Collaborating with the Enemy

How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust

Adam Kahane

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9798890571175
• eBook ISBN: 9798890571199
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Conflict Resolution

This bestselling conflict resolution book has helped thousands of people effectively collaborate across deep divides. Now it's been updated with 50 percent new material for an increasingly polarized world.
"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....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
In today's fractured world, collaboration is increasingly difficult yet more crucial than ever. Often, to get something done that really matters, we need to work with people we don't agree with, like, or trust. Drawing from thirty-plus years of experience working with leaders in over fifty countries, Adam Kahane shows why conventional collaboration—requiring harmony and agreement—is obsolete. Instead, he provides a groundbreaking approach that embraces discord, experimentation, and genuine cocreation.
Kahane introduces three key stretches to navigate difficult collaborations:
 

• Stretch to embrace conflict and connection

• Stretch to experiment and learn

• Stretch to step into the game

This substantially revised second edition adds multiple new chapters exploring how to work across deepening divides and with those we may never agree with. Using new case studies, a discussion guide, and frameworks for navigating permanent plurality in our polarized times, Kahane offers essential tools for transforming conflict into positive change.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Collaborating Is Becoming Increasingly Necessary and Increasingly Difficult
• 1. When to Collaborate: Not Always the Best Option
• 2. With Whom to Collaborate: Not Simply with Friends and against Enemies
• 3. How to Collaborate: Not Only with Love or Power or Justice
• 4. Conventional Collaboration Works in Contexts with Low Conflict and Low Complexity
• 5. Stretch Collaboration Works in Contexts with High Conflict and/or High Complexity
• 6. The First Stretch Is to Embrace Conflict and Connection
• 7. The Second Stretch Is to Experiment a Way Forward
• 8. The Third Stretch Is to Step into the Game
• Conclusion: Choosing to Collaborate
• Discussion Guide
• Supplementary Resources
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• About the Practice Designer
• About the Artist
• About Reos Partners