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Laurice Whack
Since then, I have, with my colleagues, been following this thread I picked up in South Africa. Our basic approach has been to work with teams of leaders from across a given social system, all of whom have the commitment and capacity to act to change that system, to build up a shared understanding of their current reality, of their own role in that current reality, and of what they can and will do to co-create a new reality. We have worked in this way with all kinds of teams, on all sorts of complex challenges, in all parts of the world: in Guatemala, to implement the peace accords; in India, to reduce child malnutrition; in the United States, to rejuvenate both urban and rural areas; in Canada, to shift to a low-carbon economy; across Europe and the Americas, to make food systems more sustainable and in South Africa, to respond to social impacts of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
I have bumped my head many times. But if you focus on one question for long enough, then eventually an answer will start to come to you. Here is the beginning of the answer that has come to me: If we want to be able to solve our toughest problems peacefully, then we have to become bilingual. We have to learn to speak two languages that are not translatable one into the other. We have to learn to speak the language of power and the language of love.
Now this answer requires a bit of explanation because the words power and love are defined by many different people in many different ways. I am using two particular definitions suggested by a German-American theologian named Paul Tillich that I have found resonate deeply with my own experience.
Up to this point I have been talking about power and love in neutral and straightforward terms. But of course our situation is not neutral or straightforward at all, and this is because power and love each have two faces: a generative face and a degenerative, shadow face. Italian feminist Paula Melchiori has pointed out to me that we can see these two sets of two faces clearly if we look at traditional gender roles. The father, exemplifying masculine power, goes out to work in the world, to do his job. The generative face of his power is that he can create something valuable in the world; he can create history. The degenerative face of his power is that he can become so focused on his work that he forgets about his connection to other people, and can become a robot or even a tyrant. By contrast, the mother, exemplifying feminine love, stays at home to raise the children, renouncing her capacity to create history. The generative face of her love is that she literally gives life to her child. The degenerative face of her love is that she can become so focused on the child that she stunts its capacity to grow and to realize itself.
So the reason we need to be bilingual is that power and love are complementary. Love is what makes power generative instead of degenerative. And power is what makes love generative instead of degenerative.
I had always understood his statement as metaphorical, until I came across a remarkable book by a neuroanatomist named Jill Bolte Taylor. Ten years ago, Taylor had a stroke where she completely lost the functioning of the left hemisphere of her brain. For three weeks she had the experience of functioning with only her right hemisphere.
We need to learn to be bicephal, to be bilingual. We need to learn to speak both the language of power and the language of love. Power and love are not the same, but nor are they opposed to one another. Like our masculine and feminine natures, like our left and right hemispheres, they exist in different domains; they complement and complete each other. If we can become more bilingual, then we will become more able to solve our toughest problems peacefully.
Adam Kahane (kah...@reospartners.com) is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An OpenWay of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities. As a partner in Generon Reos LLC (www.reospartners.com), he is a designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can come together to solve their toughest problems. During the early 1990s, Adam was head of social, political, economic, and technological scenarios for Royal Dutch/Shell in London.
In his book, Solving Tough Problems: An OpenWay of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (Berrett-Koehler, 2007), Adam offers 10 suggestions for beginning to solve tough problems in partnership with others:
Being wealthy crept up on me. I only noticed it during a recent interview, one of many since the new edition of Your Money or Your Life came out this spring. A reporter from Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, perched on my sofa asking questions, scribbling notes, and more than once commenting on how nice my house and yard and view are.
As the reporter marveled at my house, I started to marvel as well. How did someone who has taken home very few paychecks plus a small inheritance in the last 50 years end up with a 2,000-square-foot house with a view in a seaside village?
We all care so very much. We all want to help in these challenging times, be it writing a letter to the editor or attending a march or gathering with groups to stop something destructive or start something important. Take heart. People from all income brackets are buying back their lives and bringing forward a diversity of natural wealth that can solve our problems.
Think of the last time you faced a seemingly impossible problem. It could be related to a project at work. Or perhaps a struggle you're dealing with at home during the coronavirus pandemic. It could even be something more abstract, like finding happiness in your career or relationships.
In your drive to find a solution and act, could you be confident that your decision was the best possible one? And if you happened to give up, feeling sure that this problem simply couldn't be solved after all your analysis, is there truly no other way to figure this dilemma out?
In a recent article for Forbes, I discussed the value of staying curious a little longer and resisting the urge to jump in and solve the problem you perceive. Reframing is an activity that channels this curiosity and patience into a thought process that reveals more productive solutions to the things that confound us.
For more on this concept, I reached out to my colleague and innovation thought leader, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, who is an expert on reframing and recently wrote a fascinating book on it, called What's Your Problem?
Thomas's book is a fun mix of research, coaching, and enlightening cases where people used reframing to solve tough challenges in everything from business to careers to even dating and family issues.
Readers will find so many intriguing examples that I won't have space to repeat in this article, but here are three reasons for companies, leaders, and virtually all of us to begin learning the art of reframing for better solutions.
Reframing is more efficient than many traditional problem-solving frameworks. When I asked Thomas why he wrote What's Your Problem, he told me that after moving from academic research to consulting leaders, he noticed that tools in problem-solving and innovation were becoming too nuanced and complex for busy practitioners to use.
In my executive coaching practice for C-level and VP leaders at large, global organizations, I can attest to this truth and have observed a phenomenon he describes in his writing. He shares how many companies push the practice of common problem-diagnosis frameworks like Six Sigma and informal ones like "root cause" analysis or the "Five Whys" technique, to analyze issues.
However, these models can take too long and require extensive training. They also risk going more in-depth into one problem, without recognizing that this problem may not even be the right one to solve. This perspective reminded me of creativity expert Edward de Bono's famous quote about lateral thinking: "you cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper."
Thomas cautions against the mistake of being so focused on the first problem we notice and assuming then that the first solution we propose is the best one. And today, as we are facing an unprecedented level of uncertainty and stress, problem-solving becomes even more challenging, so there is a greater tendency to jump into addressing the first problem rather than assessing better problems to solve for better solutions.
Reframing enables everyone to be innovative, regardless of intelligence. In my discussion with Thomas, he shared an interesting fact with me: that society saw the placing of wheels on suitcases in 1972, which was three years after we put a man on the moon.
We often overlook the innovative horsepower that goes into specific products and initiatives relative to the more magnificent examples. But wheels on a suitcase, as Thomas shared, "is an example of reframing; it's a giant missing piece in our cognitive toolkit, and we've been blind to its absence for a long time."
Problem-solving through simple reframing shows us that there are many more opportunities to be innovative than we think. I found this an encouraging lesson for the leaders I coach, who are tasked every day with leading their companies into the future and who often doubt their capacity to be creative while executing.
To work through any self-doubt in becoming an innovative thinker, I asked Thomas whether there is a correlation between IQ and creative problem-solving. He answered, "the good news is that you don't have to be Einstein to be a better problem solver.
"In other words, you might not be someone who aced all your tests in school, but if you learn to reframe, you can still often outperform the resident genius among your colleagues. Reframing is a type of wisdom, perhaps, which is often more crucial than raw brainpower."
Thomas also advises that reframing together with colleagues is an even more effective way of solving problems because the collective effort at surfacing everyone's blind spots can outperform one person's capacity for solutions.
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