Collaborating With the Enemy ─ How to Work With People You Don't Agree With or Like or Trust

As our societies have become more complex and globalized, and our organizations flatter and less hierarchical, more of us need to collaborate more, across more organizations and geographies and cultures, than ever before. But this increases the chances that we're going to get stuck having to collaborate with people we don't agree with or like or trust. But we've got no choice. We have to learn to work with people we might actually have come to think of as “the enemy.”

International consultant Adam Kahane, who has worked in some very fraught contexts in his career (South Africa after apartheid, Guatemala after a civil war) has found that in these low control, high conflict situations everything we think we know about what makes collaboration work is wrong. The neat black-and-white thinking that underlies conventional collaboration—us/them, harmony/conflict, problem/solution—won't work. You need to be more flexible, accept a level of uncertainty and improvisation, practice what Kahane calls “stretch collaboration.” In this very timely book he takes on five misunderstandings that keep us from effectively collaborating with “those people” and tells us what we should do instead.

Adam Kahane is a director of Reos Partners, an international social enterprise that helps people move forward together on their most important and intractable issues.