Collaborating with the Enemy

Summary

International consultant Adam Kahane teaches us how to work with people whom we might not like or trust. He explains how flexibility and improvisation can lead to what he calls "stretch collaboration." He outlines the five misunderstandings that keep people from effectively collaborating with "those people" and shows readers how they can successfully engage with positive results instead.


As our societies have become more complex and globalized and our organizations flatter and less hierarchical, more of us need to collaborate across more organizations, 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, and 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.