doing what they think they need toaren't adequate.
One better way is through facilitating. But the most common approaches to facilitatingbossy vertical directing from above or collegial horizontal accompanying from alongsidearen't adequate. They often leave the participants frustrated and yearning for breakthrough.
This book describes a new approach: transformative facilitation. It doesn't choose either the bossy vertical or the collegial horizontal approach: it cycles back and forth between them. Rather than forcing or cajoling, the facilitator removes the obstacles that stand in the way of people contributing and connecting equitably. It enables people to bring their whole selves to the process.
This book is for anyone who helps people work together to transform their situation, be it a professional facilitator, manager, consultant, coach, chairperson, organizer, mediator, stakeholder, or friend. It offers a broad and bold vision of the contribution that facilitation can make to helping people collaborate to make progress.
International consultant Adam Kahane teaches us how to work with people whom we might not like or trust. He explains how flexibility and improvisation can lead to what he calls stretch collaboration. He outlines the five misunderstandings that keep people from effectively collaborating with those people and shows readers how they can successfully engage with positive results instead.Collaboration is increasingly difficult and increasingly necessary
Often, to get something done that really matters to us, we need to work with people we don't agree with or like or trust. Adam Kahane has faced this challenge many times, working on big issues like democracy and jobs and climate change and on everyday issues in organizations and families. He has learned that our conventional understanding of collaboration-that it requires a harmonious team that agrees on where it's going, how it's going to get there, and who needs to do what-is wrong. Instead, we need a new approach to collaboration that embraces discord, experimentation, and genuine cocreation-which is exactly what Kahane provides in this groundbreaking and timely book.
This is the first book focused on how to do and use scenario planning - which is one of the most widely used tools in the world for strategic planning, change management, innovation, problem solving, and similar purposes - for social change at the community, national, and global levels. Adam Kahane is one of the world's pioneers and leaders on this topic and he is the author of two bestselling books.
War and peace are the two main ways that people try to solve our toughest group, community, and societal conflicts. Kahane shows why neither approach works and offers a different, better way - combining love and power - to solve these conflicts.
