Collaborating with the Enemy
How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust
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Collaborating with the Enemy How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust We're trying to get something done that really matters to us. To do this we need to work with others. But these others include people we don't agree with or like or trust, so working with them seems impossible-like collaborating with the enemy. What can we do? International consultant Adam Kahane, whose work has been praised by Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Juan Manuel Santos, has faced this challenge many times in working both on big issues, like economic restructuring, climate change, and civil war, and on ordinary issues within organizations and families. He has come to understand that everything we think we know about collaboration-that it requires a harmonious team that agrees on where it's going and how it's going to get there-is wrong. On the contrary, the only way to get things done with diverse others is to abandon harmony, agreement, and control and to learn to work with discord, experimentation, and genuine cocreation. Kahane proposes a new approach to collaboration-stretch collaboration-that is built on this insight. He offers examples of how he's helped people apply it in all kinds of tough situations throughout the world. This approach requires stepping forward with openness and commitment, as in the words of poet Antonio Machado, "Walker, there is no path. The path is made by walking." As our societies have become more polarized and globalized and our organizations have become less hierarchical, more of us need to collaborate across more heterogeneous groups than ever before. This means that increasingly often we face situations where conventional collaboration does not work. Kahane's book offers a proven and practical approach to getting things done in such complex and conflictual contexts. It could not be more timely.
About this Author
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. He has worked in more than fifty countries with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists. He is the author of Solving Tough Problems, Power and Love, and Transformative Scenario Planning.
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 160
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2017-06-05
Reviews
"Kahane writes with humility, sharing what he has learned from both his successes and his failures over a long career dedicated to helping address some of the world's toughest problems. Collaborating with the Enemy offers practical guidance for how to work with diverse others, which is a precondition for confronting many of the complex challenges we face."
--Morris Rosenberg, President, Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, and former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada
"Adam Kahane worked with us on the future of our country. The four scenarios we built have come to life one after another, and today we are living the best one. In Transformative Scenario Planning, Kahane explains how scenario planning can transform the future. In Colombia we can attest that such transformation is really possible."
--Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia and Nobel Peace Prize recipient
"Power and Love is a profound book that offers us a wise way to negotiate our toughest group, community, and societal challenges."
--William Ury, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Harvard Negotiation Project, and coauthor of Getting to Yes
"Solving Tough Problems is a breakthrough book that addresses the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created."
--Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize recipient
"Kahane addresses an important challenge that we face every day: how can we move forward together in situations where we are in conflict and unable to construct a shared vision of the future? In doing this he overturns conventional practice--including his own--and proposes a new approach to collaboration that is better suited to our difficult current context."
--Jan Kees Vis, Global Director, Sustainable Sourcing Development, Unilever
"Adam's Solving Tough Problems helped me understand that all our pressing problems--be they strategic issues inside a company or societal challenges like conflict, poverty, or climate change--require that those with a stake and the power to act come together in open dialogue to create a joint diagnosis and a deep commitment to moving forward together. In Power and Love, Adam goes further and deeper--into the kind of leadership that it takes to do this. A must-read for every reflective leader."
--Ravi Venkatesan, Director, Infosys, and former Chairman, Microsoft India
"Our societies face really hard problems--poverty, injustice, unsustainability, corruption--that are insoluble by conventional means. Conflicts of interest and profound uncertainties about the future are producing paralysis and inaction. Adam Kahane has, more than anyone, developed and successfully employed tools that enable us to create futures of shared progress and profit."
--Peter Schwartz, Senior Vice President, Salesforce.com, and author of The Art of the Long View
"In Collaborating with the Enemy, Adam Kahane shows that people who don't see eye-to-eye really can come together to solve big challenges. Whether in our businesses, our governments, our communities, or our personal lives, we can all benefit from this smart and timely book."
--Mark Tercek, President, The Nature Conservancy; former Managing Director, Goldman Sachs; and coauthor of Nature's Fortune
"Adam Kahane proposes a solid and clear methodology, supported by his experience in the many processes in which he has participated, that invites us to defy our situation and to transform--not only to change--it, beginning by transforming ourselves."
--Luis Raúl González Pérez, President, National Human Rights Commission, Mexico
"Kahane takes the core message from his seminal Power and Love into uncharted territory: our messy, challenging, and necessary task of working with others to solve intractable problems. He redefines collaboration, testing our assumptions about the interplay between individual agency and collective action. At once theory, memoir, and practical guide, Collaborating with the Enemy is a vital primer for people working at all scales to make the world a better place."
--Ross McMillan, President, Tides Canada
"Nowadays, opposition and conflict are the new normal, yet normal responses to them seem impotent. Amid this chaos and as if delivered to us by 'special order,' Collaborating with the Enemy shows us how thinking and seeing differently can help us navigate this challenging landscape. Kahane abandons orthodoxy in taking on the most intransigent problems, showing us the path to effective action in a complex world."
--James Gimian, Publisher, Mindful magazine, and coauthor of The Art of War and The Rules of Victory
"Transformative Scenario Planning is a deeply human book that offers tangible means for tackling the intractable problems that confront us at every level of life, from domestic and local to national and beyond. It offers realistic, grounded hope of genuine transformation, and its insights and lessons should be part of the toolbox of everyone in leadership roles."
--Thabo Makgoba, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town
"In our field, the hardest nut to crack is how to address conflicts between parties with fundamentally different worldviews. Adam offers a robust theory and a straightforward practice to address this vital challenge."
--Ofer Zalzberg, Senior Middle East Analyst, International Crisis Group
"How many of us have dreamed of developing the art of helping others solve 'impossible' problems and bridge 'uncrossable' divides? Adam Kahane has taken that journey. Read, listen, absorb, and integrate."
--Peter Goldmark, former President, The Rockefeller Foundation
"To transcend the perilous state in which we find ourselves, we need to learn to collaborate with those with whom we'd rather not. Drawing on his experience enabling sworn enemies to create peace in places like South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Colombia, Adam Kahane shares insights and lessons we can all use when collaborating with 'those others' is our only or best way forward. Collaborating with the Enemy belongs on the same shelf as Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Machiavelli's The Prince."
--Stephen Huddart, President, The J. W. McConnell Family Foundation
"Adam Kahane helps us overcome romantic and linear approaches to conflict transformation. Collaborating with the Enemy provides a hands-on critique of the myth of the uninvolved mediator and explains the art of working with the enemy."
--Gorka Espiau, Associate Director, The Young Foundation, and former Peace Advisor to the President, Basque Government
"Mahatma Gandhi said, 'Be the change you want to see in the world.' His life was the unfolding of an even deeper truth: the need to change himself if he wanted to change the world. Hence, his autobiography was titled My Experiments with Truth. Adam's story of his engagements with people in many countries, whom he was called to help in their efforts to change their worlds, is an account of his own realization of Gandhi's deeper insight. It is an honest and beautifully told story."
--Arun Maira, former member, National Planning Commission, and former Chairman, Boston Consulting Group, India
"Power and Love includes the story of the Visión Guatemala team, in which a group of us, who in the ordinary course of events would never have met or worked together, had an unprecedented experience that opened up new horizons for us and for our country. Adam helped us cultivate our dreams and ideals and gave us the energy and hope to act to renew our society."
--Raquel Zelaya, former Secretary of Peace, Guatemala
"Advances and changes in humankind have left the world with supercomplex problems--from achieving sustainable development to maintaining peace and security--that require changes in the way we face them. Collaborating with the Enemy gives us not only a privileged look into Adam's extensive experiences in high-level engagements to address these problems but also his honest and brave reflection on his successes and failures, and from these his articulation of an important new approach to collaboration."
--Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, former Head, President of Indonesia's Delivery Unit, and Distinguished Practitioner, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
"The quality of a decision depends in large part on the quality of the process by which the decision is made. But the political process in my country (as in most) actually causes us to 'enemyfy' each other. If we are to solve the great challenges of our time, whether climate change or economic division and social unravelling, we must learn how to collaborate with those we believe to be our enemies. Adam shows us a way to do so."
--James Shaw, Member of Parliament and Coleader, Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand
"Collaborating with the Enemy is a lighthouse for our troubled times. If we are to find a way to reconcile the divides that imperil our common life, here we have a profound guide and a source of hope."
--Rufus Black, Master, Ormond College, The University of Melbourne
"Power and Love is a rare and valuable book. Kahane has immersed himself in the practical challenges of helping people effect social change, and against this backdrop he unfolds a simple and penetrating insight: that power and love are two axes that delineate our individual and collective journeys. Either we master the balance of power and love or we will fail in our efforts to realize deep and lasting change."
--Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of The Fifth Discipline
"Solving Tough Problems is a seminal book. Exciting, vital, essential reading."
--Edgar H. Schein, Professor of Management Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of Humble Inquiry
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