In This Issue

Feature
How Can We Solve Our Toughest Problems Peacefully?
a speech by Adam Kahane

How can we solve our toughest problems peacefully? It is not hard to try to solve them violently—to use money or authority or guns to try to make things the way we want them to be. And it is not hard to be peaceful—but leave things just the way they are. The question is, how can we work together to co-create new social realities?

To do so, we have to become bilingual. We have to learn to speak two languages that are not translatable one into the other: the language of power and the language of love. Power is the drive to get one’s job done, to achieve one’s purpose, to grow. Love is the drive to reconnect that which is whole, which is one, but that appears broken into fragments. The reason we need to be bilingual is that power and love are complementary. According to Martin
Luther King Jr., “Power without love is reckless and abusive. And love without power is sentimental and anemic.” If we can work with both together, we can make progress toward solving our toughest problems.

Systems Stories
The World Café Goes Local: A Town Plans for the Future
by Peter Hechenbleikner, Deborah Gilburg,
and Kerry Dunnell

In February, the town of Reading, Massachusetts, held its first World Café conversation. People new to Reading and life-long residents alike were present to talk about what they wanted for the future of their community. This kind of community-wide conversation offers valuable benefits to cities and towns that wish to increase civic engagement and qualitative community input, particularly during a time of stagnant budgets, escalating costs, competing special interests, contentious public discourse, and dwindling public participation. This article summarizes how the Reading World Café came together and the outcomes that resulted to illuminate the practical role of inclusive conversation as a means of identifying priorities and building systemic support in community governance.

From the Resource Shelf
“Black-Belt” Mastery of Mental Models
by Greg Hennessy

Originally published in 1984, Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion presents six ways that salespeople and other “consent professionals” use commonly held mental models to get us to say “yes.” These aren’t high-brow mental models we’ve painstakingly constructed over the years regarding how our organizations work. These are basic, operational mental models that we learn at an early age, are reinforced every day, and help us get through our lives by streamlining the myriad of decisions we must make despite having incomplete information. Understanding these ways of thinking can provide practice in mental model awareness (noticing that a mental model has been triggered) and mastery (evaluating and revising them, as necessary).

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