Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust

Immediately after reading the first paragraph of the forward by Peter Block and then the first chapter of Adam Kahane's book, I knew I was "hooked"!This is an easy to read but profound clarification of the versatility needed to approach life's difficult situations.Across my six decades of consulting I have been frustrated by the cyclical ascendancy of various forms of collaboration (9/9, consensus, self-managed teams) as the only true way! The Forest Service in the USA was once sold on the notion that all managers should manage 9/9, as was the City of Calgary in the late 1960s. I had the privilege of spending a couple years there helping them recover from the notion that every situation could or should be managed in the same way.As I write this review I am very aware that Kahane's international conflict experience goes way beyond my experience in business and community development. I do not intend to minimize his broad scale by my more limited scope, but to indicate what appears to be a similarity.His four styles seem very similar to the Jay Hall conflict management styles. I have used Hall's instrument with several thousand people and have trained them in how to effectively use each of the styles in an effective way.One of my contracts was with an industry that was the first American manufacturing plant to open with self-managed teams. I started to work with them as closure looked imminent in the early 80's due to an appalling lack of productivity. These errors have been repeated by Volvo and by Saturn, among many others. We had to help them get the other styles honored and in place to succeed. We built on the autonomy intended by self-management by especially putting in place more clarity about authority and single-point decision-making which had been absent.It is my belief that Jay Hall's mistake was to idolize collaboration (as in the 9/9 as the desired style). This thus led to the tendency to the enemyfying (more about this word later ) of other styles. Kahane brilliantly avoids this and supports versatility. Further he spells out the steps one needs to take to successfully do this collaboration when appropriate!He mentions the third party possibility. Having been a third-party between people who deeply mistrusted and disliked each other dozens of times, we began by having their authorities above them tell them that they did not ever have to like each other! They simply had to work together more effectively. Of course, many (but not all) of them came to enjoy working with each other eventually.Gems are spread throughout this book. In various ways he mentions the common "rational" style where experts develop solutions and then promulgate these throughout an organization with the resulting familiar problems, and even failures, in application. By contrast, in his chapter called, "The Second Stretch", he references a statement by the Columbian President Juan Manual Santos in which he, in launching a report developed in the organization of American states by 46 leaders (on the drug phenomenon in the Americas), says, "The four scenarios are not the recommendations of what should happen or forecast of what will happen; they simply provide us with realistic options without prejudices or dogmas". Kahane further quotes José Miguel Insulza, the Secretary General of the OAS, saying 16 months later, "The report had a huge immediate impact".This approach reflects what Ronald Lippitt and Charles Jung had formulated in 1960: "Knowledge Retrieval/Implication Derivation". That is to say that knowledge experts and leaders retrieve information for people working on issues. The experts do not tell them what the implications are. They may offer opinions and even recommendations, but these also must be seen in a "knowledge retrieval" way and not as directives. It is the task of the people working the problem to derive implications with the benefit of having knowledge retrieved, such as successful (or failed) practices or important concepts! This almost completely eliminates push back to the knowledge such as in the statement "The expert's do not understand our situation".Kahane has nailed it! It's not the job of the experts to understand situational details where application is expected. It's their job to bring possibilities to the problem solvers who live in the situation every day!A complete review could be written about the spiritual dimensions of this book. For instance, I was caught off guard by his use of the word "enemyfying"! Yes I have done that, and in the current political situation, am doing that! Yes I have distanced those who hold views very different from my own by seeing them as the 'impossible to converse with' enemy. As a student of Howard Thurman, "The godfather of the civil rights movement", I was touched continually by the connective reach in Kahane's stories. The Latin root for religious means "to bind together- to connect"! In any profound "religious" sense, it includes reaching out for connection with the enemy!Practical and applicable! This book will help any practitioner more clearly see these alternatives and understand when and how collaboration may be effective. Plus Kahane, with his vast experience and unique capacity to learn from that experience, outlines how to do it in ways I have not seen spelled out so succinctly before.Robert P. CrosbyCreator, in 1973, of the first Masters in the Applied Behavioral Sciences degree. His latest business book is, "Cultural Change in Organizations".Founder, 1969, LIOS, Leadership Institute of Spokane/Seattle with it’s subsequent Alcoa Corporate Graduate Masters Program.

The essential teachings of Jesus for me is The Sermon on the Mount: "Love your neighbor as yourself", “Love Your Enemy as yourself”, "Love one another as I have loved you” and the toughest one of them all: "Love yourself as I (Jesus) have loved you". Very simple but so difficult to practice.Adam Kahane’s book “Collaborating with the Enemy” brings this much closer and makes it more possible to work with these concepts in our organizations and everyday life. Collaborating with the Enemy and people I don’t trust shocks us out of selfishness, worldliness, self-absorbed, self-identified, self-righteous, self-absorbed and habitual ways.Adam’s call for collaborating with the enemy is the plausible step. It helped me understand how to bridge it in a practical way. First, it is a choice and not having one right answer is freeing and it does leave room for other’s right answers.Being in branding and marketing I am very accustomed to research, strategy, plan of action, deployment, results, etc. Shifting in thinking from rational ordering of SWOT analysis, problem-solution-plan-results way of being and allowing the “Presencing” of the U to happen. It is freeing when Adam says, often it’s not what we do but how we do it. Equally freeing, understanding what Adam explains “Stretched” collaboration and this is not the magic pill, collaboration is not always the only option and we still have the options to adopt, force or exit.The philosopher Gurdjieff in the turn of this century warned, humanity had entered a precarious new period in its evolution. Humanity as we know it would be destroyed, Gurdjieff warned, unless the 'wisdom' of the East and the 'energy' of the West were harnessed and used harmoniously—he introduced to the West a unique and powerful esoteric teaching of self-transformation. Gurdjieff called it The Fourth Way.Adam Kahane’s “Collaborating with the Enemy” will help humanity in this direction. It is a must read for anyone who is interested in gaining better insights and the tools to improve their collaborative efforts in their life both personal and corporate / organizations. The exercises at the end of each chapter makes it easy to practice and implement the ideas.

I loved this book. I listened to the audiobook first and when I got to Cahpter 3, i decided to buy the book. I highly suggest reading it even if you dont have a leadership type role. I picked it up because there are coworkers I dislike. It's surprisingly helpful for relationships (friend/romantic), too.

This book was recommended to me from our Senior VP in HR. So, I was very eager to order it and get my hands on it. I also promised a review within a week, so as you can see, mission accomplished. Reading a book like this within a week means that its highly valuable (more below) and compact or else you cannot read them. Case in point is the Robert Greene's books, which I love to read, but I cannot promise to read them within a week.I struggled between a 3 and a 4 for this book (below on things that could be better), but decided on a 4 for the book being concise. If this book was 300 pages, with the same amount of insights, I would have given a 3.1) The concept of stretch collaboration was eye opening for me. I have always seen collaboration as a boolean, either do it or don't, but seeing a different variants of collaboration was an eye opening moment, which will entice me to approach these situations with an open mind rather than yes or no.2) Collaboration being the last option is also an important concept. For a long time, I've seen collaboration as the first step of a process and I have invested varying degrees of energy put into making it happen. Collaboration slows us down was a concept I pushed later on in my management path, but some people found it hard to be palatable. I suspected that it was me and my natural penchant for delivering results, but its highly comforting to talk those in a more informed fashion.3) In stretch collaboration, take the onus on you to deliver results as opposed to listing problems with others is also a very relieving notion. Again, its something I intuitively do, but I'm so glad to have an informed opinion around doing that, rather than seeing it instinctive and at times viewing it as a crutch for my career advancement.Things that could have done better:1) I struggled to get the "collaboration" part of stretch collaboration. In stretch collaboration, you don't insist on a shared understanding or a shared plan and each of us advance with our own agenda. Is "discussions" and "informing", the only parts of the stretch collaboration? Or are there ways to convert stretch collaboration to conventional collaboration at least for some portions later.2) A lot of examples particularly at the latter stages seem to be confined to author's emotions and feelings. The India example was one such incident, where I wanted the author to spend sometime going into the learnings he had. Similarly, the author talking about conventional collaboration and contrasting some of it would have also been illuminating.Overall enjoyed reading the book and its something I plan to refer to my colleagues and friends as well.

Adam Kahane scores again! Great update of a groundbreaking model of negotiation. Great resource.

For me, Anaïs Nin’s quote, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are,” aptly captures what Adam Kahane invites us to consider in his new book, “Collaborating with the Enemy.” ALL conflict begins inside us, and is projected out onto the “other,” or “enemy,” in business, politics, society and across the dinner table. As with his earlier book “Power and Love,” the author confronts himself in a myriad of real, varied and complex human encounters where trust is missing, and mistrust is the rule. With wisdom and courage, Kahane has developed a theory and practice he terms “stretch collaboration.” When most of us want to fight or turn away from our “enemies,” the author challenges us to stop, and deeply reflect on what is actually happening, then stretch beyond our current capacities to collaborate, especially when we need the “enemy” to fulfill greater objectives in work, community or society.Trust is our greatest currency today. Kahane’s painstaking experience and research ultimately expands our understanding of human differences and how to work with them.

Working with folks you can’t stand???? Purchase this book to learn alternative ways to react

Adam Kahane is shocked--shocked, I tell you-- that someone would consider the fossil fuel lobby "the enemy." Because Adam Kahane is, presumably, an extraterrestrial being too new to the planet to know that, after multiple bad faith interactions, one can't help but be distrustful of an entity or a person.Adam Kahane bemoans the pervasiveness of a "syndrome" where we tend to "enemyfy"(his stupid word to support his strawman) people because we disagree. Not sure why Adam Kahane takes such a bleak view of humanity because variness and skepticism are not hostility. Maybe on Adam Kahane's planet. But also, see above for duplicitious people.Adam Kahane is pleased to discover that a major reason why people tend not to collaborate with someone they distrust (likely due to multiple bad faith interactions) is because they are waiting for the other to admit that they're wrong. But someone very likely is wrong. "Perspective" doesn't alter hard, probable fact. Perhaps things are different on Adam Kahane's planet.Adam Kahane seems to think that we have no choice but to work with the enemy, so-called. I'm happy to tell him that, unlike on his planet, we Terrans are allowed choices. Sometimes those choices entail interrogating the environment that promotes enemyfy syndrome i.e. villainisation. If you keep encountering hostile situations or people, it is highly likely that the work environment is playing a non-trivial role. If Tom crashes out in a meeting, his behaviour is discomfiting but the problem goes beyond personnel. People shatter if made to go at Warp-9 for months on end.A truly naïve, repetitive volume with a bizarre understanding of the world and a strange fixation on blaming people for lacking "conflict management skills" when it is systems that we work under that seem to profit from conflict.

My first introduction to Adam Kahane and his excellent book "Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust" was when a student of mine was studying it in a business class. I was struck by the concept of Stretch Collaboration and how one might embrace conflict and connection while experimenting with many routes to solving a challenge. This approach felt familiar to me because it mirrors how I teach Applied Improvisation, which is my area of focus.The idea that solutions can be messy and imperfect, and still allow us to move forward, really resonates. Kahane describes stretch collaboration as "nurturing the belonging" of collaborators, and "structuring the collaboration for equity and reciprocity." All of this works well with Applied Improvisation and theatre techniques, and Kahane recognizes this too. He talks about the importance of listening, and presents practices and games to help stretch into experimentation.Adam also talks about failure and how failure teaches us something new, which is another huge improv tenet. I often call Applied Improv a "low stakes way to get ready for high stakes things" and how we're all co-creators on the journey. Check out Adam's book. It's a wonderful tool and resource for business and life.

It wasn t what I expected. I will send it back. Thanks any way

At last a book that grapples with the uncomfortable truth that not everyone wants to find a solution and something is needed to disrupt the narrative. I've appreciated the work of William Ury, Chris Voss and others as well as Adam Kahan's other books on looking at conflict and negotiations. My own expereince is limited to some work in Beiruit and the West Bank, some victim /offender reconcilaition work as well as the much tamer but no less problematic area of top teams and their breakdowns. This book was a breath of fresh air in naming the niggles when exisitng approaches don't work. Kahane calls them out and in doing so gives renewed hope.

Great insight into behaviours and how to self develop using these techniques

Very good, thx!!!