The Global Change Days Festival was opened by Adam Kahane, a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can move forward on their most important and intractable issues, and author of ‘Collaborating With the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust’.

In this Open Space event we wish to carry forward Adam’s workshop. In turbulent times – which we are certainly in – there can be a sense of peril and anxiety. When people get scared they react more instinctively, and defensively, and can become more deeply entrenched and polarized which makes moving forward together on crucial issues even more challenging.

This Open Space event is designed as a regulator to polarisation: to bring together diverse people with diverse points of view to learn to collaborate and work with people we don’t agree with.

The Open Space will be opened by Mille Bøjer – a director (with Adam Kahane) of REOS Partners, a social enterprise specializing in large multi-stakeholder collaborations. Mille has worked over the past 15 years on projects for systems change at community, national, regional and global levels, on topics including justice transformation, education, sustainable production and consumption, democracy, drugs, civil society, and regional economic transitions.  She is the author of the chapter “Transformative Scenarios Process: How stories of the future help to transform conflict in the present” in the Berghof Handbook on Conflict Transformation and co-author of the book “Mapping Dialogue: Essential Tools for Social Change”, which outlines a variety of transformative dialogue tools and change processes.