The same old ways of thinking get the same old result. Barry Boyceprofiles a few visionary professionals who are carving out a new way of seeing and working in the world.Photo flickr.com/banaantjensIn 1988, Kurt Schmoke, the young firebrand mayor of Baltimore, shocked the U.S. Conference of Mayors by proposing the decriminalization of drugs. Advocating an approach he would come to call medicalization, Schmoke argued that drugs ought to be a matter of public health, not law enforcement. Schmokes radicaland compassionateattempt to demilitarize the war on drugs earned him the label the most dangerous man in America and ruined his political career. In a fictional treatment of the controversy, former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, in the HBO series The Wire, cast Schmoke himself as a public health official and depicted a police commander as the spearhead of the medicalization approach.Simon wanted to show how entrenched thinkingreinforced within the organizations created by that thinkingmakes creative approaches almost impossible, because they are literally unthinkable. At a critical moment in the show, the police commander meets with his top officers. They tell him that his approach, while noble, just wont work. Harsh, violent enforcementwarwill be the best policy. You mean the same old thing? he asks. His most loyal sergeant replies, Yeah, boss, the same old thingbut better.The same...old...thing...but better. This is so often the approach we takein our own lives and in our communitieswhen we face what leadership consultant and facilitator Adam Kahane calls, understatedly, tough problems.The same old thing doesnt work, Kahane says, because when it comes to complex, tough problemsglobal warming, food crises, civil war, terror, drugs, urban decay, persistent povertywe have to go beyond the approaches that got us there in the first place. Kahane, who was a key participant in the Mont Fleur process that helped bring about the peaceful transition from apartheid to democratic rule in South Africa, is one of a loose but growing collection of thinkers, activists, academics, and social entrepreneurs who are searching for the unthinkablethe new ways that we cant see because of our old ways of looking.These thinkers and advocates have not formed any formal association or movement (the very looseness of their association is seen as a virtue, in fact), but they all firmly believe that the good old world weve come to know and love is coming apart at the seams. Systems of all kinds are breaking down and will continue to do so. In response, they champion ways of seeing and acting that acknowledge that the world is a chaotic, deeply interdependent place, a place that wont yield to attempts to overpower it. We must come to understand, they argue, the nature of complexity, chaos, and interconnectednessand to train ourselves in ways of acting that embrace this unmistakable reality.Adam Kahane says our approach to the future must meet three criteria. It must simultaneously be systematic (not piecemeal and divided into silos), participative(involving many peoples ideas, energy, talent, and expertise), and emergent (able to move and adapt nimbly in a minefield of uncertainty). The hope is that we will act with courage