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Today I talk with Adam Kahane, a Director at Reos Partners, for the third time on this podcast. Adam is a prolific and impactful author: I’ve interviewed him about his books like Power and Love, Collaborating with the Enemy, Facilitating Breakthrough and now, The Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems, his latest book.
Adam has over 30 years of experience facilitating breakthroughs and helping transform systems at the highest levels in government and society. His own breakthrough facilitation moment came with an invitation to host the Mont Fleur Scenario Planning Exercises he facilitated in 1990s South Africa at the dawn of that country’s transition towards democracy and the twilight of apartheid.
One delight of this book is the recognition that transforming systems can be long and hard work. It’s not the work of a day, or a week or a month. It’s the work of seasons!
Adam helpfully grounds this long journey of transformation in everyday habits - which is such an effective way to help us all continuously refocus our energies on the work, the perseverance (and commitment to rest) at the core of habit number seven. After all, winter, a time of slowing down and reflection, is one of the seasons of this work. A shout out to my podcast conversation with artist and teacher Kate Quarfordt where we unpacked her four seasons model, which is one of my favorite frameworks for designing any experience.
Here are the seven habits from Adam’s book:
Habit 1: Act responsibly
Habit 2: Relate in three dimensions.
Habit 3: Look for what’s unseen.
Habit 4: Work with cracks.
Habit 5: Experiment a way forward.
Habit 6: Collaborate with unlike others.
Habit 7: Persevere and rest.
There's also a kind of a zeroth habit: Know what a system is.
So, in this conversation, Adam and I talk about systems theory in general. It's important to realize that we must understand that many of our most challenging challenges are with systems - governments are systems, organizations are systems, families are systems and people are also systems.
I feel that habits 2 and 6 have a great deal of overlap. We can’t deeply collaborate with people who are unlike us unless we’re willing to relate to them in three dimensions - as full people who we share a fate with. Dealing with people simply through the lens of their role in the system, or as someone with their own interests misses an opportunity. As Adam shares in his book, it’s the people who relate in all three dimensions who are able to make the most impactful transformations.
One of the most powerful insights from this conversation for me was habit 4 - work with cracks - this metaphor, this visual analogy that the monolithic, unmovable mountain that the system we seek to change or transform may seem to be only seems monolithic at a comfortable distance. If we look closer, we can see the cracks. And as Adam says - we don’t actually climb the mountain, we climb the cracks in the mountain - the cracks are where we put our fingers and toes.
And as any mountain climber will tell you, the cracks aren’t always where you want them to be, but that’s what makes finding a path up the mountain a worthwhile challenge.
Systems change and systems transformation can only happen when we find the cracks, and it's only through close observation and deep understanding of a system that we can see those cracks
It's important to realize that cracks are not just where the system is breaking. Cracks can be where the system is starting to change already, or a bright spot of new growth. Cracks can be where someone's mental model is open to influence, suggestion and conversation. A crack can be widened, leveraged. And we can only find those cracks if we practice habit 3, to look for what’s unseen. All the habits are intertwined.
I’ve already found this mountain and cracks metaphor fruitful in some of my CEO coaching conversations.
One of the other humbling insights from this conversation was that if we are not part of the problem we cannot be part of the solution. We are part of the system that we seek to change and it's important to bring a certain level of humility and curiosity to the process of seeking to change a system - we may have to find the cracks in our own approach, our own self image, before we become effective intervenors in a system. This may be another flavor of habit 1 - acting responsibly.
Learn more about Adam’s work at www.reospartners.com.
Links
Learn more about Adam’s work at www.reospartners.com, www.reospartners.com/adamkahane and find him on twitter/X at @adamkahane
More About Adam
Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders collaborate to address their most important and intractable 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.
He has degrees in physics, energy and resources, applied behavioural science, and cello performance.
Full Transcript
Daniel Stillman 00:00
Adam, welcome back to the Conversation Factory. It's really nice to. It's nice to see your face. It's nice to be here again with you.
Adam Kahane 00:08
Yeah. When was it?
Daniel Stillman 00:09
Oh, man. So we were talking about facilitating breakthrough.
Adam Kahane 00:14
So that would have been four years ago because that came out Covid 2021. I didn't do any live presentations at all.
Daniel Stillman 00:23
Yeah. So, I mean, that was a blockbuster book. We'll talk about lots of your books, but I just started cracking this one open. It's a really delightful book. And I think the thing that is most interesting to unpack first is you mentioned that systems can't be transformed if folks don't understand that they're working with a system. And I feel like systems thinking, like the recognition of what a system is and why it's important is not universally held knowledge. So I'm wondering, you use some ecological metaphors in the book to help people understand the system. But I'm wondering if you're, you know, if you're sort of trying to explain that to someone that you're working with, a person who is part of a system who wants help transforming system but doesn't use that language yet. How do you say to them, hey, this is what a system is and this is why we can't transform it. Unless you think about it from the perspective of this is a system.
Adam Kahane 01:32
Yeah, well, it's a great question and so I'll try to feel my way to an answer. I'm just going to close my door because there's street noise.
Adam Kahane 01:52
So that's a great question and let me feel my way to an answer.
Adam Kahane 01:59
A system is a set of elements that is connected in a particular structure that produces a certain characteristic set of behaviors. So, and by I'm going to come to your question, but backwards, by transform it, I mean that it produces a fundamentally different set of behaviors. And I gave a talk last Friday and the person I was talking, the person who was on the stage with me, has done a lot of work in Montreal on making Montreal a more bicycle friendly city. And it's a great example for many reasons. One, I guess we don't understand what I mean. So that is a transformation. It used to be very dangerous to bicycle in Montreal, and now Montreal is a great city for bicycling in. So that's a different characteristic set of behaviors. And also by coincidence, we both remember somebody who used to talk about this 45 years ago, an eccentric fellow named Bicycle Bob Silverman. And I remember meeting him when I was in high school and thinking this was really crazy. Where do people get these ideas? And thirdly, it's easy to see how. What it took to transform the system. I mean, I suppose it took several things, but the main thing it took was reconstructing the roads so that they have dedicated bike paths.
Daniel Stillman 03:30
Yeah.
Adam Kahane 03:31
So it's a great example. It took a long time. It seemed impossible. It involved changing the structure, how the cars and the bicycles related to one another. In particular, that they were separated rather than sharing the same road. And I suppose there were changes in how people thought about things, cyclists and motorists, and it now produces a fundamentally different set of behavior. There's less cars on the road and many, many bicycles on the road.
Daniel Stillman 04:00
Yeah.
Adam Kahane 04:00
Which. So. So that's a. A good example, I think. And I'm not saying you can't. I think it. Maybe I stated it too strongly. I think you can transform it without understanding it, but it's going to be hit and miss.
Adam Kahane 04:23
And. Yeah, I guess it be less likely to work if you just said that, you know, if you just decided, I'm gonna. I'm just gonna bicycle and I'm gonna. By my individual actions, I'm gonna change the city.
Daniel Stillman 04:38
Right.
Adam Kahane 04:39
I don't think I would work. I think you. Yeah. Anyhow, that's. Don't know how interested you are in that example, but it struck me as a very straightforward one as a.
Daniel Stillman 04:49
As a cyclist. I am. I'm a highly. This is a perfect example and, you know, an interesting one because I actually remember the first time that New York City had summer streets, which was, you know, kind of a big deal when it happened. This is probably more than 10 years ago, where they shut down park avenue from like 95th street to, like, Lafayette, well past the REI that may not have even been there at Houston and Lafayette. And you could bike through the road that goes around Grand Central Station, which many people will only know because it's where the famous scene from the first Avengers movie happened. When you circle around, you know, the, The Incredible Hulk and Captain America and everything. Like, that's, that's this. This little piece of road that's usually only available to cars. It's maybe 30ft up off the street. And being on there on a car, on a bicycle, I got a little tear in my eye because I was like, I can't believe how much the city has changed in my lifetime. A city that many people would say is untamable and unchangeable. And I think it's actually an interesting link back to. Well, not link forward to a question that I been sitting with, which is because you point out somebody, even with power and authority in a system, can't necessarily transform it on their own. And in New York, we have the example of Bloomberg and, you know, Jeanette Sadak Khan, who was the transit.
Daniel Stillman 06:21
I don't know, whatever the word is. Commissioner, thank you. You know, they did very quick projects where they're like, hey, we're going to put boulders here, and we're going to paint this ground blue. We're going to put some tables and chairs out. But those are physical changes, and there's in a system, many layers to transform a system on, because now we have a lot more bicycles and bicycle lanes in New York City. But you still have people who write in places like the New York Post saying all of this traffic we're having in New York is because of all these goddamn bike lanes they've made traffic. And the city is for me and my car. And so there's disagreement sometimes about what a system is and what. What behaviors or outcomes we're optimizing. 4.
Adam Kahane 07:08
Yeah, I'm remembering there's another famous example, slightly different, which brings up a different aspect of it, and that is the city of Bogota in Colombia used to have an extraordinarily high rate of vehicular homicide, people being killed by cars. And the mayor at the time, it was a very innovative man, brilliant intellectual and politician named Antanas Mockus. And he had the idea that simply putting more police on the streets wouldn't do the trick. And so he did something wild and famous, which is he hired tens of mimes, like, you know, people with white paint on their face, and they'd stand at the corners and make fun of people who were driving badly, like, ridicule them. And apparently, in the minds of people in Bogota, they really don't like to be made fun of. And the rate of vehicular homicide dropped by 80%.
Daniel Stillman 08:16
That's shocking.
Adam Kahane 08:18
So that's interesting because it didn't involve any enforcement, any changes that I know of to the physical infrastructure, but it involved, I guess, changing how people thought about what they had a right to do in their car.
Daniel Stillman 08:36
Yeah, yeah. And. And it's a really, really interesting intervention because there's. There's all these sort of very common interventions that people would come up with, you know, more signage, more cops, bigger lanes and things like that. And just a little bit of shame and derision can do wonders, which is delightful to know. And what an interesting insight he had about the, like the. The. Maybe The. The fundamental unit in a System like the, the person of the, you know, the characteristic nature of the people in his town, which speaks to like, I guess another aspect of systems transformation is you have to understand all of these different parts and components, the ways that they interact and.
Adam Kahane 09:23
Yes.
Daniel Stillman 09:25
And what the characteristics of each individual component really are. Like, what are the people like and what are their interactions. So I could see how if you don't really understand that, you can't just bulldoze a result.
Adam Kahane 09:38
Well, he had a particular result in what he called culture and he did many things. I won't bore you with other examples, but there are four or five famous examples. But yes, and for me, the general principle, you know, I wrote the book, I finished the book last August, but it came out this April, the book Everyday habits for transforming Systems. And I've been presenting it the past few months and lots of things are becoming clearer to me through talking about it with people that weren't as clear when I was writing it. And one of them is this idea that to transform a system you really have to understand how it works from up close. You have to understand the detail. And yeah, some things, I guess, can be transformed from the top down by force, but most things, if you want them to stay transformed, require many people to do many things.
Daniel Stillman 10:37
Yes.
Adam Kahane 10:38
And.
Daniel Stillman 10:40
Yeah, this, I mean, this makes sense to me. Um, but I'm curious if some of the leaders you've worked with in the past, how. Because I think it is a common belief or maybe a wish of some people who are at the top or in the, the upper components of, of a system who have, you know, official power and official authority to say, well, like, why can't we just. Why can't I just change this? Why can't I just do this? Why can't by fiat make this change? How do you coach a leader to open up their mind to realize they have to have this granular understanding and a maybe more multi stakeholder or collaborative approach, given the fact that there are so many actors inside of a system that there really has to be in some sense everyone pulling in the same direction.
Adam Kahane 11:41
Well, I want to make a distinction, which is that as you know from our previous conversation, I am very focused on collaboration across difference and that's been the core of my work. And I wrote a book called Collaborating with the enemy, how to work with people you don't agree with and like and trust. And that's been the center of Rio's partners work for, for decades. But I'm making a bit of a different point in this book. The collaborating with others and not necessarily everybody. And not necessarily everybody pulling in the same direction. That's part of it. But I think the broader point is simply engaging with the system, paying attention, seeing how it works, what will work, rather than just deciding, I think it ought to be this way, and trying to impose it. That's the distinction I'm making this time, which is a little different. Yes, it involves working with others most of the time, but what it really involves is paying attention to how things work. And yes, what Mokus Mokus's insight about how people in Bogota, how car drivers in Bogota think. I don't know if car drivers in other places would think the same way. I was giving a talk a few weeks ago about the book, and somebody said, you know, I'm listening to you. And what it really reminds me is of Robert Capa famous statement about photography. Robert Capa was a famous war photographer, really famous. And he said once, if your photograph isn't good, move closer.
Adam Kahane 13:42
And I think it's a really important idea that you're able to transform a system or contribute to transforming a system if you're close enough to be able to see how things really work. I use in the book an image which I've never used before, but I think it's working very well, this idea of working with cracks, that it's easy to think that a system is solid and stable and smooth, that there's no way to change it. It's like a mountain. There's no way to change it except putting a stick of dynamite and blowing it up. And there's lots of people, lots of people doing that these days, trying to change things by blowing them up, by using force or violence or bombs, literally.
Adam Kahane 14:30
And the book argues. Well, there is an alternative. It is to pay attention to what's cracking, just like a mountain. A rock climber doesn't climb a mountain. They climb the cracks in a mountain. And anyhow, this is.
Daniel Stillman 14:46
And somebody pointed out that is like an amazingly. That's such a subtle transformation in language. But I just think it's really interesting to highlight because we say just very habitually, we climb the mountain, but you actually climb the cracks in the mountain.
Adam Kahane 15:01
Well, that's where you put your toes and your fingers. But the way I'm bringing it back to Robert Capa is somebody pointed out to me last week, and you can't see those cracks unless you're up close.
Daniel Stillman 15:13
Yeah, very interesting. And I want to push on this a little bit because I've been thinking, I have my own metaphor that I've been thinking about for this. So first of all, I think it's just worth bringing Leonard Cohen into the conversation because I think he's the one who says cracks are where the light gets in. And it's. It's really worthwhile to acknowledge that cracks are these places you can put your hand on and create some leverage. But when you say cracks, you don't necessarily mean where the system is breaking, but where there are openings. And maybe both mindsets or. Yeah, say more about what a crack is and how we can know it if we see it.
Adam Kahane 15:54
Well, a crack is where the system is, is already changing, at least in certain places, and it can be where it's breaking down that this isn't working. There's an aspect of this that isn't working. And so we see, oh, we thought it was working, but it's not. It's working for some people, but not for other people. Or it used to work and it doesn't work anymore. Or it works to some extent, but not further. Or it can be a place where people are doing something new and interesting, a bright spot. So it's either of those. But the point is, it's a place where things are already moving that you can work with, you can widen it, you can go through it, you can leverage it. And the metaphor is just the opposite of, nothing's happening. It's solid, it can't be changed unless you just take a sledgehammer or dynamite to it.
Daniel Stillman 16:57
Yeah. So one of the things that I've been thinking about, you know, you know, in physics, there's this idea of leverage and that the classic diagram in, you know, like, Physics 101 is. It's like a seesaw, but it's off center. There's a triangle.
Adam Kahane 17:15
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 17:16
On one side, you've got the, the object, the thing you're trying to move, and then you've got this lever point, right. That gives you, quote, unquote leverage, but it's really the arm on the other side that gives you the quote, unquote leverage. And Archimedes has that famous quote that give me a place to stand on and a lever long enough, I can move the world.
Adam Kahane 17:35
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 17:36
So I feel like cracks and leverage points, there's this dance between closeness and distance because the lever arm gives you some leverage to be able to step away and say, well, how do I really move this? And, yeah, the kind of. Well, first of all, I'm just as you. As you look around, as that sets in with, like, what is. How does that hit you. This, this combination of closeness and proximity to know it, but somehow distance to, to make a, to be able to make that effect.
Adam Kahane 18:10
Well, these are two often used metaphors, cracks, which I hadn't thought about before, and leverage points which have been used in systems thinking for a long time. And what they have in common. I guess what they have in common is they're asking you and I. Yeah, I guess there's a limit to how far you can take an analogy, but yes, let's find out. Yeah. So yes, stepping back in order to see that there's things that are important here beyond the things that are right in front of me. And the opposite of that is this is just about me and what I think and what I want and what I can touch personally. And
Adam Kahane 18:59
often what's going on in a system, what you need to pay attention to is something that's on the other side that you can't even see from where you are and so you don't notice it not working. That's the example of climate change, is that the problem is that cause and effect are far apart in space and time. So things that happen 15 years, fossil fuels that were burned 10 years ago are having an impact now and fossil fuels that are burned on the other side of the planet are having an impact here. So yes, there is a there. Certain systems are big in time and space. And so just looking at what's right in front of you now doesn't help. But. So that's one metaphor and the other is that pay attention to what's changing and look at it closely enough. The. I'm. What I'm saying by saying closely enough is. What I mean is pay attention to the reality of what's happening, not just sitting back thinking about. I think it ought to be like this. I'm going to just make an order. It should be like this.
Daniel Stillman 20:07
Yes.
Adam Kahane 20:08
And yeah, I think people at the top probably exaggerate how much impact they have both because they're used to being deferred to.
Adam Kahane 20:23
But I have found often that the things that aren't working or the things that are changing are not visible to people at the top because it works perfectly well for them.
Daniel Stillman 20:36
Yes, yes. Right. Which is why going outside and looking at what's really happening can be really eye opening.
Adam Kahane 20:43
And you know, the, the second habit in the book or the third habit in the book, I always have to look at the of because I can never remember the numbers. Looking for what's unseen. The, the, the. The easiest way to see what you're not seeing is to talk to somebody with a different position and positionality in the system and say how does this look like from where you are? And you'll often, you'll be surprised. Oh geez. I, I, I, I hadn't seen that before. I couldn't see it from where I was. And so that's about, that's one of the seven habits for engaging with a system.
Daniel Stillman 21:24
You know, you, you talk, we should maybe zoom back in or zoom out, I'm not sure and talk about, you know, maybe an overview of the, of the, of the habits. But, but I, but also I think this question of like how you started to think about this change in terms of this granular moment by moment, day by day, conversation by conversation, change versus the maybe we call it the event based facilitation based transformation. That was the sort of the bread and butter of the way you did work and do work generally speaking. And now I'm in danger of asking a two multi parted question because when I think about leverage, I think about these aspects of you as an outsider and the people you work with as insiders and the benefit that they get from the distance you have. I mean there's challenges you talk about in the book. Some people don't trust you necessarily as an outsider.
Adam Kahane 22:32
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 22:33
Or as a member of the system as a, as a, you know, a white male when you're working with, with aboriginal organizations. But there is this interesting synergy of insider and outsider in creating change and transformation.
Adam Kahane 22:47
Yeah. So that is a definitely multi part.
Daniel Stillman 22:50
It is. I know I have too many things that I'm curious about and I just want you to take whatever your is most interesting for in that one.
Adam Kahane 22:59
Yeah. Okay. So, so let me, let me cover two aspects of that. So I got started in the work I do and that Rios partners does in 1991 in South Africa, which is a country I didn't know. I'm from Canada. I was living in London at the time and I got invited to facilitate a series of workshops that became known as the Mont Fleur Scenario exercise. Which was 1991 was one year after Nelson Mandela was released from prison and three years before the first democratic elections that Mandela won or that Mandela's party won and he became president. So there were lots of, there were many, many things going on in that interregnum. As they say, the old was dying, but the new had not yet been born. And there were many, many activities. And I was emboldened. One quite small one which was a set of workshops to think about how could the transition go? And what was special about it, at least, was that it involved 28 people from across the whole system, which means politicians, business people, trade unionists, community activists, academics, men and women, black and white, opposite, an establishment, left and right.
So this experience of facilitating this group in South Africa was extraordinary. And that's how I ended up leaving the corporate world and immigrating to South Africa and starting to do the work that, that I've been doing for. For 35 years since then. So that's an interesting example for two reasons. One, what happened in South Africa between the mid-80s and the mid-90s was an extraordinary, historic example of a system being transformed imperfectly, incompletely, but it produces different results for different people than it did under the apartheid system. And secondly, I met a man there. There was a. One of the 28 was a man named Trevor Manuel, who has been quite an important leader in South Africa. He's a member of the African National Congress. He was at that time the head of the ANC's Department of Economic Policy. He'd been a really important activist in the country even during the time the ANC was illegal. When Mandela formed the government, Trevor went into the cabinet and became the Minister of Finance, which is a very powerful position, a position he held for 13 years. So anyhow, he knows a lot about that particular system transformation. He knows a lot about a lot of things, but including that. So four years ago, when I was launching my previous book, the one you and I spoke about, facilitating Breakthrough, I had this idea that I would talk to. I would conduct these interviews with three people that, loosely speaking, could be considered great facilitators. And the first of these three was Trevor Manual, who kindly agreed to be interviewed for 30 minutes live, online. And to make a long story short, it was a disaster of an interview. An interview. And because I had this idea of how transformation occurred from my position as a Consultant, as a outsider, as a Canadian, as a facilitator. And he had a different idea from being an insider who was on the ground day in, day out for years, really. Day in, day out for years, literally. And I didn't understand what he was saying and I kept interrupting him and it was a fiasco. And when the half hour was up and I hung up, I got messages from my colleagues and my wife saying, don't quit your day job. You have no future as an interviewer.
Daniel Stillman 27:43
I know we make it look easy here on the other side of the mic, but there's a lot that's like the duck. There's a lot going on down there.
Adam Kahane 27:49
Yeah, well, I think the main thing I learned is don't interrupt like every three seconds. In fact, we even tried to edit the tape so he could put it up, but it was even two days of editing, it just wasn't possible. It was such a disaster anyhow, it was embarrassing for me, but also really puzzling. I couldn't figure out what am I missing. So I looked at the transcript over and over and I think the key thing Trevor was trying to say that I didn't understand was in retrospect or now I understand he was saying that, look, the way we did this is we just talked to people all the time and tried to figure out a way forward. I talked to business people in the morning and then radical students in the afternoon. Then I'd go to a poor community, then late at night I'd be at party headquarters strategizing. And that's what we. That's it. And he later had a similar description when he talked about how he, how he did his work as the Minister of finance. So that's what gave me the idea for the book. I thought, geez, there's something here that's obvious to him, that's not obvious to me that I'd like to understand and that maybe other people would like to understand. So that was the inspiration for the book. And this idea of we know that system transformation is a collective activity. It's not one person, one time. But it still begs the question, what does each person who's contributing have to do not occasionally, but on an everyday basis? And fast forward many interviews later, including the second interview with was Cristiano Figueres, who negotiated the Paris accord on climate change. And the third was with Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Columbia, who ended the 52 year civil war and won the Nobel Peace Prize. And many other interviews and working with hundreds of colleagues around the world on the text itself. Fast forward past all of that, and I come back to. Okay, now I get what Trevor was trying to tell me. It's about engaging with others, but not superficially, like I have a dinner engagement, but under the surface. And I use the word radical engagement because the word radical doesn't. First meaning is not extreme. It means, you know, root or essential or fundamental. So engaging with the system, engaging with others under the surface, at the root. Now, it's related to the question you asked, the second question you asked, which is the difference between what you can do as an outsider and what you can do as an insider. I've worked all my life as an outsider, and I don't think it's useless. I think it can be helpful to have somebody who's, you know, not a partisan, not on one side or another, not. Doesn't have so much skin in the game. But I think that role is very limited. And I think people who play that role imagine that
Adam Kahane 30:59
it has more potential than it does.
Adam Kahane 31:04
And somebody pointed out to me just last Friday that as soon as you engage with a system, you're by definition, no longer an outsider. You're in the mix. And understanding that rather than saying, I have nothing to do with this, I'm just facilitating, I think, a rather dramatic error.
Daniel Stillman 31:24
Mm. So, you know, if I. Going back to this. This question of what a crack is and how we find them, it seems like it really is a conversation by conversation. You know, these micro interactions we have with someone realizing that there's an opening in somebody's mental model or, you know, it can be as simple as different using a different type of word and seeing that that word resonates with somebody in a way that another word doesn't. It's a very granular effort that the system transformers are doing to spot these cracks not just in a system in abstract, but in individual actors inside of the system.
Adam Kahane 32:04
Yes. Say. Oh, you look at it that way. Okay, now that I get. Let me say it another way. People often ask me because so much of my work has been on collaborating across difference. They say, how can I ever work with those people? I don't. They. I don't like them. I don't agree with them. I don't trust them. And my answer is, well, I'm not saying you have to, but, I mean, you can. You can try to work around them or. Or. Or ignore them or bulldoze over them, but if you want. If you think it's worth trying, then my. My advice is talk to them. But talk to them by trying to figure out where are they coming from. And that's amazing. I mean, it doesn't always work, but it's different from I'm going to talk to them, I'm going to convince them they're wrong and I'm going to get them to apologize and they should think like me and then we'd be fine. I mean, that's kind of like Adam Kahane interviewing It doesn't go so well.
Daniel Stillman 33:02
I mean, I I've been meaning to write an essay about the you know, the word convince, which has its root in the Latin for with victory to win over someone versus persuade, which comes from this idea of like, there's sweetness, there's, there's, it's, it's really trying to find what, what will flow. That there's a there's a Latin root for the word flow in persuasion. And I think that's a there's a big difference between trying to convince somebody and it's like I win, you lose, haha, suck it. Versus persuading someone, which is finding a flow point for someone else.
Adam Kahane 33:37
So I think, Sorry, just let me just finish what I was saying. If you can hold on to that idea. No, no, just that when you hear how other people think about things, often they just are paying attention to something different or they care about something different and it doesn't make much sense to you or anyhow you understand it, you might not agree with it, you might not like it. But okay, I get now why you're doing what you're doing. I get now what you care about. I get where you're coming from. Literally the point of that is whether or not you work with them. You can make wiser decisions about what you yourself can do. Oh, okay. If I included this element or if I use this word or if I went in this direction, maybe this would work better than what I was thinking about before. So that's what I mean by paying attention enough to see what you could try out. That's all I'm saying. It's nothing more than that. But it's so different from convincing that it needs to be underlined four times.
Daniel Stillman 34:52
Well, so I want to with the little bit of time we have left, I want to break down. I have another like, you know, seven parts question, but I'm going to try and link it together in one bigger question because I feel like we should get granular on some of the habits so that some of the listeners can sort of like have something to hold on to, some leverage points. Yeah, cracks. And so one thing is, I myself was curious about habit number two, which is just relating in three dimensions, because it seems like we're pointing at this, that in order to find these cracks, in order to relate to somebody deep, deeply and sort of enable to engage in persuasion over long periods of time, we have to engage with them, not just very superficially, and we could just have a beat about those, that particular habit. But I'm also curious about the other habits. I think books are conversations. You know, I know that you did a lot of work to do a lot of community listening over the last year, at least to have people work with you on this one, to have conversations about it. You know, you boiled it down to seven, and now that you're sharing it, I'm willing to bet that you're learning that one makes a lot of sense to people and resonates a lot and one maybe doesn't make a lot of sense to people or they're having a harder time with it. And there's one that you wish people were asking more about that they aren't asking about. So maybe there's a couple of habits we can, we can, yeah, we can zoom in on. I have ones that I'm interested. I don't know which ones are hardest for you and therefore interesting to you.
Adam Kahane 36:15
Okay, so let's talk about two. Let's talk about two of them. But yes. So unlike my other books for the, as I explained in the Trevor manual story, this is a book about something I didn't understand.
Daniel Stillman 36:35
Yeah.
Adam Kahane 36:35
So it's not primarily based on my own experience. It's primarily based on the experience of the people I spoke to. And I had this book creating club that ultimately 300 people contributed to over many Google Docs and many zoom calls. And it was really fun and creative in the sense that making a list of seven things that is true and fresh and useful is not straightforward. So I'm very happy with the result. And I, I. It's a collective result, not an individual result. And, and people, people ask me, what did you leave out? What's the eighth one? You know, I just like, seven's a lot, man. Come back.
Daniel Stillman 37:21
I'm sure people told you that too, that are like seven's too many. Make it five, do three.
Adam Kahane 37:26
Yeah, so there's. Some of them are very, Some of them are things I've thought about for a long time. Collaborating with unlike others has been the core of my work for decades. It's the subject of my book, Collaborating with the Enemy, which I've Just rewritten completely and looking for what's unseen is something that I think I'm pretty good at any. I have a lot of experience with. And it's one of the things that working in diverse groups makes easy because you literally turn to your neighbor and say, how do you see this? But they were the working with cracks that we've spoken about. This was. I had not thought about this. And the metaphor, I think, is very powerful. I want to come back to this at the end, if you'll remind me.
Daniel Stillman 38:07
Sure.
Adam Kahane 38:08
But the two I want to focus on right now, one that I think is pretty difficult to understand, unfortunately, and one that has really been challenging for me. And then we can. We can end with this point about cracks. So number two says relating in three dimensions. And it makes a point that I've been trying to make in different ways many times. And I've taken another run at it through in this book, and I think I finally nailed it in the book I worked on since then, the new edition of Collaborating with the Enemy. So let me try to explain it quickly. It's. When I talk to you, Daniel, there's three different ways I can talk to you. And they're all real, they're all important, but they're not the same. And most people focus on only one. So one of them is. I could think of Daniel as part of a larger whole. I don't know you well, but to take the simple example, we're together on this screen and we're the whole of the. Of this conversation. And I could think about, you know, Daniel's questions and Daniel's and the interaction. The interaction, me and Daniel, as we together produce a whole, which is this podcast. This. This podcast. And that's a. You know, people who think about systems thinking often focus on that. Like, I'm going to focus. If I was interested in climate change, I'm going to focus on how do each of us contribute to this global phenomena called climate change. So that is paying attention to people as parts of larger wholes. I say. I say, thinking of them as actors. So in this little play we're doing now, Daniel and Adam are actors, and we are together. We make up this podcast conversation that's number one. Number two, which is complementary, but it's different, is I could think about Daniel as a whole in himself. What's Daniel's interest here? What's his ambition? What's his schedule today? What is he trying to do? How does he make his money? What's important to him? How does this fit in with his life plan and his career ambition. And I call that the party perspective. Daniel as a whole, in himself and in climate change. This is really important. When people go to a cop. COP stands for Conference of the Parties. The big thing that's happening to a cop in a COP is a negotiation among the parties that are signatories to a treaty. They're not talking about in general, what can we all do to resolve climate change. They're talking about. This is what I need. I need you to put this in the text, and I'll give you that it's a negotiation among parties. And thirdly, there is the element of Daniel as a relative. You know, we are kin in some way. This is not. It's not apparent to me except in some general way. I don't know. We don't. You and I don't know each other personally. We don't have a relationship outside of that I know about. Outside of this podcast. I can guess we might have some distant family connections.
Daniel Stillman 41:39
There's only seven. We're all the children of seven daughters genetically. Right. There's.
Adam Kahane 41:43
Okay, well. And that is this idea that we are related. So anyway, it's a long way of saying that habit two is pay attention to all three of these, which happen to be the elements in a system, the performance of the system as a whole, and the relationship or structure among the elements. So, sorry, that's. Everybody says to me, that's the one I didn't understand. So I'm trying to find a way. And in my other books, not in this book, I refer to this as love, power and justice, which is a triad I've been very interested in. I think I finally figured it out.
Daniel Stillman 42:21
Yeah. I mean, this. I feel like there's so many, not surprisingly, relationships between your books. I was. I've been thinking about power and love and collaborating with the enemy and even some of the skills in facilitating breakthrough. You know, sort of like the horizontal and. Versus the vertical and suspending versus.
Adam Kahane 42:38
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 42:39
Aging, debating and dialoguing.
Adam Kahane 42:42
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 42:43
But on the sort of. This. Human to human, outside of a facilitative context, a dialogical approach to say, like, this person is a whole person. You know, this is why people say, like, oh, visualize this person as a naked person. Or really, you know, this person was just a. They were a baby. They were a child.
Adam Kahane 43:00
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 43:00
Inside of each person is a child.
Adam Kahane 43:03
Still.
Daniel Stillman 43:03
We all can act like children, feel like children sometimes. You know, in a way, I took that to say, like, there's often things we want people to do. And we want them.
Adam Kahane 43:12
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 43:12
There's a very transactional way.
Adam Kahane 43:14
Yes.
Daniel Stillman 43:14
Of, you know, horse trading and negotiation. And this person is just a person who.
Adam Kahane 43:20
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 43:21
Their knees might be aching and. And there's some people who are really good at relating on that human level. First. Yeah, I know in the story chapter you talked about some people who go around and during those cop events and relate as human beings. First. Yeah, Signatories. Second. So to me, it was just a good reminder that.
Adam Kahane 43:44
Yeah. So that human to that, human to human, that we are all relatives. The Native American invocation you hear often, all my relations, that's referring to that third element. The second element is we all are holes with interests. And so when we say to people as facilitators, leave your agenda at the door. It's a completely unreasonable, even manipulative request. The facilitator is not leaving their interest at the door. And yet we're all part of larger holes. And that's where we started this conversation, systems thinking. So if we have time, I'll mention these two other points. The one that I find most challenging, and it was going to be a bit of a throwaway chapter at the end, but is now the first one is the chapter called Act Responsibly or Acting Responsibly, Habit one. And it's just not. I'm a very pragmatic person. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, what's the right thing to do, at least in those words. But I've realized it really is crucial. And the chapter is short because it's offering more of a. It's not offering a recipe, it's offering a riddle, which is figuring out for yourself what is your role in the system and what is your responsibility and acting accordingly. And it relates back to what we said about outsiders because Bill Torbert said to me years ago, if you're not that old 60s expression, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. That's not the key point. But the key point is if you're not part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution. If you can't see how what you're doing or not doing is part of the way things are, then you have. There's almost nothing you can do except from the outside by force. So that relates to the question of realizing I'm part of the system. And this was new to me and I find it challenging. What. You know, what's I? And it's challenging and it involves Trade offs. This is the. As far as I've gotten, you know.
Daniel Stillman 45:52
Acting responsibly can even just mean. And people, you know, angels rush in, fools rush in, where angels fear to tread. Right. The unintended consequences of. Very simple. There's a video that I saw recently of. I mean, it was 1985. We were. We were dumber people then. Cincinnati was like, we're gonna. We're gonna do the world's record of releasing balloons. And they released this shocking cloud of plastic, which then proceeded to, like, cover whatever lake was nearby and impeded the Coast Guard rescue of, like, a boat that resulted in two deaths, like, a week later. And, you know, everyone on the day was like, oh, yeah, this is amazing. And it's beautiful. Look at all these balloons.
Adam Kahane 46:36
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 46:37
And I mean, what could possibly go wrong when we release, you know, a ton of plastic into the air? We don't often think what could, you know, plan, do check, act. Right. You talk about this. The cycle of acting carefully is certainly reasonable, but also.
Adam Kahane 46:57
Yeah, well. And not just doing whatever you feel like doing or whatever is expected of you, but what's the responsible thing to do? And I'm not saying that's straightforward, but I am saying. Or it's become more clear to me what. Most people would consider this obvious. But it wasn't obvious to me to. Yeah, to pay attention to what's outside of me. And what are the. What's the responsible thing to do? So that's habit number. So we've talked about most of the habits now.
Daniel Stillman 47:28
And so we were going to go back to cracks. I also just want to highlight, just as a structural insight, one of the pieces of feedback I got that I took to heart in my high school English class. Mr. Getz took my last paragraph and circled it and said, you should have started here. And it's so interesting that in a way, this. This last. Are like, well, here's this other thing. Here's the coda. Act responsibly. And it became the anchor point in the beginning, which I think is a beautiful reminder to anybody in the process of editing your work. It sounds like a really interesting truism in this experience of.
Adam Kahane 48:03
Yeah, well, I have a great editor, Steve Piersante, and I worked on the book with my eldest granddaughter, who's a tattoo art artist and who did the drawings in the book. And she was the one who said to me that, look, positionality matters, Grandpa. You have to start with that. And I think she's right.
Daniel Stillman 48:21
Yeah, I will. I will make a plug for. I Had Leslie. Oh, God. I was just looking at her. I just. I had her on my podcast years ago, or actually around the same time that I. I had you on my show. She. She was the first person to really teach me about the importance of positionality. Dr. Leslie Ann Knowles. She. Positionality is such an important aspect of transforming a system. But we. We have moments left. And you wanted to circle back around.
Adam Kahane 48:52
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 48:53
To crack what the crack was in the cracks.
Adam Kahane 48:56
Well, what I wanted to say is I am from Montreal and therefore I'm obliged. The rule is, for every podcast, I have to quote Leonard Cohen at least once. And you are correct that he has a song anthem where the refrain includes, there's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. But I've realized in talking about the book that the two lines before that are equally, maybe more important and particularly presenting this text in the current context, where so many people are feeling overwhelmed and frightened and in some cases, paralyzed. What can I possibly do? And so the book is about what, how it doesn't tell people what to do, but it offers that all of us, any of us, can make a contribution to making systems work better for more people. And they can discover what to do with these seven habits. So the other part of the Leonard Cohen quote is, or refrain is, ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. And I realized that those first two lines ring the bells that still can ring. We all have things we can do. We all have bells we still can ring. And a requirement is to forget your perfect offering. Forget or give up this idea that I can't do anything until it's perfect, till I know everything that's going to work. That I have to be fully developed. The idea has to be fully developed. Everything has to be just right. And so I've come back to the full refrain, all four lines. And I think that's important in the context we're in.
Daniel Stillman 50:49
Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful. It gives one goosebumps because it's, you know, forget your perfect offering is. I mean, that points to habit number five, experimenting your way forward. It doesn't have to be perfect in order to offer it and to. To get things moving going.
Adam Kahane 51:09
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 51:10
I also feel like there, there. I want to just. Maybe there's someplace else you'd like to end. But there is an interesting challenge here because there is this assumption that, yes, we are all part of the system, and we can all just by changing who we are and how we show up, start to change how the system behaves. But, you know, certainly with, you know, with climate change, I think there's this heavy burden that many people feel that, you know, I have to, I mean, yes, you should take your bags with you when you go shopping instead of buying one at the store. You know, yes, you should reduce air travel. But there are big actors in these systems who, and I feel like it can be challenging to sort of locate the responsibility on individuals.
Adam Kahane 51:56
Yeah, I think, I'm not saying,
Adam Kahane 52:03
I'm not saying change how you think, change how you are. The world will change. That's not what I'm saying at all. I don't believe that. But what I am saying is there's a contribution each of us can make.
Daniel Stillman 52:15
Yes.
Adam Kahane 52:16
And we have to figure out what that is. And it may well be running, running for Congress or lobbying for a law or picketing outside a gas station or, you know, developing a new technology or promoting a new technology. I'm not saying it's just work by individuals. I'm just making the perfectly obvious point that even collective action requires each person to do something. And the book is saying this is how to figure out your next move.
Daniel Stillman 52:51
Yes, yes. Yeah, I, you know, the reason I asked that question is, you know, my wife, who may wind up listening to this episode, is one of these people who, who wears it heavily. And I think we need to balance our own burden versus finding the cracks that we can, we can create leverage on. And I really appreciate you doing the work that you do because I believe these are high leverage interventions, giving all of the people out there these habits. You know, especially when you think about the habit of resting and persisting, giving everyone a reminder that these are day to day habits and it's a long game. I really appreciate all the work that you've done. Is there anything I have not asked you that I should ask you or any parting comments with our last literal seconds?
Adam Kahane 53:42
No, it's great. Thank you.
Daniel Stillman 53:45
Where should people who want to learn more about all things Adam Kahane? I mean you have, there's, all of your books are really good. People should read Power and Love. They should read Collaborating with the Enemy. Where would you like people to go to learn more about all things you.
Adam Kahane 54:04
Adam Kahane.com There you go.
Daniel Stillman 54:07
Well, listen, Adam, I really appreciate you making time to talk about these things. Obviously these are things you like talking about, but I appreciate you. You could have been anywhere in the world and I appreciate you spending some time with me. These are really really great, great nuggets, and I look forward to sharing them with the world.
Adam Kahane 54:21
Thank you.