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We are living through a pandemic of fragmentation. Political polarisation, trade systems breaking apart, technological isolation, the retreat into smaller and smaller circles of sameness. At every scale – from families to nations – we seem to be falling apart.
But this falling apart is not accidental. There is an ideology driving it – a story we tell ourselves: that things would be better if certain people could act without encumbrance from alliances, regulations, or obligations to others. Call it the myth of freedom. Like all myths, these myths have power precisely because we don’t see them as myths – we see them as simply the way things are.
And yet, beneath this surface story lies something more complicated. In the most freedom-loving cultures, you also find fierce loyalty to community, family, neighbourhood. Freedom twinned with responsibility – just to a smaller circle. On the surface, autonomy. Beneath it, a longing for connection that doesn’t know how to speak its name.
So, the question becomes: How do we find the larger us in a world that keeps choosing the smaller one?
The antidote to fragmentation is working across difference. Not a new subject – but one that has become urgent on every scale.
Adam Kahane has spent three decades facilitating collaboration in the world’s most divided contexts – South Africa during the transition, Colombia’s peace process, Thailand, climate change and beyond. He is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities, Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future, Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together, and Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems: The Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement. His book Collaborating with the Enemy (second edition recently released) confronts an uncomfortable truth: the people we most need to work with are often the people we least want to work with. He is now writing its successor, asking: how do we come together in a world that keeps falling apart?
Betty Sue Flowers is a poet, mythologist, and international foresight consultant. She was the series editor for Bill Moyers’ celebrated interviews with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, and has spent her life investigating the stories that shape what we believe is possible. Her publications include Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (co-authored), Realistic Hope: Facing Global Challenges (co-edited), “The American Dream and the Economic Myth,” and “The Primacy of People in a World of Nations.”
Together, they will explore:
This is not a webinar. It is a deliberative, interactive dialogue – an invitation to engage, to listen, to explore what connection actually requires in times like these.
This dialogue is part of The Impact Trust’s 2026 Open Dialogue series, anchored in Sem ena Werq—the Ethiopian tradition of “wax and gold,” where speech carries two layers: the surface meaning and the deeper truth beneath. This year’s conversations explore how we listen for what lies beneath the noise.