Facilitating Breakthrough

What keeps people stuck when they try to solve complex problems together—whether in their team, organization, or society? In Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together, Adam Kahane argues that progress is rarely blocked because people lack good intentions or intelligence—it’s blocked by unseen obstacles to contribution, connection, and equity. He contends that the facilitator’s job isn’t to push a group forward but to remove what’s holding them back so they can move of their own accord.

Drawing from thirty years of global experience—from corporate boardrooms to post-conflict societies—Kahane introduces an unconventional, practical framework called transformative facilitation. This method breaks free from the two limited traditions of conventional facilitation: the hierarchical, top-down method (“vertical”) and the flat, consensus-driven one (“horizontal”). Each has strengths but also fatal weaknesses: the vertical approach risks domination, and the horizontal risks diffusion or gridlock. Kahane’s insight is that true progress requires cycling between these poles, as naturally as breathing, to harness the best of both while avoiding their pitfalls.

From Commanding and Coaching to Transforming

Most people try to create change by commanding (the bossy vertical style) or coaching (the easygoing horizontal style). But when complexity and conflict rise, both fail. Kahane discovered this during a workshop in Colombia that brought together guerrillas, politicians, and businesspeople after fifty years of civil war. Tension ran high until the group began engaging authentically through structured dialogue—and achieved an unexpected sense of unity. A Jesuit peacemaker told Kahane, “You are removing the obstacles to the expression of the mystery!” That statement captured the book’s central idea: when we stop trying to control progress and instead remove what impedes it—fear, pride, inequality—the natural current of collaboration flows.

The Five Essential Questions of Collaboration

Every group, Kahane explains, faces five foundational questions: How do we see our situation? How do we define success? How do we get from here to there? How do we decide who does what? And how do we understand our role? These aren’t mechanical steps but living questions that demand constant revisiting. Transformative facilitation helps groups answer them by cycling between ten paired moves: advocating and inquiring, concluding and advancing, mapping and discovering, directing and accompanying, standing outside and standing inside. The facilitator’s mastery lies not in applying these moves linearly but in listening intently and moving fluidly among them as needed.

Attention Is the Core Skill

Kahane likens the facilitator’s task to sailing a small boat through strong winds: you can’t control the wind, only tack back and forth by paying attention to what’s happening. The facilitator’s primary skill, therefore, is attention—being fully present to what’s emerging in the room or in themselves. This inner work involves five parallel shifts: opening, discerning, adapting, serving, and partnering. These internal orientations guide when and how external moves should happen. As psychologist Timothy Gallwey wrote about sports performance, success depends equally on the outer game and the inner game; Kahane shows that transformative facilitation demands both.

Love, Power, and Justice: The Underlying Forces

Ultimately, the book evolves from a manual on facilitation into a meditation on social transformation. Kahane proposes that true collaborative progress arises from aligning three universal drives: love (the energy of connection), power (the energy of contribution), and justice (the structure that ensures fairness and equity). When any of these dominate—love without power becomes sentimental, power without love becomes abusive, justice without compassion becomes rigid—groups stagnate. But when balanced, they fuel breakthroughs that transform societies and hearts.

Why This Matters to You

Whether you’re managing a team, leading a community initiative, or trying to mend relationships in your family, Kahane’s framework maps a way through complexity. Instead of forcing agreement, you learn to create conditions for genuine movement. Instead of choosing between authority and empathy, you cycle between them. Instead of trying to fix everything yourself, you help others find their own rhythm. This is the art of becoming a transformative facilitator—someone who helps people bridge differences and co-create change by paying attention and enabling flow.

In short: Transformative facilitation shifts collaboration from control to liberation. It teaches you to remove obstacles instead of pushing harder, to alternate structure and freedom, authority and empathy, and in doing so, to unlock the powerful natural movement of people working together.

Kahane begins by contrasting two conventional approaches: vertical facilitation (directive and hierarchical) and horizontal facilitation (autonomous and egalitarian). Both, he argues, can help groups collaborate—but each also creates unique obstacles. To be effective long term, facilitators must learn to cycle between them rather than choosing one.

Vertical Facilitation

This approach prioritizes coordination, cohesion, and clarity. The facilitator or leader defines the objective and ensures alignment, relying on authority and expertise. Vertical facilitation is familiar—think of a CEO driving strategy or a government official shaping policy. While this style produces strong agreements, it risks rigidity, domination, and the silencing of minority voices. Kahane recalls a logistics company whose CEO’s directive style ensured success for years but eventually stifled innovation as globalization reshaped the market.

Horizontal Facilitation

Horizontal facilitation relies on equality and autonomy, encouraging each participant to find their own way forward. It’s popular among NGOs or creative teams where freedom matters. But overemphasizing this approach often leads to fragmentation and gridlock. Kahane describes multi-stakeholder alliances in which everyone valued freedom so much that collective decisions were rare and progress slow. This echoes the challenges identified by Peter Block and Margaret Wheatley in their writings on participative change: too much autonomy can dilute shared purpose.

Transformative Facilitation as the Third Way

Kahane’s breakthrough insight is that vertical and horizontal aren’t opposites—they’re complements. The solution is not to stand halfway between but to cycle dynamically as situations demand. When rigidity creeps in, you emphasize autonomy. When chaos threatens coherence, you restore alignment. He uses the metaphor of breathing: inhaling and exhaling keep the body alive; focusing only on one means death. Likewise, facilitation requires rhythmic alternation to sustain collaboration.

Practical Application

In Colombia, Kahane and his team created workshops where ex-guerrillas and business leaders alternated between structured plenaries (vertical coherence) and open conversations (horizontal freedom). Sitting in circles without hierarchy and limiting speaking time with a bell created equity, while organized sessions ensured progress. The result was a genuine sense of breakthrough—a flow of trust that no unilateral approach could produce.

Key takeaway

Real collaboration breathes between order and freedom. You direct to align, and you invite to empower. Staying too long at one pole—command or consensus—kills creativity and progress. Learning when to shift is the heart of transformative facilitation.

Transformative facilitation, Kahane explains, operates through ten outer moves—five vertical and five horizontal—guided by five inner shifts that cultivate attention. These moves answer five recurring collaboration questions and help groups progress through tension without breaking down.

Five Collaboration Questions and Their Moves

• How do we see our situation? → Cycle between advocating (assert ideas) and inquiring (ask and learn).
• How do we define success? → Cycle between concluding (agreement) and advancing (keeping momentum).
• How do we get from here to there? → Cycle between mapping (plan routes) and discovering (adapt as we go).
• How do we decide who does what? → Cycle between directing (coordinate actions) and accompanying (support autonomy).
• How do we understand our role? → Cycle between standing outside (seeing objectively) and standing inside (owning responsibility).

Five Inner Shifts

• Opening – cultivating curiosity and presence; seeing multiple perspectives.
• Discerning – sensing when to slow down or move faster; working with time wisely.
• Adapting – changing course as feedback emerges, rather than clinging to plans.
• Serving – acting humbly; directing not to control but to help others move.
• Partnering – balancing distance and involvement; being both apart and a part.

These shifts form the facilitator’s inner compass. Without them, outer actions degrade into manipulation or confusion. Kahane compares mastery of these moves to riding a bicycle: balance is never static but constantly recalibrated.

Application in Practice

In Mexico’s “Possible Mexicos” initiative, Kahane’s team faced chaos when participants resisted their agenda. By practicing these moves—inquiring, adapting, and partnering—they turned tension into collaboration. Through disciplined reflection and “plus-delta” reviews (asking what to keep and what to change), the facilitators learned faster and adapted collectively, achieving breakthroughs on national issues around corruption and inequality.

Insight: Progress emerges when facilitators move between action and reflection, structure and openness. The outer moves align people; the inner shifts align the self. Together, they create breakthrough through balance.

At the heart of Kahane’s framework is one simple directive: pay attention. Facilitating transformation isn’t about clever techniques—it’s about awareness. Like a sailor adjusting to changing winds, a facilitator must watch subtle shifts in group energy, tone, and emotion to know what move to make next.

The Outer and Inner Game

Borrowing from Tim Gallwey’s concept of the inner game (originally applied to tennis), Kahane explains that every human endeavor involves two arenas: the outer game of external obstacles and the inner game of the mind. Facilitators must navigate both simultaneously. Dynamics such as fear, ego, or defensiveness often obstruct not only participants but also the facilitators themselves.

Flow and Presence

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the state of full absorption in activity “flow.” Kahane equates effective facilitation with flow and presence—being undistracted, relaxed, yet alert. Drawing on Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, he contrasts this state with “absencing,” when people retreat into fear or control. True presence means being open to what’s emerging, even when it’s uncomfortable or unplanned.

Attention in Practice

Kahane’s real-world stories make this tangible. He recalls reminding colleagues to “stop looking at your phone” during workshops—because distraction kills flow. He also admits moments when fear overwhelmed his own composure. Each time, the practice is to return to the breath of attention: notice, refocus, and continue. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s recentering faster.

The sailor metaphor illustrates this beautifully: wind fluctuations require constant micro-adjustments using sail telltales. Similarly, facilitators read group telltales—tone, posture, silence—and shift accordingly. Over time, this becomes intuition: knowing without overthinking which move the group needs next.

Lesson: Pay attention. The rest is interpretation. Attention transforms facilitation from mechanical delivery to living artistry—and every meeting, if approached with mindfulness, becomes a potential site of breakthrough.

The first practice of transformative facilitation—advocating and inquiring—teaches how to see a situation clearly. Kahane’s story from the 1991 Mont Fleur Conference in South Africa is the archetype: in a country emerging from apartheid, fierce rivals sat together and began asking not what should happen, but what could happen. This subtle shift opened a transformative dialogue.

Advocating: Speaking Your Truth

To advocate is to assert a perspective confidently. Trevor Manuel, an ANC economist, proposed a scenario called “Growth through Repression” to explore what would happen if his own movement abandoned socialism. That humility—critiquing his own side—was vital. Advocacy becomes transformative only when offered as contribution, not imposition.

Inquiring: Listening into the Unknown

Inquiry balances advocacy by inviting curiosity. When a rival politician imagined China aiding rebels, others didn’t reject the idea—they asked, “Why would that happen?” Through questioning, unrealistic assumptions fell away. Attentive inquiry transforms debate into discovery.

Applying the Moves

Kahane notes that facilitators must model what they ask of others. At Mont Fleur, he brought structured neutrality from Shell but combined it with humility and “beginner’s mind.” Later, he used visible tools—flip charts, sticky notes, toy bricks—to help participants suspend their thinking and see it collectively. These methods turned ideas into shared objects open for questioning.

Opening as the Inner Shift

This dual practice depends on the inner shift of opening: the courage to admit you may not know the whole truth. Kahane quotes Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki—“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities.” Opening creates space for empathy, curiosity, and ultimately, new realities. As Carl Rogers taught, empathy begins with unconditional regard—accepting others enough to truly hear them.

Practical takeaway: Say “In my humble opinion” before expressing certainty; ask “What happens next?” instead of defending your view. These small openings turn rigid debate into shared creation—the first step toward breakthrough collaboration.

The second facilitative polarity—concluding and advancing—addresses when a group should pause to agree and when it should simply move forward. Kahane illustrates this through projects like the Sustainable Food Lab and Destiny Colombia, where insisting on total consensus would have paralyzed progress.

Concluding: The Power of Agreement

Vertical systems emphasize conclusion: reaching clear agreements or decisions. In South Carolina’s education reform project, conflict over including the word “racism” nearly derailed progress. Yet choosing to confront it directly allowed authentic alignment. Some moments require clarity—an explicit stand that transforms vague goodwill into shared commitment.

Advancing: The Wisdom of Movement

Horizontal collaboration values motion. In the Food Lab, participants resisted defining “sustainability,” fearing premature agreement. Proceeding anyway allowed experimentation that later shaped global shifts in agricultural policy. As Kahane observes, many breakthroughs arise while still disagreeing—because relationship precedes resolution.

Learning to Discern

The inner discipline here is discerning—sensing timing. The facilitator feels when to pause, when to push, and when to let go. John Keats called this capacity “negative capability”: staying in uncertainty without “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Discernment enables patience to wait for genuine convergence while continuing action in ambiguity.

Kahane’s encounter with President Santos exemplifies this. Santos said he learned that “it’s possible to work with people you do not agree with and will never agree with.” In cultures intolerant of disagreement, discernment—the balance between agreement and movement—is revolutionary.

Remember: Progress doesn’t demand consensus—it demands co-movement. Pause to conclude only when clarity serves action; otherwise, keep advancing. The art lies in knowing which the moment calls for.

Few things upend well-laid plans more quickly than complex human systems. The third polarity—mapping and discovering—calls for flexibility. You must chart a path but be ready to change it without shame when reality punches back (as boxer Mike Tyson quipped: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”).

Mapping: Planning a Route

Mapping is crucial for clarity: setting goals, timelines, and responsibilities. In Mexico’s Education Lab—a national reform initiative—nine teams mapped strategies to improve early childhood education, teacher training, and resource allocation. Structured plans grounded ambition in reality.

Discovering: Adapting as You Go

But as projects unfolded, unexpected obstacles emerged—political resistance, budget cuts, pandemics. Those who clung to their maps failed; teams that pivoted, listening to feedback and experimenting through “plus-delta” reflection, succeeded. Kahane’s Mexico facilitation team itself had to adapt mid-workshop when participants rebelled against their process, turning conflict into creativity.

Adapting as the Inner Shift

The inner shift of adapting teaches resilience. Eisenhower captured it perfectly: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” The act of planning builds shared understanding; sticking blindly to the plan destroys it. Adaptation means valuing feedback over pride and fluidity over control.

Trevor Manuel’s reflection on South Africa’s transformation—“There was no precedent. We had to carve it”—illustrates this attitude. transformation is craftsmanship, not engineering. Kahane concludes that we advance not by imposing molds but by carving reality—with sensitivity to what’s actually forming in front of us.

Practical advice: Map boldly, then discover humbly. When fear tightens your grip, relax—learning happens through steering, not clinging. Transformation is carved, not commanded.

The fourth polarity—directing and accompanying—addresses how actions become coordinated without coercion. Kahane demonstrates this with examples contrasting Thailand’s military regime and Ethiopia’s peacebuilding project.

Directing: Leading for Alignment

Directing provides order, authority, and clarity. Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha lamented giving “fifty thousand orders, and only five hundred were implemented.” His frustration revealed vertical leadership’s flaw: commands alone don’t generate action in pluralistic systems. Without voluntary alignment, directives fall flat.

Accompanying: Empowering Autonomy

Accompanying means walking beside others, not above them. In Mexico, a banker hearing a transgender colleague’s story became morally compelled to act; his heartfelt advocacy led a major company to change its hiring policy. No one ordered it—autonomy turned empathy into systemic change.

Serving as the Inner Shift

The key inner orientation here is serving. Kahane’s mentor Bill O’Brien told him, “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.” Serving transforms leadership from manipulation to authenticity. When facilitators act with genuine care, trust replaces suspicion—what Kahane calls escaping “facipulation.”

The Ethiopian project Destiny Ethiopia embodied this principle. Its leader Negusu Aklilu and team convened fifty opponents to co-create national scenarios for peace. Their humble “Cloud 9 service” built trust that transcended politics. When participants held hands on TV, declaring unity, it wasn’t obedience—it was voluntary coordination born from trust.

Action point: Don’t lead to be admired; lead to serve. Direct when clarity demands it; accompany when empathy invites it. Coordination without coercion is sustainable leadership.

The fifth polarity—standing outside and inside—asks how to balance objectivity with responsibility. Kahane’s story from the First Nations health project in Manitoba shows what happens when outsiders impose solutions without cultural sensitivity—and how healing begins when they step inside.

Standing Outside: Seeing Clearly

Facilitators often position themselves as neutral observers, seeing patterns others miss. Kahane compares this to “going to the balcony,” a phrase from Ronald Heifetz’s Adaptive Leadership: step back to view the whole dance. This stance offers perspective but risks detachment, arrogance, and denial of one’s own role in systemic injustice.

Standing Inside: Taking Responsibility

After initially offending elders by imposing Western methods, Kahane acknowledged that he too was part of Canada’s colonial legacy. Confronted by a leader’s blunt remark—“I don’t trust you”—he shifted from apart to a part. Participating in ceremonies, listening rather than teaching, and “serving snacks” became gestures of humility that rebuilt trust.

Partnering as the Inner Shift

Partnering means living in paradox: being both apart and a part simultaneously. Kahane invokes Jungian thinker Robert Johnson’s image of the mandorla—the overlapping of two circles representing opposites. The overlap, however small, begins healing the split. In facilitation, partnering transforms relationships from hierarchical to reciprocal.

Exercises like “paired walks” (used in Guatemala and elsewhere) build this awareness. When participants from opposing sides walk side by side and share personal stories, empathy forms naturally. Love precedes confession, as theologian Lucila Servitje noted: grace arises when we’re accepted before we change. Standing inside a system connects you to its humanity.

Essential truth: You can’t change a system you don’t belong to. To transform problems, acknowledge your part in them. Partner across divides—not only to understand but to heal.

Kahane culminates his model by connecting facilitation to three universal drives—love, power, and justice. Drawing on theologian Paul Tillich and Martin Luther King Jr., he shows that transformation fails when any one of these dominates.

Love: The Drive Toward Unity

Love is the force of connection—the “drive toward unity of the separated.” In Guatemala’s post-war workshops, a minute of silence following a story of atrocity melted suspicion and restored empathy. Facilitators who unblock love help participants feel belonging even across deep divides.

Power: The Drive Toward Self-Realization

Power expresses energy and agency. As activist Clara Arenas warned Kahane, love without power is naïve. Groups must assert their interests while connecting compassionately. True power is not control but power-with, mutual empowerment that strengthens all participants.

Justice: The Structure That Guides Love and Power

Justice provides direction and fairness. It ensures that power and love don’t reproduce inequality. In Thailand, every faction claimed victimhood; in fact, all sought justice. Kahane redefines justice as “the form through which love performs its work.” Facilitators enact justice by designing equitable processes: equal speaking time, inclusion of marginalized voices, and transparency.

Together, these forces describe how transformation actually happens. Love connects, power contributes, justice balances. When fear or prejudice obstructs any of them, facilitation removes the obstacle and restores flow—as de Roux called it, “the expression of the mystery.”

Final reflection

To create a world that works for all, we must learn to hold love, power, and justice together. Facilitation is only the craft—but the purpose is moral: to bend the arc of our systems toward connection, contribution, and fairness.