Glenn's blog

I've been having trouble organizing my thoughts around Adam Kahane's new book, Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change. It could be because it is more subtle of a topic than his first book, Solving Tough Problems. Or, it could be because I have not been working and thinking in terms of growth. Instead I think in terms of change, of getting other people to see and think like I do. Of protecting animals and defending their rights against people who harm and exploit them.

But can radical social change happen like this? What does growth mean in this context? If a society where all sentient beings are free to live free from human exploitation is the goal, how do we grow to reach it?

Solving Tough Problems, Kahane's first book, dealt with openness, listening and talking openly. By opening ourselves up to others we can connect and work together, generatively.

Power and Love outlines what Kahane found lacking in the first book: growth. He writes:

Power and Love picks up where Solving Tough Problems left off and reports the second discovery. In order to address our toughest challenges, we must indeed connect, but this is not enough: we must also grow. In other words, we must exercise both love (the drive to unity) and power (the drive to self-realization). If we choose either love or power, we will get stuck in re-creating existing realities, or worse. If we want to create new and better realities—at home, at work, in our communities, in the world—we need to learn how to integrate our love and our power.

Love and power aren't opposites. Instead, they are two fundamental drives that complement each other. Without love, our power changes from liberation to oppression. Without power, our love changes from nurturing to stifling.

Kahane uses the metaphor of walking to illustrate how we balance power and love. If we choose one or the other, we fall. If we manage to uneasily balance the two, we stumble. If we get it right, we walk. He refers to this as "dynamic balance."

When we stumble or walk we move forward. And only by moving forward can we grow. We need to move forward together in order to solve the tough challenges that face us.

Animal rights is one such challenge, a tough challenge that is dynamically complex, socially complex, and generatively complex.

A challenge is tough when it is complex in three ways. A challenge is dynamically complex when cause and effect are interdependent and far apart in space and time; such challenges cannot successfully be addressed piece by piece, but only by seeing the system as a whole. A challenge is socially complex when the actors involved have different perspectives and interests; such challenges cannot be successfully addressed by experts or authorities, but only with the engagement of the actors themselves. And a challenge is generatively complex when its future is fundamentally unfamiliar and undetermined; such challenges cannot successfully be addressed by applying "best practice" solutions from the past, but only by growing new, "next practice" solutions.

There is no easy solution to the problem of animal rights, and thinking about it in terms of these three forms of complexity is daunting. I mean, how can we involve all actors in solving the problem? What would it even look like to bring people together who are so deeply opposed to each other and find ways to work together to succeed, together?

But, we can certainly start to cooperate with allies and partial allies. One of the ideas in Solving Tough Problems was that open listening and open talking can create generative dialogue, where new ideas are generated not by any one person, but by the group. It is groupthink in the most positive sense possible, where the group is greater than the proverbial sum of its parts.

Cooperation doesn't mean that we relinquish our own interests and ideals. We can't give up our power in the service of unity, or else we will fall. But fighting for our own interests with no concern for unity will also cause us to fall.

This is where the idea of generative dialogue intersects with love and power: we can be creative in finding solutions that balance unity and interests, solutions that each of us may not have thought of before, solutions that come out of the collective working together.

Having these varied perspectives and ideas is what makes us strong, and the more varied our perspectives the more chance we have of finding truly novel and viable solutions.

So I have come to understand that—contrary to my training in answering, controlling, and solving—social change work never produces final, ticked-off failure or success. Some social change efforts I thought were making progress later stalled, and some stalled efforts later made great advances.

How can we build collaboration and dialogue into our social change movement? Can we employ our differences together to find new solutions and new ideas? in other words, can we balance power and love?

Kahane writes: "We must step forward."

If we hope to succeed, we have no choice but to step forward, together.