Acknowledgments

While most acknowledgment sections end with the authors’ families, we think it’s most appropriate to start there. Our wives, Alaka and Sarah, and our children, Vikram, Uma, Ari, and Madeleine, have had to put up with more of our nonsense than anyone. And no one has held up as crystal clear a mirror to help us reflect, learn, and grow. In these pages we include some choice excerpts of our crusades on the home front. Sarah provided valuable input on several drafts of the book. Alaka contributed the elegant turns of phrase that reshaped not only the chapter and book titles but our voice throughout. There are no words to express our gratitude for their love, humor, and support through this whole journey.

We have also benefited from a variety of mentors and teachers along the way. For Jason, the key “voices in my head” through writing this book have been (in chronological order) my parents, Rick Jay and Sue Sawyer (who also provided valuable comments on the book), Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Netanel Miles-Yepez, Robert Kegan, Catalina Laserna, Bruce Allyn, Bill Isaacs, Skip Griffin, Glennifer Gillespie, Peter Senge, John Sterman, Wanda Orlikowski, Rick Locke, and Susan Silbey. For Gabriel, my parents, Gregory Grant and Marilyn Bauchat, who taught me to always pursue my purpose, Jim Brainard, Mark Boyce, Gunter Pauli, Amelia Terrapin, Tom Seager, Marian Chertow, Charles Vogl, Amy Wrzesniewski, Chad Oliver, Harry Pickens, Anamaria Aristizabal, Wayne Davis, and Barrett Brown.

We both owe a debt of gratitude to a few shared mentors and influencers whose work has inspired ours. John Ehrenfeld redefined sustainability as the possibility that human and other life will flourish on Earth forever. Donella Meadows invited us all to hold and express our vision. Together they helped us identify the critical link between authenticity, personal transformation, and wider social transformation. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s books, including Immunity to Change, and Otto Scharmer’s Theory U have been powerful influences on our work and showed us that sharing a process of personal and social transformation through a book is possible. We also both feel profound gratitude for the chance to encounter Werner Erhard and our teachers and coaches in the lineage he inspired, including some whom we’ve already mentioned and Roger Smith. They shared with us the possibility of transforming a discourse. In addition, the notion of paradox underlies many of our ideas, particularly in the “Embrace the tension” chapter, and we are thankful to a lineage of work on paradox from Kenwyn Smith and David Berg, Robert Quinn and Kim Cameron, Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis, and Paula Jarzabkowski. We benefit from their consistent effort to make an esoteric concept useful in understanding organizational and social change. Finally, our work benefits from a set of contemporary authors taking on the challenge of political polarization from new vantage points. Dan Kahan’s cultural psychology of climate change and other societal risks, Jonathan Haidt’s careful depiction of the “Righteous Mind,” and Mark Gerzon’s well-documented efforts toward a “Reunited States of America” have all been inspirations for this book.

Our workshop participants, students, and interviewees brought their experience to the table through profoundly vulnerable and powerful stories. They have done the real work of changing the conversation, and we owe all of them our gratitude. A few chose to share their stories in the book and leave what we hope will be an important legacy: Kevin Hagen, Melissa Gildersleeve, Joyce LaValle, John Frey, Sean Kenney, Rob Wilson, Molly Baldwin, and Brent Segal.

None of this would be possible without the cofacilitators we have engaged along the way, including Katie Wallace, Barrett Brown, and Sara Soderstrom. Barrett helped us develop key exercises. Sara’s environmental leadership class at the University of Michigan has generated some of the most profound transformations we have witnessed. Our workshops have also enjoyed some financial sponsorship, and we owe particular thanks to Jeff Senne at PwC, Mark Boyce at Byron Fellowship, and Jeremy Grantham and Ramsay Ravenel at the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.

We have received tremendous help and inspiration from Laura Yates, our project manager. A glimpse into her spring-break climate change conversation kicks off the book, and stories of her courageous conversations are included in chapters 6 and 8. She kept us organized and on task throughout the whole journey.

Our editors, Rose-Anne Moore and Anna Leinberger, helped wrangle our cacophony of ideas and exercises into a coherent whole. And we would never have proceeded with the book if it weren’t for the “tough love” and encouragement of Jeevan Sivasubramaniam and Steve Piersanti at Berrett-Koehler. We are inspired to be part of a publisher and author community that is dedicated to creating a world that works for all and that puts its authors through their paces to get there.

We received extremely helpful feedback on our early draft from two groups. The first includes published authors we respect, like Wanda Orlikowski, Peter Senge, John Ehrenfeld, Andrew Hoffman, Barrett Brown, Charles Vogl, Bill Isaacs, Kate Isaacs, and Steve Schein. Others were “test users” who muddled through our first-draft exercises, including Rachel Payne, Becky Margiotta, Carolyn DuPont, Heather Johnson, Tamara Staton, Bethany Patten, John Harrison, Jasmine Hamilton, and Savannah Christiansen. Sarah Townsend-Grant and Chloe Cockburn helped us bring in perspectives from health and social justice contexts. Our illustrator, John Cox, helped us bring the spirit of serious play alive. And finally, we have greatly benefited from other university faculty who field-tested the work in their classrooms, including Elizabeth Walsh, Jessica Vogt, James Beresford, Jim Stoner, and Glen Dowell.

We have done our best to honor all our friends’ extensive insights; any further omission or lack of clarity falls squarely on our shoulders.