Foreword

I first met David Straus more than thirty years ago. I was involved with the Coro Foundation, an organization that focused on experience-based, graduate education in public affairs. We were committed to training leaders to function effectively in an ever more complex world. Coro was located on the wide-open top floor of a South of Market Street warehouse in San Francisco, in the center of what would become the dot.com world many years later. We didn’t know it then, but across the floor from us, a small group of visionaries would have a profound effect not only on what we did and how we did it, but on much of the world as well. David was their organizer and leader. They called themselves Interaction Associates.

It seems difficult to believe it now, but in 1971, terms such as “facilitator” and “process management” were not part of the common language, let alone “win-win” or “explicit group memory.” Nobody was taping sheets of paper on the wall and “recording.” Collaboration was probably more associated with giving secrets to enemies than with sharing power with colleagues. Leadership and control were not dissimilar concepts. David was searching for new ways of “problem solving,” for processes and methodologies that involved multiple parties working together at the same time and in the same place, and that truly respected and honored the widely diverse ideas and input of as many of those involved—i.e., the stakeholders—as possible. The notion that the process would be run most effectively by a highly trained neutral was revolutionary, and yet it made sense. We were mesmerized by all that was happening on the other side of our warehouse floor, and we were invited to watch and participate.

From my vantage point in 1971, I had the privilege of observing David and his colleagues as they developed, pushed, reinvented, refined, and experimented with the field of collaborative problem solving. David was constantly finding new venues and applications for his ever-expanding skills, techniques, and theories. No challenge was too big or too small for the ever-evolving Interaction Method, whether it be the nonadversarial divorce of a friend or the redesign of an entire community.

I became fast friends with David and his wife-to-be, Patricia, and, later, his entire family. Subsequently, as Interaction Associates grew, I joined the board of directors of the company and had the chance to participate in a very small way in the growth of both the for-profit and the nonprofit sides of the company. By that time, I had become the CEO of a grantmaking foundation and found that some of the best ideas and projects presented to me were closely related to and informed by the work of Interaction Associates (IA). Soon other foundations were supporting the field as well. One of the most important examples was the development of the field of “alternative dispute resolution,” which has come to include everything from neighborhood justice centers and school-based programs to highly sophisticated, multi-lateral efforts undertaken by organizations such as the Carter Center (which was staffed with the help of Bill Spencer, a former Interaction Associates partner). Over my years of friendship and work with David, when the business side of Interaction Associates was stressed, I was fond of asking, “Just what kind of organization is Interaction Associates? A business? A religion? A think-tank?” The answer, of course, is that it’s all of the above and more. Interaction Associates has been an ongoing experiment in modeling how to facilitate leadership, how to grow the field of consensus-driven decision making, and how to listen to and respect every voice.

For David, it’s been the work of a lifetime—from Harvard to Berkeley and back again, going around the world in the process. His training in architecture and design has played out on the largest imaginable stage. A new language has been created. New values are now widely held. The tens of thousands who have participated in Interaction Associates’ training program, and the hundreds of thousands who have read How to Make Meetings Work, are only the tip of the iceberg. David Straus’s life work is a gift to us all.

Thomas C. Layton

President

Wallace A. Gerbode Foundation

San Francisco