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Part I: Tough Problems
Chapter List
"There is Only One Right Answer" When i was young, I thought that the world's toughest problems would be solved by the world's smartest people, and I wanted to be one of them. So in 1978, when I started university at McGill in my home town of Montreal, I chose honors physics. This degree involved courses only in theoretical physics and advanced mathematics—nothing but the laws of nature and of pure reason. My classmates and I were proud to be inducted into this elite intellectual fraternity. We trained by reproducing an increasingly difficult series of logical proofs. Our textbooks contained questions at the end of each chapter and the answers at the back of the book. Our quantum physics course was graded based on a single open-book exam. Before the exam I worked through every exercise in the text, and so I got a perfect grade. We understood that there is only one right answer. During the summers, I had electronics jobs in different laboratories. When you're troubleshooting circuits, e
Seeing the World In 1988 I left PG&E and took a job in the strategic planning department of Royal Dutch/ Shell, the giant Dutch-British energy and chemicals company: almost 100 years old, $100 billion in sales, and over 100,000 employees in more than 100 countries; the fourth largest industrial company in the world. The global petroleum business was much different from the California utility business. Shell was not concerned with regulatory hearings; it was dealing with the hurly-burly of the marketplace. It was wonderfully cosmopolitan, intellectual, and practical: a combination of British subtlety and Dutch bluntness. If Shell staff were arrogant, I thought, it was because they deserved to be: they were the best. Here I could learn how the world really worked. My job was to come up with new ideas that would provoke, stretch, and challenge the managers' thinking about tough business problems—to improve the quality of their strategic debates. From the window of my office in the London
The Miraculous Option In the middle of 1991, Jaworski was in his office at Shell when he received a telephone call from Pieter le Roux, a professor at the left-wing, black University of the Western Cape in South Africa. One year before, the white minority government of F. W. de Klerk had released Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years, and simultaneously legalized all the black opposition parties, including Mandela's African National Congress (ANC). This broke a deadlock in one of the world's most stuck political situations. Now the government and the opposition were trying to do what nobody believed could be done: negotiate a peaceful transition from an authoritarian apartheid regime to a racially egalitarian democracy. Le Roux wanted to organize a scenario project to help the opposition develop its strategy for this unprecedented transition. South Africa had had two previous scenario projects, both of which had been sponsored by big South African companies and advised by
Part II: Talking
Chapter List
Being Stuck South africa had been stuck in apartheid for decades, but by the time I first went there in 1991, South Africans were in the middle of changing that. What does a tough problem look like when it is still stuck in the apartheid syndrome? It looks like the Basque Country did in October 2002. When I went there to share my South African experiences, Basque nationalists were fighting for independence from Spain, or at least for the right to vote on it. Non-nationalists and the Spanish government wanted the Basque Country to remain part of Spain. Over the previous five years, this conflict had grown increasingly polarized and violent. The nationalist terrorist group ETA (Euzkadi to Askatasuna, which means "Basque Homeland and Freedom" in the Basque language) had killed more than 850 people and planted bombs in Bilbao, Madrid, and tourist resorts, so that hundreds of public officials needed full-time bodyguards. The police had killed 170 people and made more than 11,000 arrests. Th
Dictating In order to unstick a stuck problem peace-fully, the people involved in the problem have to talk with and listen to one another. But there is more than one way of talking and listening, and some ways hardly help at all. I observed such hardly helpful communication in the problem-ridden context of Paraguay. Paraguayans seem to enjoy telling awful and bizarre stories about their country. The first evening I was there, in 2001, a presidential candidate boasted to me about the suicidal War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), in which Paraguay battled its three much larger neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and lost half of its people. Men had to be imported to re-grow the population. "We are," he concluded with a flourish, "a fierce and crazy people." Their recent history has been similarly awful. General Alfredo Stroessner was elected president in 1954 and stayed in power for thirty-five years through siege, harassment, murder, political purges, and bogus elections. His
Talking Politely In order to solve tough problems peacefully, people must be willing to talk openly. In Paraguay and in the communications company, people hesitated to speak openly because they were afraid of authoritarian reprisal. In Canada, my native country, I worked on a project in which I noticed a different kind of hesitancy—people hesitating to speak openly because they were afraid of offending someone, or of being embarrassed. We Canadians are polite. It is not that we do not have the same conflicts and passions as other people, just that we prefer not to talk about them. As Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once said, "Just because English Canadians don't move their faces much doesn't mean they don't have feelings." Sometimes this politeness helps us deal with our challenges, but sometimes it hinders us. In 1996, I worked with a Canadian team that was trying to make progress on the long-running constitutional tension between Quebec separatists and Canadian federalists (like t
Speaking Up In colombia, the most violent country in the world, the status quo works for almost no one. In proportion to its population, Colombia has the highest number of murders and kidnappings in the world. It has a home-grown academic discipline called violentology. In the first half of the 1900s, it had two bloody civil wars, the second one called simply "The Violence." Since the 1960s it has suffered from an increasingly violent mess of conflicts among the military, drug traffickers, left-wing guerrilla armies, and right-wing paramilitary vigilantes. Yet Colombia has also elected civilian governments for all but 5 of its 185-year history, making it the longest-lasting democracy in Latin America. The country is, like many places, both a disaster and a wonder. During 1996 and 1997, a team called "Destino Colombia" wanted to use the Mont Fleur approach to find a better way forward for their country. It was then, and as of this writing still is, the only time that all of the armed ac
Only Talking Talking openly (as I observed in Colombia) Is better than talking guardedly (Paraguay) or politely (Canada) or not at all (Basque Country), in that it allows us to see more of the problem and understand it from multiple perspectives. But by itself, talking about a problem does not change anything. Something more is required. I learned this when I participated in a series of meetings in the Caribbean. The convenors invited sixty prominent leaders, from all walks of life, to talk about what was going on in the region and what they might do about it. The participants spoke with discouragement about their complex mess of problems: poverty, AIDS, drug trafficking, emigration, political factionalism, economic stagnation, and social deterioration. They also spoke with pride about their democracy and free speech: politicians who argued vigorously in Parliament and in public; newspapers that were full of sharp reporting and serious analysis; and ordinary people who spent hours "rea
Part III: Listening
Chapter List
Openness If talking openly means being willing to expose to others what is inside of us, then listening openly means being willing to expose ourselves to something new from others. I observed the power of this simple directional shift in Houston, Texas. I was working with a group of powerful and public-spirited businessmen. They had a high confidence in their ability to wisely guide the city into the future and a low confidence in government and politicians. The businessmen were concerned that the younger generation of business leaders were not sufficiently enthusiastic about becoming responsible "city fathers" and that politicians would step into this vacuum and ruin the city. They organized a team that included younger and minority businesspeople and a few leaders of large nonprofit organizations to talk about the situation and decide what to do. They were reluctant, however, to broaden the membership of the team further to include politicians and community leaders. They were afraid
Reflectiveness The south african apartheid system was based on separating people—where they could live, study, work, and play—according to their race. People who challenged the system were banned from speaking in public, jailed, exiled, or assassinated. It was therefore not surprising that the members of the Mont Fleur team, coming from all races and political histories, some only recently released from jail or returned from exile, arrived at their first workshop in 1991 with radically different and strongly held views. Given this background, the most extraordinary characteristic of the Mont Fleur process was the relaxed openness of the conversation. The team members not only spoke openly but, over the course of the meetings, changed what they said. They stretched more than the Basques, Paraguayans, and Canadians. This contrast allowed me to begin to answer the second question that I had been left with at the conclusion of Mont Fleur: How can we solve tough problems peacefully? The mem
Empathy When I did my scenario work at Shell and Mont Fleur, I believed that the key to solving complex problems was for people to listen openly and reflectively enough to change their thinking. Then I discovered that I was missing something. I was leading a workshop in South Africa for the University of the North, a rural, apartheid-era institution with a history of conflict between radical black students and conservative white faculty and administration. The workshop included 100 students, faculty, and administrators. My fellow facilitator was a renowned black community organizer and political leader named Ishmael Mkhabela. A few hours into the workshop, a shouting match broke out between the students and the staff. One year earlier, a student had been killed, and now the student leaders in the workshop were demanding a moment of silence in memory of their "martyr." The faculty did not want to celebrate a "troublemaker." The temperature in the room was rising, and my attempts to get
Part IV: Creating New Realities
Chapter List
Cracking Through the Egg Shell I had the opportunity to witness generative dialogue in the shambles of Argentina. In December 2001, after three years of deepening recession and rising unemployment, Argentines marched, rioted, looted, and brought down their elected government. The country had five presidents in two weeks. When I started making trips to Argentina in the months that followed, things were going from bad to worse: the currency crashed, the country defaulted, banks closed, professionals emigrated. Suddenly, in a country that had had the highest standard of living in Latin America, one-half of the population was living in poverty, one-quarter in destitution, and children were dying of hunger. Almost nobody believed that Argentines could solve their own problems. Month after month, political leaders failed to agree on an emergency reform program. Politicians hesitated to walk in the streets because people so despised them. One popular slogan was "They Must All Go!" Internation
Closed Fist, Open Palm The way to listen is to stop talking. One reason we cannot hear what others are saying is that their voices are drowned out by our own internal voices. We keep reacting and projecting, judging and prejudging, anticipating and expecting, reloading and drifting off. The biggest challenge of listening is quieting down our internal chatter. When we succeed in doing so, we see the world anew. Jaworski and I were helping a team from a European multinational company that was working to turn around the dismal sales performance of their oldest and biggest division. They had been studying the situation for months, interviewing colleagues, customers, competitors, and people in other industries. We met for a three-day workshop in a small inn in the French Pyrenees. We spent the first morning analyzing the overwhelming mass of interview material. Then we walked up a nearby mountain and spread out along a ridge with magnificent views of snow-capped peaks and rocky valleys. We
The Wound that Wants to be Whole In guatemala, I observed this generative dance in a beautiful and terrible context. Guatemala had, from 1960 to 1996, the longest-running and most brutal civil war in Latin America. Even the torture instructors hired from Argentina were appalled by what they witnessed. Out of a total population of 7 million, more than 200,000 people were "disappeared" (killed), and more than 1 million were forcibly displaced. The Guatemalan state was responsible for almost all of this violence, and they directed almost all of it against the country's indigenous people, the Mayans. The official, internationally supported investigation of this period was the "Commission for Historical Clarification." Their report is appalling to read. It documents the use of terror, torture, kidnappings, child soldiers, a militarized police, arbitrary executions, rape, and semi-official death squads; the closing of political spaces, weakening of social organizations, and denial of justice
Conclusion—An Open Way 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? The answer to 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. This injunction to open up is not surprising. Many texts on marriage, management, negotiation, and spirituality give similar advice. What is surprising is that when we make this simple, practical shift in how we perform these most basic social actions— talking and listening—we unlock our most complex, stuck problem situations. We create miracles. How can you get started? Here are ten suggestions: Pay attention to your state of being and to how you are tal
Notes 14 Pierre Wack,...who had invented this approach in the early 1970s. See Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics, Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change (New York: Doubleday, 1996), Peter Schwartz, TheArt of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (New York: Currency, 1996), and Kees van der Heijden, Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (West Sussex: John Wiley, 1996). 16 Economic and political vested interests are deeply threatened by opening up. Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996). 23 Flight of the Flamingoes...everyone in the society rising slowly and together. Pieter le Roux et al., "The Mont Fleur Scenarios." Deeper News, vol. 7, no. 1 (1992). 25 Mandela made a decision—the deadlock...must be broken. Patti Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 71. 25 "The Great U-Turn." Allister
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