To co-create new social realities, we have to work with two distinct fundamental forces that are in tension: power and love. This assertion requires an explanation because the words power and love are defined by so many different people in so many different ways.Power and love are difficult to work with because each of them has two sides. Both power and love have a generative side and a degenerative side
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excerpted from the book Power and Love by Adam Kahane
Introduction: Beyond War and Peace
Our two most common ways of trying to address our toughest social
challenges are the extreme ones: aggressive war and submissive peace.
Neither of these ways works. We can try, using our guns or money or
votes, to push through what we want, regardless of what others want--but
inevitably the others push back. Or we can try not to push anything on
anyone--but that leaves our situation just as it is.
These
extreme ways are extremely common, on all scales. One on one, we can be
pushy or conflict averse. At work, we can be bossy or "go along to get
along." In our communities, we can set things up so that they are the
way we want them to be, or we can abdicate. In national affairs, we can
make deals to get our way, or we can let others have their way. In
international relations--whether the challenge is climate change or
trade rules or peace in the Middle East--we can try to impose our
solutions on everyone else, or we can negotiate endlessly. These
extreme, common ways of trying to address our toughest social
challenges usually fail, leaving us stuck and in pain. There are many
exceptions to these generalizations about the prevalence of these
extreme ways, but the fact that these are exceptions proves the general
rule. We need--and many people are working on developing--different,
uncommon ways of addressing social challenges: ways beyond these
degenerative forms of war and peace.
A character in Rent, Jonathan Larson's Broadway musical about struggling artists and musicians in New York City, says, "The
opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation!"1 To address our toughest
social challenges, we need a way that is neither war nor peace, but
collective creation. How can we co-create new social realities?
Two fundamental drives
To co-create new social
realities, we have to work with two distinct fundamental forces that
are in tension: power and love. This assertion requires an explanation
because the words power and love are defined by so many
different people in so many different ways. In this book I use two
unusual definitions of power and love suggested by theologian and
philosopher Paul Tillich. His definitions are ontological: they deal
with what and why power and love are, rather than what they
enable or produce. I use these definitions because they ring true with
my experience of what in practice is required to address tough
challenges at all levels: individual, group, community, society.
Tillich
defines power as "the drive of everything living to realize itself,
with increasing intensity and extensity." So power in this sense is the
drive to achieve one's purpose, to get one's job done, to grow. .
He defines love as "the drive towards the unity of the separated." So
love in this sense is the drive to reconnect and make whole that which
has become or appears fragmented. These two ways of looking at power
and love, rather than the more common ideas of oppressive power and
romantic love (represented on the cover by the grenade and the rose),
are at the core of this book.
Our full world
We cannot address our tough
challenges only through driving towards self-realization or only
through driving towards unity. We need to do both. Often we assume that
all it takes to create something new--whether in business or politics or
technology or art--is purposefulness or power. This is because we often
assume that the context in which we create is an empty world: an open
frontier, a white space, a blank canvas. In general this assumption is
incorrect.
Let's
look at a historical example. In 1788, British settlers arrived in
Australia and encountered the indigenous people who had arrived 40,000
years earlier. This history illustrates not only the courage and
entrepreneurialism of people willing to travel across the globe to
create a new social reality, but also the human and ecological
devastation that this pioneering mind-set can produce. For more than
two centuries, the conflict between settlers and aboriginal peoples in
Australia was framed in terms of the doctrine of terra nullius,
a Roman legal term that means "land belonging to no one," or "empty
land." It was not until 1992 that the High Court of Australia ruled
that the continent had in fact never been terra nullius, and that the modern-day settlers had to work out a new way of living together with the aboriginal people.
None of us lives in terra nullius.
We can pretend that our world is empty, but it is not. Our earth is
increasingly full of people and buildings and cars and piles of
garbage. Our atmosphere is increasingly full of carbon dioxide. Our
society is increasingly full of diverse, strong, competing voices and
ideas and cultures. This fullness is the fundamental reason
why, in order to address our toughest social challenges, we need to
employ not only power but also love.
A challenge is tough when it is complex in three ways.3 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 successfully be 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.
The
fullness of our world produces this threefold complexity. We can
pretend that we are independent and that what we do does not affect
others (and what others do does not affect us), but this is not true.
We can pretend that everybody sees things the same way, or that our
differences can be resolved purely through market or political or legal
competition, but this is not true. And we can pretend that we can do
things the way we always have, or that we can first figure out and then
execute the correct answer, but this is not true.
When
we pretend that our world is empty rather than full, and that our
challenges are simple rather than complex, we get stuck. If we want to
get unstuck, we need to acknowledge our interdependence, cooperate, and
feel our way forward. We need therefore to employ not only our power
but also our love. If this sounds easy, it is not. It is difficult and
dangerous.
Two pitfalls
Power and love are difficult to
work with because each of them has two sides. Power has a generative
side and a degenerative side, and--less obviously--love also has a
generative side and a degenerative side. Feminist scholar Paola
Melchiori pointed out to me that we can see these two sets of two sides
if we look at historically constructed gender roles. The father,
embodying masculine power, goes out to work, to do his job. The
generative side of his power is that he can create something valuable
in the world. The degenerative side of his power is that he can become
so focused on his work that he denies his connection to his colleagues
and family, and so becomes a robot or a tyrant.
The
mother, by contrast, embodying feminine love, stays at home to raise
the children. The generative side of her love is that she gives life,
literally to her child and figuratively to her whole family. The
degenerative side of her love is that she can become so identified with
her child and family that she denies their and especially her own need
for self-realization, and so stunts their and her own growth.4
Love
is what makes power generative instead of degenerative. Power is what
makes love generative instead of degenerative. Power and love are
therefore exactly complementary. In order for each to achieve its full
potential, it needs the other. Just as the terra nullius perspective of focusing only on power is an error, so too is the pop perspective that "all you need is love."
Psychologist Rollo May, a friend of Paul Tillich, warned of the dangers of disconnecting power (which he referred to as will)
from love. "Love and will," he wrote, "are interdependent and belong
together. Both are conjunctive processes of being--a reaching out to
influence others, molding, forming, creating the consciousness of the
other. But this is only possible, in an inner sense, if one opens
oneself at the same time to the influence of the other. Will without
love becomes manipulation and love without will becomes sentimental.
The bottom then drops out of the conjunctive emotions and processes."5
May's conjunctive processes also operate on a social level, and
nonviolent social change can be achieved only if we use both power and
love.
One
of the greatest practitioners of nonviolent social change, Martin
Luther King Jr., was both a practical activist and a spiritual leader.
He demonstrated a way of addressing tough social challenges that went
beyond aggressive war and submissive peace, thereby contributing to the
creation of new social realities in the United States and around the
world. In his last presidential speech to the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, King--drawing on his doctoral studies of
Tillich's work--emphasized the essential complementarity between power
and love.6 "Power without love is reckless and abusive," King said,
"and love without power is sentimental and anemic."7
My own experience of the past twenty years entirely bears out King's analysis. Power without love is reckless
and abusive. If those of us engaged in social change act to realize
ourselves without recognizing that we and others are interdependent,
the result will at best be insensitive and at worst, oppressive or
even genocidal. And love without power is sentimental and
anemic. If we recognize our interdependence and act to unify our social
groups, but do so in a way that hobbles our own or others' growth, the
result will at best be ineffectual and at worst, deceitfully
reinforcing of the status quo.
Power
without love produces scorched-earth war that destroys everything we
hold dear. Love without power produces lifeless peace that leaves us
stuck in place. Both of these are terrible outcomes. We need to find a
better way.
In
his speech, King went on to say: "This collision of immoral power with
powerless morality constitutes the major crisis of our time."8 This
collision continues because our polarization of power and love
continues. In our societies and communities and organizations, and
within each of us, we usually find a "power camp" that pays attention
to interests and differences, and a "love camp" that pays attention to
connections and commonalities. The collision between these two camps--in
the worlds of business, politics, and social change, among
others--impedes our ability to make progress on our toughest social
challenges.
An imperative
Power and love stand at right
angles and delineate the space of social change. If we want to get
unstuck and to move around this space--if we want to address our
toughest challenges--we must understand and work with both of these
drives.
Rather
than a choice to be made one way or another, power and love constitute
a permanent dilemma that must be reconciled continuously and
creatively. This reconciliation is easy in theory but hard in practice.
Carl Jung doubted whether it was even possible for these two drives to
coexist in the same person: "Where love reigns, there is no will to
power; and where the will power is paramount, love is lacking. The one
is but the shadow of the other."9 His student Robert Johnson said,
"Probably the most troublesome pair of opposites that we can try to
reconcile is love and power. Our modern world is torn to shreds by this
dichotomy and one finds many more failures than successes in the
attempt to reconcile them."10
I
have seen many examples of reckless and abusive power without love, and
many examples of sentimental and anemic love without power. I have seen
far fewer examples of power with love. Too few of us are capable of
employing power with love. More of us need to learn.
If
we are to succeed in co-creating new social realities, we cannot choose
between power and love. We must choose both. This book explores how.
1. Jonathan Larson, Rent: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2008), 101. Tova Averbuch brought this intriguing formulation to my attention.
2. Tillich, 25 and 36.
3. Peter Senge and Claus Otto Scharmer, "Community Action Research" in Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, editors, Handbook of Action Research (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2001), 23.
4. I am indebted to Betty Sue Flowers for sharpening my understanding of the degenerative side of love.
5. Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), 9, 14.
6.
Martin Luther King Jr., ""A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the
Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,'' in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 339544.
7. King, "Where Do We Go From Here?" 186.
8. King, "Where Do We Go From Here?" 187.
9. Carl Jung, Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed., translated by R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 53.
10. Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche (New York: Harper One, 1993), 89.
Authors Website: reospartners.com
Authors Bio:Adam Kahane is a partner in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, office of Reos Partners. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.
Adam is a leading organizer, designer, and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders work together to address their toughest, most complex challenges. He has worked in this way 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.
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 British Columbia, California, Toronto, and the Western Cape.
In 1991 and 1992, Adam facilitated the Mont Fleur Scenario Project, in which a diverse group of South African leaders worked together to contribute to their country’s transition to democracy. Since then he has led many such seminal cross-sectoral dialogue-and-action processes, around the world. He was featured in Fast Company’s first annual “Who’s Fast,†and he is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Business Leaders’ Dialogue, the Commission on Globalisation, Global Business Network, the Global Leadership Network, the Society for Organizational Learning, and the World Academy of Art and Science.
Adam has a BSc in Physics (First Class Honors) from McGill University (Montreal), an MA in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California (Berkeley), and an MA 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 with their family in Cape Town and Montreal.