Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together

by Adam Kahane, Jeff Hoyt (Narrator)

Making progress on complex, problematic situations requires a new approach to working transformative facilitation, a structured and creative process for removing the obstacles to fluid forward movement.

It is becoming less straightforward for people to move forward together. They face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people from across more divides. In such situations, the most common ways of advancing - some people telling others what to do, or everyone just doing what they think they need to - aren’t adequate.
One better way is through facilitating. But the most common approaches to facilitating - bossy vertical directing from above or collegial horizontal accompanying from alongside - aren’t adequate. They often leave the participants frustrated and yearning for breakthrough.

This book describes a new transformative facilitation. It doesn’t choose either the bossy vertical or the collegial horizontal it cycles back and forth between them. Rather than forcing or cajoling, the facilitator removes the obstacles that stand in the way of people contributing and connecting equitably. It enables people to bring their whole selves to the process.

This book is for anyone who helps people work together to transform their situation, be it a professional facilitator, manager, consultant, coach, chairperson, organizer, mediator, stakeholder, or friend. It offers a broad and bold vision of the contribution that facilitation can make to helping people collaborate to make progress.

Audible Audio

Published July 19, 2021

About the author

Adam Kahane is a Director of Reos Partners, an international social enterprise that helps people move forward together on their most important and intractable issues.

Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address such challenges. He has worked 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.


Adam is a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2022 he was named a Schwab Foundation Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.