Foreword by Peter Block
If you are working to make the world a better place, there are few experiences more rewarding and useful than having your thinking turned upside down. A shift in thinking is the essence of transformation. It is the basis of renewed faith. It is at the core of great leadership. In most cases the shift happens slowly, perhaps from education or trying to make sense of unsettling experiences, usually occurring without our being aware of it. Once in a while, however, we get lucky. Our mind shifts by simply reading a book. Adam Kahane’s Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust is such a book.
The book is really an annotation on the title. The title asks me to collaborate with people I don’t agree with. Not so difficult. But then the stakes are raised, and I am asked to collaborate with people I don’t like. This too is manageable, even common in most workplaces. The final ask, though, is tougher: collaborate with people I don’t trust. Even people I consider enemies. To make these acts doable is the promise of the book.
This promise is particularly relevant in light of what is occurring in the world. We live in a complicated time. It is a divisive and polarizing era in which we respond by constantly seeking like-mindedness. We have a growing number of ways to meet up with people similar to ourselves: We are drawn to people with the same interests, same tastes, same politics. Every time I buy something online, I am told what other people like me also bought. And it works. As a larger society, cities are resegregating into neighborhoods of people like us. As nations, we are voting for politicians who want to keep out strangers and reclaim our country as if someone had taken it away.
We live in a time of growing alienation and isolation. We are losing trust in our institutions and our governments to act in our interests. Most of our elections are variations of a “no” vote. We have growing economic divisions, ideological divisions, contests over values.
All this is why Adam’s book is important. It offers a way of thinking and action that can create what seems like an impossible future by inviting all sides of a question into one room, especially when they don’t agree with, like, or trust each other. It describes this way of being and working and does it in a way to make the process accessible. What is also compelling is that Adam and his colleagues have actually put their thinking into practice. The world has been changed by their efforts.
Here are some of the elements of Collaborating with the Enemy that have shifted my thinking:
• I have believed that collaborating with others is our first choice. My view has been that human beings are basically collaborative, wanting to work together, and that we just need to remove the obstacles that prevent this from happening. Not so. Collaboration as presented in this book is simply one of several first choices. It is just as likely that our first choice is imposing our point of view on others, forcing compliance when possible, and doing all we can to get our way. Another first choice is to adapt to the world. Make compromises, minimize differences, and go along to get along.
What Adam describes are ways to think about collaboration when the situation is increasingly hopeless. When we have reached a moment in which trying to control outcomes and impose our position on others is not working. Or, when adapting to the difficulty becomes untenable. The collaboration described here is aimed at finding a new way to move when the current reality is dire, and there is agreement on only one thing: something needs to change. This approach applies—whether for us as individuals, or an organization, or a community—whenever we are forced or ready to try something really new.
• For much of my career I made a living as a consultant to organizations, whether they were businesses, schools, governments, churches, or associations. Much of the work involved helping teams to work better, helping labor and management to build trust with each other, or helping departments within a company to cooperate more effectively. In all these situations it was assumed that people were working toward a common goal. In my perspective, if they did not have a desire and instinct to work together and to trust each other, what was the point of coming together? Adam’s basic point is that this is exactly the time to come together.
• As a culture, we believe that the answer to fragmentation and polarization is to develop coalitions and strategies to defeat or weaken the other side. We campaign to prove the superiority of our position. If we are oil companies, tobacco companies, or pharmaceutical companies, we establish so-called independent think tanks to gather research that casts doubt on those who oppose us.
When facing a complex challenge, where prior efforts to achieve results have essentially failed, we invest in a cocktail of marketing strategies, build movements, and mobilize political will to produce the change we desire. In the public arena, the most visible strategies have been the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on terrorism, and civil war. We convene summits that craft a declaration and leave us with a set of action steps and a news release. The call to the summit is always to do something for the good of the whole. In times of crisis in the management and organizational world, whenever disruption occurs—a product loses its market or an industry or business is losing its legitimacy to operate—our propensity is to work at change management. We design culture-shifting programs, initiate training programs, set new standards, find new people, call for more agility and more innovation.
All these are well-accepted strategies and have a net positive impact. They certainly deliver improvements, but most of these transformation efforts are thinly veiled versions of how we try to get other people to change, to shift either their thinking or their actions in alignment with our intention. Colonial in nature, disappointing much of the time.
Where change is stubborn, the conventional strategies suffer from a kind of naïveté. They are constructed on two premises:
One premise is that there is an elite circle of people who know what is best for others and the world. We hold the almost sacred opinion that it is the right and duty of the central circle of leaders and experts to create think tanks; declare war on popular negatives like drugs, poverty, and terror; and select the people who speak and negotiate at the summits. Inside organizations, we basically believe that the central circle is top management and—whether in business, education, the church, or government—they are best equipped to launch the change programs.
The second premise is the belief that we can problem-solve our way into the future. It is a deeply held belief that change will occur when we agree on a vision, set goals and define a predictable path to reach them, and specify observable measures, with timelines and milestones. The glue for all this is our belief and language about holding people accountable and demanding consequences for failure.
Collaborating with the Enemy calls this rational ordering of action into question, especially in the face of complex problems where there are very divergent views and conflicts among important stakeholders. This condition of complex problems, whether in a society or in an organization, calls for a different way. This is where Adam offers something unique.
He talks of stretch collaboration as an alternative to the dominant thinking about how progress is achieved. He outlines a process whereby those who have a long history of distrust, incompatible goals, and embedded stories of not liking each other can create an alternative future without reaching major agreements. This means bringing people with divergent intentions into a room together where the task is not to negotiate or develop action steps. They only need to agree that a condition needs to change, but at no point are they asked to give up their own solutions or story of their position.
A final piece of conventional practice, one that I have held dear and that Adam sets limits on, is that we primarily need to focus on the nature of the conversations between opposing parties and interests. The common paths are to seek understanding through better listening, through carefully structured forms of dialogue, through managing difficult conversations and getting to yes. These methods are always useful, but in the “stretch” approach to collaboration, dialogue is not the main concern. Changing the conversation as the primary means of creating an alternative future is not enough. Something more is called for.
This stretch collaboration has three major tenets, which I will only name here. You need to read the book to do them justice. First, we have to affirm the legitimacy and value of every stance and each of its advocates. This idea manifests the belief that there is more than one worldview or mind-set to be considered. It reflects the thinking in a statement often attributed to Niels Bohr: “For every great idea, the opposite idea is also true.”
Second, the way forward in the form of collaboration Adam describes is through experientially learning together. We set aside any effort at coming up with negotiated certainties and engage in joint experimentation. Everyone has an opinion, and it is only by trying some things together that we can jointly see which ones will work in the situation at hand.
Finally, Adam calls us to place attention on the consciousness of ourselves and the people working to achieve collaboration. This is for anyone in the position of trying to bring enemies together. This consciousness is to be present in a new way, one in which we are able to notice what is occurring in the world rather than trying to impact it. And to notice that we are as much a player in the moment as anyone else in the room.
In addition to the ideas it presents, the book is important because it is written with humility and an acceptance of our humanity. Adam talks about how his own attempts to force collaboration have in fact worked to prevent it. He supports the theory with very concrete examples of how people have found ways to honor and acknowledge the legitimacy of their enemies and create futures that once seemed impossible. The book is insightful as much for its stories as for its theory.
Underlying the book is an unnamed spiritual dimension. It uses the language of Power and Love, the title of another of Adam’s books. This language evokes aspects of collaboration that hold a place for mystery. For things unknowable, impossible to define. Collaboration of this kind arises in certain moments in the life of a group that shift the context of the effort and open the possibility of something new occurring. This is most likely to happen when there is recognition of our equal capacity to exercise power and to love, both at the same time, with the same people.
What comes through in the book is a call for wholeness. It asks us to face the harsh reality of the political and human suffering in the world, the existence of seemingly un-negotiable conflicts, long histories of contempt. At the same time, it invites us to include in our thinking the possibility of enemies having a useful place in our longing for a different future. Also, to do this work we have to inquire into ourselves, individually, as conscious, learning, and mistake-making human beings; we have to accept that, in the face of our good will, we can lose trust, agreement, and affection for people, and still move the action forward.
The real work here is about creating the space where peace can triumph in the face of our attraction to the clash of cultures and ideologies, intensified by a journalistic megaphone that is primarily interested in what is wrong with the world. It aims for peace in the face of social media outlets where attention is the only goal, celebrity without substance makes the winners, and fabrication without facts is the way to create an audience.
There is much unneeded suffering in the world and in our institutional life, much of it caused by our desire to have our own way or to adapt to what we don’t believe in. Collaboration with the enemy is one form of the politics we have been waiting for: a reachable way for power, love, and neighborliness to reshape our collective lives.