About Adam

Adam Kahane is a Director of Reos Partners, an international social impact organisation that helps people move forward together on their most important and intractable issues. Reos designs, facilitates, and guides processes that enable teams of stakeholders—even those who don’t understand or agree with or trust one another—to make progress on their toughest challenges. It partners with governments, corporations, and civil society organizations on challenges such as education, health, food, energy, environment, development, justice, security, and peace. Reos operates both globally and locally, with offices in Cambridge (Massachusetts), Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Montreal, and São Paulo.

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.

Adam 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, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust, 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 books have been translated into more than twenty languages. 

Adam is the editor of Possible Canadas: Perspectives on Our Pasts, Presents, and Futures and Radical Collaboration to Accelerate Climate Action: A Guidebook for Working Together with Speed, Scale, and Justice.

During the early 1990s, Adam was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch Shell in London. He has held strategy and research positions with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (San Francisco), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Vienna), the Institute for Energy Economics (Tokyo), and the Universities of Oxford, Toronto, British Columbia, California, and the Western Cape. Adam has a B.Sc. in Physics from McGill University (Montreal), an M.A. in Energy and Resource Economics from the University of California (Berkeley), and an M.A. in Applied Behavioural Science from Bastyr University (Seattle). He has also studied negotiation at Harvard Law School and cello performance at Institut Marguerite-Bourgeoys.

Adam and his wife Dorothy live in Montreal and Cape Town.