Tough problems usually don't get solved peacefully. Either a stalemate occurs, or the person or groups with power--authority, money, guns--impose their solutions.

But there are other ways. In Solving Tough Problems, Kahane explains why our ordinary ways of solving problems--expert-driven, piecemeal and best practice--cannot work for solving the complex problems we increasingly face, and demonstrates the methods that actually work.

"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's profile page

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Adam Kahane is a partner in Reos Partners (www.reospartners.com), an international organisation dedicated to supporting and building capacity for innovative collective action in complex social systems. He is also a Visiting Practitioner at the University of Oxford and the University of Waterloo.

Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address their toughest challenges. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.

Adam is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004), about which Nelson Mandela said: "This breakthrough book addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to worktogether to solve the problems we have created." He is also the author of Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2010).

During the early 1990s, Adam was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch Shell in London. Previously he held strategy and research positions with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (San Francisco), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Vienna), the Institute for Energy Economics (Tokyo), and the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia, California, and the Western Cape.

In 1991 and 1992, Adam facilitated the Mont Fleur Scenario Project, in which a diverse group of South Africans worked together to effect the transition to democracy. Since then he has led many such seminal cross-sectoral dialogue-and-action processes, throughout the world. He was one of the sixteen outstanding individuals featured in Fast Company's first annual "Who's Fast," and is a member of the World Academy of Art and Science, the Commission on Globalisation, the Aspen Institute's Business Leaders' Dialogue, the Society for Organizational Learning, the Global Leadership Network, and Global Business Network.

Adam has a B.Sc. in Physics (First Class Honors) from McGill University (Montreal), an M.A. in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California (Berkeley), and an M.A. in Applied Behavioral Science from Bastyr University (Seattle). He has also studied negotiation at Harvard Law School and cello performance at Institut Marguerite-Bourgeoys. Adam and his wife Dorothy live in Montreal and Cape Town.