10 March 2026 | With Adam Kahane & Betty Sue Flowers
• • •
In the second Wax and Gold Open Dialogue of 2026, Adam Kahane and Betty Sue Flowers led a rich, wide-ranging conversation about how we can live together well across deep and permanent difference. Drawing on Adam’s recent and forthcoming work along with over four decades of collaboration between them, the dialogue moved from the conceptual architecture of power, love, and justice to the lived, embodied, relational practices that might make such living-together possible.
The session drew over 100 participants from more than a dozen countries, with a vibrant chat that extended the conversation into reciprocity, storytelling, relational intelligence, and the role of place and lineage in how we know one another.
• • •
Adam Kahane opened by describing a dynamic he sees playing out at every scale — from families to international affairs. Faced with chaos or difference, we default to one of two responses: separating (doing our own thing, refusing engagement) or subordinating (forcing unity, suppressing dissent). These two moves feed each other in a vicious cycle: the more one group tries to subordinate, the more others try to separate, and vice versa.
“We’ve somehow gotten into this state, or backed ourselves into a corner, that living together across difference is impossible and takes superhuman skills. But as an urban historian in Paris reminded me: this is just life in a city.” — Adam Kahane
The core insight from the revised edition of Collaborating with the Enemy is that working with people we don’t agree with or like or trust is not extraordinary – it is an ordinary human capacity we need to recover.
Drawing on Martin Luther King Jr. and Paul Tillich, Adam argued that the way out of the separation–subordination trap is neither more power (which leads to conflict) nor more love (which, taken too far, leads to authoritarianism), but justice. Not justice in the narrow legal sense, but justice as the quality of our relationships – the form, the structure, the “regulator” that enables us to be simultaneously apart from and a part of one another.
“An Armenian mathematician said to me: I get it. Justice is the regulator between power and love. And I think he’s exactly right.” — Adam Kahane
“The drive to deal with clearly remediable injustices is the core challenge to the mess we’re in, at all scales.” — Adam Kahane, drawing on Amartya Sen
Betty Sue Flowers expanded on this, inviting the holding of space for vision and beauty alongside the regulatory mechanism – the intuition that things could fit together differently, the way a beautiful theory kept physicists working even when experiments failed.
“The balance is in order to go forward. There’s something about having that vision there that is really important.” — Betty Sue Flowers
This framing of justice provoked some of the dialogue’s sharpest exchanges, both spoken and in the chat. Douglas Weinfield pressed on what gives the regulator its authority: what happens when power simply comes in and smashes the norms? Eileen Lawless asked whether, in a moment when the post-war regulators are being systematically dismantled, we need to reimagine the concept of justice itself. And several participants pushed the idea further — Jeremy Bentham offered a systems definition of a regulator as something that automatically senses deviation from the desirable and corrects; Tom Lent argued that justice in relationships means respect, equity, reciprocity, and mutuality; Darcie Milazzo introduced mercy as a necessary polarity to justice.
Gerry Salole brought a powerful counterpoint, rooting the conversation in lived experience beyond Western frameworks. He argued that reciprocity — not rules imposed from outside — is the driving principle in how communities actually hold together, settle disputes, and make peace. He drew on the example of Mozambican mothers who invented cultural practices of forgiveness to reintegrate children who had committed atrocities during war.
“Reciprocity, for me, is actually all about in the home. Who does the washing up? We have a very highly tuned brain to when we think things are unfair. We keep forgetting how important reciprocity is.” — Gerry Salole
Adam acknowledged reciprocity as “absolutely central” and noted that Philip Atiba Solomon had told him that justice as relationship – rather than merely as law – is a major theme in African American theology. Mike Davice Bird offered a complementary formulation from WIEGO’s work, equating reciprocity with Ubuntu: “I am because you are.”
Several participants pressed the question that Adam himself had identified as the part he couldn’t yet see: what does justice actually look like in practice? Juanita Brown, drawing on her years as an adversarial nonviolent activist in the Gandhi and Cesar Chavez tradition, asked directly: what are the embodied, engaged practices that enable this quality of possibility, and how do they differ across contexts?
Heather Remacle brought twenty years of experience as a senior public servant and facilitator in British Columbia to bear on exactly this question. Working in government – hierarchical, rank-bound, and not set up for equitable participation – she described having to remake the conditions for collaboration from the ground up: disrupting signals of hierarchy, creating the daily interactions through which reciprocal service could take root. Her ambition, she said, is to spend the next decade working on that “pile of easily solvable injustices” that Sen points us toward, building a library of patterns for where and how justice emerges in context-specific settings. In the chat, she sharpened this into a provocation with real theoretical weight:
“Maybe justice emerges when people have enough evidence that it is possible.” — Heather
This reframes the question from “What is justice?” to “Under what conditions does justice become available?” It connects directly to Betty Sue’s insistence on the role of vision. Heather also drew a crucial distinction between signalling reciprocity and the harder work of demonstrating actual intent and challenged the group to ask not how we find the perfect answer but “how we become self-aware of the need for walking together to find the balance … forever.”
Raj Chawla offered a reframing that resonated deeply across the group. He challenged whether the right question is “What holds us together?” and proposed instead: “How can we walk through the fire together without internally falling apart?” He named a global ontology of separation and domination that shapes all our systems, and called for an alternative ontology of entanglement, reciprocity, and attunement.
“Perhaps the question is not so much ‘What holds us together in a world that is falling apart?’ but ‘How can we walk through the fire together without internally falling apart?’” — Raj
Adam’s response was revealing. He borrowed the language of a Chilean diplomat he and Betty Sue had once worked with – “I insist” – to make a deliberate two-step move. First, he insisted on not skipping over the reality of apartness: the drive to self-realisation, competition, and individual power that Tillich described and that is visible in any day’s news. To jump straight to entanglement without acknowledging that drive, he argued, is to leave yourself unable to understand what is actually happening in the world. But having made that insistence, he arrived at the same destination as Raj: “I’m ending, I think, in the same place as you — which is that the way we deal with our interrelatedness, our kinship, our entanglement, is the solution through the mess.” The sequence matters. For Adam, you cannot get to entanglement honestly without first passing through the acknowledgement of what holds us apart.
Mary Alice Arthur raised the question of what narratives underpin our current struggles, arguing that a flattened, black-and-white version of the hero’s journey – divorced from its original purpose of bringing the boon back to the community – has left us with impoverished storytelling. Betty Sue Flowers agreed and pointed to the goddess mythologies of death, rebirth, and cyclical transformation as a tradition that has been dropped from consciousness but urgently needs to rejoin the heroic, linear narrative.
“We don’t have a big story anymore … The goddess material is not linear. It’s about death and rebirth, about the seasons, about transformation. That has just dropped out of consciousness.”— Betty Sue Flowers
Alexis Niki connected this to the two -stories of human experience: “A stranger goes on an adventure” and “A stranger comes to town” – the individual going out and the newcomer being integrated. Mike Davice Bird offered a linguistic provocation: the word “argument” originally meant polishing silver to see a reflection more clearly. It was about daring to disagree respectfully, not about division.
Dylan Terry introduced the concept of relational intelligence — the deeply human ability to build trust, navigate tension, repair ruptures, and create meaning with others — as the key capacity in the AI era, and one that AI cannot yet replicate. This landed as a natural complement to Adam’s framing of justice as the quality of relationships.
Adam closed with a story from Melbourne, where Aboriginal participants introduced themselves not by name and position but by lineage and place. After he introduced himself by his Jewish tribal lineage, an Aboriginal colleague said simply:
“Welcome to relationship.”
Betty Sue connected this to her own Southern tradition of being placed by clan and geography, and wondered what happens to our groundedness when we are no longer situated in one place for a lifetime.
In closing, Adam reflected on what he has learned at a distance from Nelson Mandela. The head of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, when asked about accusations that Mandela “sold out,” replied: “This was a negotiated solution. What part of ‘negotiated’ don’t you get?” Adam argued that the desire for heroic, total victory is deeply counterproductive, and that most of us, most of the time, are in Mandela’s situation: working within a balance of forces and needing to find a way forward that doesn’t involve separation or subordination.
“Nobody expects it to be perfect. The best is the enemy of the good. If we’re going to denounce everything that’s not perfect, we will not be able to advance.” — Adam Kahane, drawing on Amartya Sen
• • •
The conversation in the chat was as rich as the spoken dialogue, with over 40 participants contributing. What follows is a selection of the threads that ran alongside and extended the spoken conversation.
“What gives the regulator the power, ability, or authority to regulate? What happens when the norms and stories are violated?” — Douglas Weinfield
“How do we reconcile that need for justice with those wielding power and subordination as their primary tool, and separation as another, to systematically upend the norms and practices of justice? Do we have to reimagine that regulator?” — Eileen
“The regulators agreed upon by many groups after great loss and great risk are now being questioned, and that balance is teetering on a scale that’s uncomfortable globally — but it’s also teetering in communities, which is equally unsettling.” — Eileen
“How can justice emerge unless we learn cognitive humility? The willingness to navigate our dogmas, mindsets, and meanings?” — Anupam
“Power, love, and justice rest on notions of identity, trust, and truth. Those notions are being challenged through large systems of technology, economics, and politics.” — Christian
“A key point is Adam’s statement that the balance between we and me is permanently out of balance. The question is whether it’s possible to create a durable container within which that balance can shift back and forth without destroying the communities in that container.” — Douglas
“It’s always a dance between autonomy and belonging … we need both.” — Dorothe
“I lived in a housing co-op for 17 years. My mother asked me, haven’t you outgrown this? I told her it makes me a better person every day — in having to navigate everything we are talking about here on a personal level.” — SarahDawn
“Everything has been designed by anti-social tech bros to strip out any threat — or opportunity — of interaction, and we no longer know what to do when we’re mildly irritated beyond escalating it to extreme polarisation.” — Seisei
“There is a shift when people stop working with their hands and start engaging on the imaginary plane.” — Heather
“The aboriginal introduction says, ‘I am a part of this.’ Conventional introductions say, ‘This is how I am apart from you.’” — Dave
“How we place our identity — by location and heredity, or by education and position — is so important to how we perceive self and other and the notion of power and negotiation.” — Christian
“The direction of travel towards optimised, even extreme individuation might contain within it the seeds of potential to foster a renewed appreciation of belonging — to each other, tribe, place, and to the whole cosmos.” — Dave
• • •
Adam Kahane, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust (2nd edition, 2024)
Adam Kahane, Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (2010)
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (2009)
Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990)
Peter Kingsley, Reality (2003)
Riane Eisler, The Chalice, and the Blade (1987)
Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey (1990)
Maria Karamitsos, The Heroine with 1001 Faces (2023)
Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995)
Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin (2022)
Gerry Salole, “Suspended in Webs of Our Own Spinning”
Heather Remacle’s VASE framework: medium.com/vase-stories-about-a-centering-framework
• • •
Convened by the The Impact Trust. Named for the Ethiopian literary tradition of sem ena werq — surface meaning (wax) and hidden depth (gold).