## Metadata - Author: [[Adam Kahane]] - Full Title: Power and Love - Category: #books ## Highlights - In our societies and communities and organizations, and within each of us, we usually find a “power camp,” which pays attention to interests and differences, and a “love camp,” which 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. ([Location 337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=337)) - It seemed to me that businesspeople understood power the same way Martin Luther King Jr. did: “Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose.”2 Their actions seemed to accord with Paul Tillich’s explanation of power’s generative root: “the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity.” This drive can be seen in the force of a growing seed: the force that “guerrilla gardeners” employ to turn vacant urban lots into parks, when they surreptitiously plant seeds that break through the concrete. ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=378)) - The generative side of power is the power-to that Paul Tillich refers to as the drive to self-realization. The degenerative, shadow side is power-over—the stealing or suppression of the self-realization of another. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=431)) - In Kanyini, Randall argues that the crisis in aboriginal society originated in their having been dispossessed and estranged from the four aspects of life that are essential to survival: their belief system or law, their land or country, their spirituality, and their families. “The purpose of life is to be part of everything that is,” he says in the film. “You take away my kanyini, my interconnectedness, and I’m nothing. I’m dead.” I was struck that Randall’s yearning was the same as Paul Tillich’s love: “the drive towards the unity of the separated.” ([Location 549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=549)) - the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin realized he was becoming mature when he could read a newspaper story that had a favorable impact on society and a negative impact on himself, and be happy. ([Location 604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=604)) - Humberto Maturana says that love is the only emotion that expands intelligence. ([Location 642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=642)) - experienced the pain of this power-denying love myself in an early meeting of our Global Leadership Initiative team. Ten of us spent a week at a retreat center on a wild mountain property in Colorado. A particular tension ran through this meeting. Most of the team thought it was essential that we articulate and take a stand for the underlying connectedness of all being, for retreating into wilderness as the way to access that connectedness, and for the centrality of this access to addressing the world’s toughest social challenges. I was in the minority in doubting these premises: I was not confident that a deep felt sense of connectedness was sufficient to achieve the results we wanted, and my own retreat experiences had neither revealed to me this deep connectedness nor much shifted my actions. My doubts were magnified one morning when a teacher from the retreat center took us all on a walk around the property to show us some rock formations that he said had powerful energetic properties. At one formation after another, my colleagues sat or held their hands as the teacher demonstrated, and marveled at the sensations of connectedness they experienced. But when I approached the rocks, I didn’t notice any sensations. I was torn between my need to belong and to unite with these, my closest colleagues and friends, and my need to be true to my own different experience. I felt subjugated. ([Location 850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=850)) - Solomon Asch, a social psychologist who studied agreement-forming processes in the 1950s, says, “Consensus is valid only to the extent to which each individual asserts his own relation to the facts and retains his individuality. There can be no genuine agreement unless each adheres to the testimony of his experience and steadfastly maintains his hold on reality.”21 A hegemonic doctrine of boundary-less unity that denies each person his or her own boundaries is a form of love without power that prevents valid consensus and therefore cannot be sustained. ([Location 860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=860)) - we discovered that in the field of international public health, India stands out as a glaring and distressing anomaly. Fifty-five million, or 43 percent, of Indian children under five years old are underweight (this is one of the highest rates in the world), and 35 percent of all the underweight children in the world are in India.1 Furthermore, in spite of having one of the world’s largest government programs aimed at solving this problem (wiith a budget of over $1 billion per year), the Indian rate of child malnutrition has come down only slowly. ([Location 924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=924)) - The sociologist Ulrich Beck makes the case that “one could almost say, whenever nobody is talking about power, that is where it unquestionably exists, at once secure and great in its unquestionability. Wherever power is the subject of discussion, that is the start of its decline.” The point, of course, is not a decline of power for its own sake. Rather, it is important that participants do not feel that they are merely cogs in a process that is beyond their control, subject to hidden power dynamics. Instead, organizers need to ensure that the group has real agency in the design and structure of the change lab process. When power dynamics are explicitly discussed, the group can come to terms with its own collective identity and relational agency. When power differentials and dynamics are masked, there is a risk that both individuals and the collective will become politically disenfranchised and essentially ineffective. The change lab as a vehicle for systemic change will only succeed when the power dynamics present within the larger system are consciously addressed. ([Location 1016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1016)) - Family systems therapist Edwin Friedman suggests that this is a typical symptom of leadership characterized by love without power: In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true one hundred percent of the time, regardless of whether the disrupters are supervisors, subordinates, or peers, is that the person at the very top of that institution is a peace-monger. By that I mean a highly anxious risk-avoider, someone who is more concerned with good feelings than with progress, someone whose life revolves around the axis of consensus. ([Location 1044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1044)) - These two poles of love without power and power without love, in the project and in me, clashed cataclysmically on the final day of the lab. The lab team proposed to the Champions four innovative initiatives that they believed could, if piloted and developed and scaled up successfully, contribute to meeting the alliance’s ambitious objectives for reducing child malnutrition. These initiatives had been generated through the team’s intense interaction with each other and with the stakeholders we had worked with over the course of the lab. They also involved effecting radical changes to the “malnutrition system,” in particular a shift in control away from the state government and towards local communities. The members of the lab team had pushed themselves hard, had survived many arguments, and were exhausted but satisfied with where they had arrived. Most of them were committed, notwithstanding the risks to their own careers, to staying involved in Bhavishya and working on the implementation of the initiatives. But the Champions saw things differently. Many of them were critical of our proposals and doubted whether they were sound or viable. One of them thought that our work was poorly thought through and stepped in to call for an immediate meeting of the Champions without the lab team. By the end of the day, almost none of the lab team’s work had been approved. The lab team felt bewildered and distressed. I felt devastated. Later I told this story to businessman and Buddhist teacher Michael Chender. He commented, “When you get very close to the heart of the system, that is when the devils will appear. By devils I mean the system’s strongest and trickiest defenders: its auto-immune system. If you aren’t prepared for this, then you will be overwhelmed, and your efforts to change the system will fail.” ([Location 1056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1056)) - For political or philosophical or psychological reasons, we often mistakenly choose to pay attention either only to power or only to love. Most of us prefer one of these drives over the other, or deny one in favor of the other. Even if we understand the need to employ both drives, when under pressure and frightened and constrained, we often revert to our habitual choice of either power or love. ([Location 1119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1119)) - One way to make both power and love visible is to inquire explicitly after them—to ensure that both are acknowledged and discussable rather than denied and undiscussable. We must, with others, ask about our situation: Where is the power here? What is each of the actors (including ourselves) trying to achieve and realize? What are their positions, needs, and interests? Who is employing what kind of power-to and power-over? Whose voices are being heard and whose are not? And where is the love here? How are the actors separated, and how are they unified? What is it that is driven to being reunited? What is being kept united that is not driven to be? ([Location 1126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1126)) - Consultant Louis van der Merwe taught me that in starting any social change initiative, we need to keep in mind that “the pattern is set at the beginning.” In particular, we need to ask, Which systemic patterns of power and love—of realization and nonrealization, of connection and nonconnection—are we interrupting or reinforcing? If the patterns we set intentionally or unintentionally increase or sustain the polarization of power and love, we will fall down. We all fall down, sometimes when we are inattentive and sometimes when the terrain we are traversing is treacherous. Falling down hurts, but we can learn from it. Falling down signals to us that we need to reflect on what we have been doing and why and with what effect. Then we must pick ourselves up and, with greater attentiveness, try to move forward again. ([Location 1131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1131)) - Afterwards another participant, seeing that I had been taken aback by the ferocity of the questioning, tried to reassure me: “Don’t worry, Israelis are always like this. Even in the Army, we won’t follow an order unless the next six steps have also been explained to us.” This drive for self-realization, set against the conflicting drives of other participants, created heated and lengthy arguments. Ben Yosef offered an explanation for why workshops in Israel usually aren’t placid and conclusive. “Israelis don’t like things to be ‘tied up neatly with a bow,’” he said. “When we see a package like that, we worry that it might be a bomb.” ([Location 1199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1199)) - A philosophical and practical pillar of Haramati’s way of working is the “Open Space” approach pioneered by Harrison Owen and developed in Israel by Averbuch and Haramati. The only rule of Open Space, says Owen, is “the Law of Two Feet, which says that every individual has two feet, and must be prepared to use them. Individuals can make a difference and must make a difference. If that is not true in a given situation, they, and they alone, must take responsibility to use their two feet, and move to a new place where they can make a difference.” ([Location 1207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1207)) - As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel suggests in his book on Jewish spirituality, the Jewish “architecture of holiness” appears not in space but in time. “The Sabbaths,” he writes, “are our great cathedrals.” ([Location 1227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1227)) - the fear of being hurt—even of being annihilated—exceeded the fear of hurting others, and so power exceeded love. ([Location 1250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1250)) - In one of our later meetings, Rabbi Azriel Azriel, from the Council of the Rabbis of the Settlements, was reflecting on how fundamentally his perspective had shifted through our working together. He said, “What I now see, and what surprises me, is that I would rather live in a scenario that I didn’t choose and do not like but that takes me and my needs into consideration, than in a scenario that I do like but that does not take you into consideration.” After he said that, the room fell into a sacred silence—and Israelis are not often silent. This was one of those precious moments of grace that makes worthwhile all of the trials and tribulations of our journey. ([Location 1272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1272)) - The oldest member of the team was Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim, a leader in the ultra-Orthodox community. He reminded us of the admonition in the Jewish Ethics of the Fathers: “It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.” ([Location 1285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1285)) - My partner Zaid Hassan suggests that two conditions are necessary for a team to be healthy: A group displays collective intelligence when the conditions of diversity in its composition and access to information by its members are met. If a group lacks diversity or lacks information, then it will in all likelihood not display signs of collective intelligence, but rather will tend to either conflict or groupthink. Groups that are able to meet conditions for collective intelligence will be able to make decisions in complex social systems that may well appear messy or illogical in the short-term, but will ultimately result in systems that are more resilient and hence sustainable.13 The Dinokeng team met these two conditions and so exhibited collective intelligence and contributed to the resilience and sustainability of South Africa. Zaid goes on to say that, in order to meet these conditions, a team needs a “container.”14 He quotes Crane Stookey, founder of The Nova Scotia Sea School: “The container is any closed, inescapable environment. It can be 12 people in a 28 foot open boat for 3 weeks at the Sea School, or it can be the river, the ropes course, even the workplace. The image that best describes this principle is the stone polisher, the can that turns and tumbles the rocks we found at the beach until they turn into gems. The rocks don’t get out until they’re done, the friction between them, the chaos of their movement, is what polishes them, and in the end the process reveals their natural inherent brilliance. We don’t paint colors on them, we trust what’s there.” ([Location 1362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1362)) - People who can understand the concerns of others and mix those concerns with their own agenda have access to a power source denied to those who can push only their own interests. In this fuller understanding, “power” is a verb meaning “to give and take,” “to be reciprocal,” “to be influenced as well as to influence.” To be affected by another in relationship is as true a sign of power as the capacity to affect others. Relational power is infinite and unifying, not limited and divisive. It’s additive and multiplicative, not subtractive and divisive. As you become more powerful, so do those in relationship with you. As they become more powerful, so do you. This is power understood as relational, as power with, not over.17 Chambers also believes that power and love are complementary:     In Western culture, “power” means “unilateral power” and “love” means “unilateral love.” So Westerners tend to see power and love as opposites, and the right relationship between them as a kind of balancing off of the effects of these two ways of relating. When we “power” someone, we ignore their interests; when we “love” someone, we ignore our own concerns. Power and love—like self-interest and self-sacrifice—are not, however, mutually exclusive, but are rather complementary aspects of a conjugal partnership. ([Location 1406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1406)) - Peter Senge has been involved in the Food Lab since its inception. He calls it “the largest and most promising systemic change initiative I know of.”12 In his book The Dance of Change, Senge writes, “Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. Leaders instigating change are often like gardeners standing over their plants, imploring them: ‘Grow! Try harder! You can do it!’ No gardener tries to convince a plant to ‘want’ to grow: if the seed does not have the potential to grow, there’s nothing anyone can do to make a difference.”13 ([Location 1634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1634)) - designer Buckminster Fuller’s admonition: “You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ([Location 1645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1645)) - The dominant ways that humanity is currently acting in relation to climate are the extreme, polarized, degenerative ones: aggressive war and submissive peace. We burn fossil fuels to provide ourselves with power-to, literally, but we do this in denial of the impacts of our activities on climate and on other people. Earl Saxon says about the futility of denying our interconnectedness: “Mother Nature does not negotiate.”15 ([Location 1671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1671)) - Binding agreements in the UNFCCC require the unanimous consent of the 192 participating national governments. This peaceful approach of not forcing anything on anyone is reproducing the status quo of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. With every passing year, climate change is becoming more severe and urgent and more difficult to address. ([Location 1681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1681)) - I can see the character of the challenge of climate change and of the response that is required of us. I cannot yet see how to mobilize that response in a way that is big enough and fast enough. But I have seen a fractal of what that response looks like. ([Location 1688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1688)) - Roy’s way of leading change was uncomfortable for some of the people involved, including me. A few of us discussed how we found him pushy and insensitive. But over the years, I had heard this same criticism about almost every one of the social change project initiators, around the world, with whom I had worked. To lead means to step forward, to exceed one’s authority, to try to change the status quo, to exercise power, and such action is by definition disruptive. There is no way to change the status quo without discomforting those who are comfortable with the status quo. ([Location 1702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1702)) - Power defines, and creates, concrete physical, economic, ecological, and social realities. Rationality is context-dependent, the context of rationality is power, and power blurs the dividing line between rationality and rationalization. We cannot rely solely on democracy based on rationality to solve our problems. Forms of participation that are practical, committed, and ready for conflict provide a superior paradigm of democratic virtue than forms of participation that are discursive, detached, and consensus-dependent, that is, rational. ([Location 1720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1720)) - Most people find the prospect of employing an emergent approach to addressing their challenges to be unusual and daunting. But organizational theorist Karl Weick argues that in practice this is how people usually make progress in complex contexts: During military maneuvers in Switzerland, the young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit into the icy wilderness. It began to snow immediately, snowed for two days, and the unit did not return. The lieutenant suffered, fearing that he had dispatched his own people to death. But the third day the unit came back. Where had they been? How have they made their way? Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end. And then one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm, and then with the map we discovered our bearings. And here we are. The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. He discovered to his astonishment that it was not a map of the Alps, but a map of the Pyrenees.19 Weick’s argument is that people find their way forward not because they necessarily have a good strategy or map, but because they “begin to act, they generate tangible outcomes in some context, and this helps them discover what is occurring, what needs to be explained, and what should be done next.” ([Location 1746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1746)) - The movement from power to love enables actors to see more clearly the system that they are part of and their role in it. They see how they contribute to the system’s producing the results it is producing and what—if they want the system to produce different results—they need to do differently. Boston College professor Bill Tolbert once remarked that the old quip “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” is less useful than the alternative formulation: “If you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution.” ([Location 1798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1798)) - The second movement, from love to power, involves supporting actors to undertake individual and collective actions—arising out of and remaining in connection with their co-sensing of the whole of the system—to shift that system. It involves shifting from “someone should” to “I will.” In the Food Lab, this second, co-realizing, movement was accomplished through processes that involved the members choosing to act: to join the lab and come to its meetings, to vote with their feet to join initiative teams, and to stay engaged in these initiatives through the long ups and downs of the practical work to create new social realities. The discomfort and conflict of the Salzburg meeting exemplified the challenge of stepping from love’s connected feeling of warm belonging, to power’s lonely feeling of putting on cold armor to do battle with the world, our colleagues, and ourselves. ([Location 1804](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1804)) - a pamphlet written by the philosopher Martin Buber that challenged my position:     This perspective, in which a man sees himself only as an individual contrasted with other individuals, and not as a genuine person whose transformation helps towards the transformation of the world, contains a fundamental error. The essential thing is to begin with oneself, and at this moment a man has nothing in the world to care about than this beginning. Any other attitude would distract him from what he is about to begin, weaken his initiative, and thus frustrate the entire bold undertaking. ([Location 1836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1836)) - “A shaman is someone who has a wound that will not heal. He sits by the side of the road with his open wound exposed. The stance of such a wounded healer is fundamentally different from that of an expert curer: the doctor in the clean white coat who stands, objective and healthy, above his patient.” Our capacity to address our toughest social challenges depends on our willingness to admit that we are part of, rather than apart from, the woundedness of our world. ([Location 1877](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1877)) - What holds us back from exercising all of our power and all of our love? Fear. Because we are afraid of off ending or hurting others, we hold back our purposefulness and our power. Because we are afraid of being embarrassed or hurt, we hold back our openness and our love. We dysfunctionally allow our fears to prevent us from becoming whole. ([Location 1881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1881)) - “In Aikido,” he told me, “what we aim to do is to be powerful and loving at the same time. Power does not mean hitting another person, and love does not mean giving up and hoping that the other will take care of us. I cannot throw a 200-pound person to the ground, but I can lead him into wanting to fall.” ([Location 1918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1918)) - “If you take unity seriously, as Obama does, then outrage does not make sense, any more than it would make sense for a doctor to express outrage that a patient’s kidney is causing pain in his back.”9 ([Location 1955](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005P2A6IE&location=1955))