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\"Adam Kahane worked with us on the future of our country.The four scenarios we built have come to life one after another, and today we are living the best one...Kahane explains how scenario planning can transform the future.

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.

Purpose - This paper aims to describe \"transformative scenario planning,\" a methodology that enables people trying to change the future collaboratively to transform, rather than adapt to, a situation.Design methodology approach - The process centers on constructing scenarios of possible futures for a situation, but takes the well-established adaptive scenario planning methodology and turns it on its head - to construct scenarios not only to understand the future, but also to influence it.Findings - Transformative scenario planning teams have tackled some of the most important and difficult challenges of our time: health care, economic development, and climate change across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Some of these teams succeeded in changing their situation and others have failed.Practical implications - The five steps of transformative scenario planning are: convening a team from across the whole system; observing what is happening; constructing stories about what could happen; discovering what can and must be done; and acting to transform the system.Originality value - The process centers on constructing scenarios of possible futures for a situation, not only to understand the future, but also to learn how to influence it.

Purpose The article offers an innovative process for collaborating with people you don’t agree with or like or trust . Design/methodology/approach Based on his experience as a collaboration facilitator in national and regional conflicts and stalemates, the author explains how to achieve success through what he terms “stretch collaboration.” Findings Stretch collaborations requires participants to take three unconventional approaches. Practical implications Unconventional “stretch collaboration” abandons the assumption of control. It gives up unrealistic fantasies of harmony, certainty, and compliance, and instead embraces messy realities of discord, trial and error and co-creation.” Originality/value Managers and leaders increasing must collaborate with stakeholders who have opposing interests. This stretch collaboration process offers a way to make progress even in volatile, hostile, high-risk situations.

\"A profound book that offers us a wise way to negotiate our toughest group, community, and societal challenges.\" --William Ury,  New York Times -bestselling coauthor of  Getting to Yes   To try to solve their toughest problems, people either push for what they want at all costs or try to completely avoid conflict. Adam Kahane argues that these.

\"This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created.\" --Nelson Mandela   Adam Kahane has worked on some of the toughest, most complex problems in the world.

Teaching us how to work with people whom we might not like or trust, this timely book 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. --

Adam Kahane has pioneered the use of scenarios as a tool for multi-stakeholder problem solving – as a way for leaders to talk and think together, in order to reach a shared understanding of their shared problem situation and of what they must do to address it. In 1991, Kahane was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch/Shell in London, when he was unexpectedly asked to facilitate the scenario conversation in South Africa among politicians, community leaders, businessmen and trade unionists – black and white, left and right – that became known as the Mont Fleur Scenario Project. This project played an important role in the shaping of the post-apartheid political and economic landscape. Inspired by this experience, Kahane ended up leaving Shell and throwing himself into the development of this dialogic approach to peacefully addressing highly complex, stuck problem situations. Since then he has led many Mont Fleur-type multi-stakeholder dialogue-and-action processes, throughout Africa, Europe, and North, Central and South America. Kahane has just published a book about what he has learned from this work, entitled Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (San Francisco: Berrett–Koehler, 2004). The thesis of the book is that our most common way of solving problems is to use our expertise and authority to apply piece-by-piece, tried-and-true ‘best practices’. This works for simple, familiar, uncontentious problems, but does not work for the complex, unfamiliar, conflictual problems that we all increasingly face. When we try to solve these complex problems using our common way, the problems end up either being stuck or becoming unstuck only by force. We therefore need to learn another, uncommon way. The essence of this other, open way, Kahane suggests, is the practice of open-minded, open-hearted, open-willed talking and listening. Below we have excerpted a chapter from Kahane's book, about his experience in and around a landmark scenario project in Colombia. The chapter deals with one of the key transitions in moving from closed talking and listening, which merely re-enacts the current reality, to open talking and listening, through which new and better realities are born: speaking up.

Since the early 1990s, Generon Consulting has been developing the use of scenario thinking as a tool for effecting societal change. In its civic scenario projects, a group of influential leaders, drawn from a broad range of sectors and organizations, works together to understand what is happening, might happen, and should happen in their city, region, or country. They then act in concert on that shared understanding and vision. This article summarizes its experience with this work to date, the process developed, and the kinds of results produced. Examples are drawn from pioneering projects in two countries that made among the most remarkable democratic transitions of the 1990s: South Africa and Guatemala.