Book summary “Collaborating with the enemy”: summary

Introduction

You often face situations where you must work with people who disagree with you, oppose your goals, or operate by entirely different rules. You might try to force these opponents to change, adapt to their demands, or simply walk away, but none of these standard responses solve complex problems. Adam Kahane argues in Collaborating with the Enemy that you can work together effectively across deep divides without requiring harmony, agreement, or trust by shifting from conventional hierarchical control to horizontal stretch collaboration.

When you treat adversaries as pure enemies, you trigger endless conflicts that block any possibility of progress. The book explains how to abandon this destructive enemyfying syndrome and choose the right partners for pragmatic cooperation. You will learn to balance the competing forces of love, power, and justice, moving away from rigid conventional planning. The following chapters answer key questions about navigating severe disagreements:

• When is collaboration actually the wrong choice for your situation?
• How do you engage with people you dislike or distrust?
• Why do conventional top-down plans fail in complex environments?
• What specific steps allow you to experiment your way forward without a master plan?

1. When to Collaborate

Collaboration is not always the best choice when you face difficult situations. You must choose among four distinct strategic options based on your power and agency.

When individuals or groups face problematic situations, they generally have four strategic options: collaborating, forcing, adapting, or exiting.

Each option involves distinct risks. Collaborating means changing the situation together with others when unilateral action is impossible. Forcing means imposing your will unilaterally. Adapting means living with the situation as it is because you cannot change it. Exiting means leaving the situation entirely because you cannot change it and it is no longer tolerable.

Millions of Venezuelans exercised the exiting option by fleeing their country due to the severe political and economic crisis.

Strategic options in problematic situations

You can evaluate your own tendencies when facing challenges.

Rate how often you use each of the following options in difficult situations, on a scale of 1 (not often) to 5 (most often):

• I collaborate
• I force
• I adapt
• I exit

Reflect on your responses by identifying which way of acting you use most and least often, what emotions you associate with each, and which option you could be better at applying. Think of a specific challenging situation and reflect on your first reaction, the capacities and resources needed for each option, the level of risk, and what is at stake for you. Shift your perspective by asking what would be different if you chose something other than your habitual approach and considering the perspectives and habitual approaches of other key people involved.

Why potential participants decline

Organizations often decline to join cross-sector collaborations because they calculate that other unilateral strategies better serve their specific strategic objectives. Initiators of large-scale collaborations often encounter rational refusals from potential participants who prefer alternative stances. Companies may stay out to preserve competitive advantage, interest groups may wait until they build independent power to negotiate as equals, and government agencies may remain separate to enforce regulations without perceived bias.

When Hal Hamilton and Adam Kahane launched the Sustainable Food Lab in 2003 and 2004, a global company declined to join to protect its competitive advantage, an international farmer organization waited until building its power, and a government agency chose to remain apart to maintain regulatory neutrality.

2. With Whom to Collaborate

Pragmatic collaboration requires moving beyond rigid black-and-white boundaries to engage selectively with a grayscale spectrum of potential partners.

The ordinary nature of cross-difference work

Although collaborating across differences is frequently viewed as an extraordinary feat, it is actually an ordinary feature of daily social and urban life. While war and political polarization encourage enemyfying that divides populations into friends and enemies, everyday interactions in diverse settings routinely involve cooperating with people whose backgrounds, beliefs, or behaviors differ significantly from your own. Societies sustain themselves through diverse pragmatic mechanisms for working across boundaries without requiring total agreement or affection.

In September 2024, Adam Kahane participated in a writing fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study located at Cité Universitaire, a campus built after the First World War to foster international living together, surrounded by recent national elections and the Paris Olympic Games supported by forty-five thousand volunteers.

Jurist Carl Schmitt argued that political grouping relies fundamentally on the distinction between friends and enemies and the willingness to fight or kill. Conversely, philosopher Hannah Arendt emphasized human plurality as the primary reality of political life, where individuals share a common humanity while remaining entirely distinct from one another.

Navigating the grayscale collaboration area

Sticking strictly to a red line of working only with trusted allies often leads to isolation and failure, summarized by the phrase having one hundred percent of nothing. By looking carefully at concrete situations, initiators can discover broader groups of potential collaborators and make pragmatic choices about whom to include, exclude, or oppose.

In 1993, Adam Kahane facilitated a strategy workshop for the Pan Africanist Congress, a radical Black political party in South Africa committed to armed resistance against apartheid, which historian Brian Feeney compared to the Irish Republican Army's tendency to prefer complete ideological purity.

You can evaluate your own openness by completing several concrete steps:

• rate your willingness to work with different types of people on a scale of 1 to 5, including those with similar beliefs, different beliefs, those you have never collaborated with, opponents, difficult people, those you strongly disagree with, those with aggressive styles, and those you fear;
• reflect on your responses by identifying which types of people you are more or less open to working with, your bodily and emotional reactions, and how your role or background influences your preferences;
• think of an important initiative and a person or group you have been hesitant to work with, and answer questions regarding their role, the value they could contribute, their strengths, and what needs to change for collaboration to be possible;
• choose one simple, near-term or more involved action to engage constructively with a person or group you have typically avoided.

3. How to Collaborate

Successful collaboration requires the integration of three universal drives: love, power, and justice.

Most people favor one or two of these drives. All three remain necessary for progress. Ignoring any of them leads to failure, sentimentality, abuse, or sterility. Paul Tillich examined this synthesis in his 1954 book Power, Love, and Justice.

The three universal drives

Love operates as the drive toward the unity of the separated. It arises because all participants belong to larger wholes. This impulse expresses itself as community and serves as an antidote to enemyfying.

Ronalth Ochaeta told a story in a 1998 workshop in Guatemala about the exhumation of a mass grave. That project led to a profound minute of silence and communion among deeply divided leaders.

Power means the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity and extensity. Stephen Lukes explored these dynamics in his 1974 book Power: A Radical View. Power does not merely mean domination over others. It functions as the ability to achieve purpose, agency, ambition, and identity.

In 2008, Kahane visited Clara Arenas in Guatemala City. She explained that her civil society coalition took out a full-page newspaper ad stating they would not participate in government dialogues if required to surrender their power to march and demonstrate.

Justice provides the structure and fair form that enables both love and power to activate and perform their work. It arises from human relatedness and expresses itself as solidarity, reciprocity, and the Golden Rule. This drive ensures fair inclusion and the proper handling of power differences.

Integrating unity, agency, and structure

Collaborators can use a specific reflective practice to assess and balance their habitual reliance on these forces. You can strengthen weaker drives by examining your tendencies and planning new actions.

• Rate how often you use each of the following drives when collaborating with others on tough challenges, on a scale of 1 to 5: I focus on our unity—on acting together as one: _______; I focus on influence, contribution, and effectiveness—on each of us getting what we need: _______; I focus on fairness, equity, and reciprocity: _______
• Reflect on your responses by considering which of the three you prioritize, which you overlook, what emotions you associate with each, and how your role or background influences your actions.
• Examine a difficult collaboration by considering which drive is most activated and how they have shaped your view of the other person or group.
• Choose the drive you struggle with most and brainstorm one concrete action to incorporate into your next interaction with this person or group.

4. Conventional Collaboration

Conventional collaboration works by limiting the scope to low conflict and low complexity, and aligning collaborators who subordinate themselves to the team. Operating like an orchestra with a conductor, it achieves results through harmonizing individual contributions, following a plan, and top-down direction.

Conventional collaboration relies on a hierarchical model where smart people make a plan, authorities approve it, and subordinates execute it.

This model reduces clutter and conflict by requiring participants to leave non-work-related differences and opinions at the door. Khalifa Al Qama, director of a robotics laboratory in Dubai, explained that their success relies on respecting each person's technical contribution and providing freedom without micromanagement. Dubai experienced a thirty-five-fold population increase over the past fifty years, with a 90 percent non-Emirati population percentage. Kahane visited a conference in Dubai in 2024.

Meyer Kahn, appointed by Nelson Mandela to run the South African Police Service, quipped that he believed in having one God, one wife, and one boss. Meyer Kahn was appointed CEO of the SA Police Service in 1997.

The hierarchical model

Conventional collaboration fails in contexts with high conflict or high complexity where top-down command and control no longer work. When social and economic complexity increases, or when working across organizational boundaries, rigid direction is insufficient and requires stretch collaboration.

Limits of conventional command and control

A reflective framework helps determine whether an initiative is suited for a conventional collaboration approach. Evaluating expectations around disagreement, clarity of problems, conformity, and definitions of fairness clarifies the usefulness and limitations of conventional methods.

• Reflect to what degree you expect differences to be easily managed, the work deals with a clear problem with a clear solution, fitting in is the main way to participate, participants stay in their lanes, and fairness is defined by decent treatment.
• Analyze in what ways your initiative would be served by conventional collaboration and in what ways the approach would be limiting.
• Outline the leadership structure, decision-making process, conflict resolution method, goal-setting process, strategy development, and roles of expertise if employing conventional collaboration.

5. Stretch Collaboration

Conventional collaboration fails when you face complex and conflictual settings because wicked problems cannot be solved with optimal answers. You must then abandon narrow models in favor of stretch collaboration.

Stretch collaboration enables people to work together effectively in contexts characterized by high conflict and high complexity without requiring harmony, shared understanding, or a single leader.

Contrasting stretch and conventional approaches

Conventional collaboration relies on a three-step rational model of thinking through a problem, getting executive approval, and instructing subordinates to execute a plan. Tame problems fit this method. Stretch collaboration relaxes the assumption of narrow circumscription, allowing diverse actors to function more like a messy ecosystem that figures out what to do as they go along.

In stretch collaboration, participants see themselves primarily as wholes in themselves and only secondarily as parts of the collaboration. You work without a single directive boss, keeping your differences and disagreements out in the open. This pluralistic structure gives up nostalgic fantasies of harmony, certainty, and compliance in favor of trial and error and cocreation.

Stretch collaboration also requires expanding your approach to love, power, and justice. You nurture belonging so participants do not have to hide parts of themselves. Power is organized horizontally rather than hierarchically to respect each collaborator's agency. Justice shifts from basic security to equity and reciprocity to handle increased volatility and diverse ambitions.

Real-world applications in extreme conflicts

During the armed conflict in Colombia, organizers brought together generals, politicians, businessmen, and active guerrillas from the FARC and ELN via telephone and in-person workshops to form Destino Colombia. Rather than forcing a single consensus, the group mapped out four alternative scenarios for the country's future and presented them to the public as guides for different actions.

In the 1995 year when Adam Kahane first went to Colombia, 42 forty-two people represented the conflict in miniature on the organizing committee. They held 3 three workshops over four months for a total of ten days, resulting in 4 four scenarios agreed upon by the end of the third workshop. This process influenced national peace processes, and in the 2010 year Santos was elected president before he negotiated a peace treaty with the FARC and won the Nobel Peace Prize in the 2016 year.

You can design your own initiative by working through specific contextual questions:

• Reflect on the degree of persistent, meaningful disagreements or deep differences among the collaborators and whether they are likely to endure.
• Reflect on the degree to which the work ahead deals with an unclear problem and an unclear situation.
• Reflect on the degree to which collaborators can show up with their full uniqueness and agency even if it disrupts plans.
• Reflect on the degree to which the structure of the initiative will adapt to allow collaborators to truly show up as themselves.
• Reflect on the degree to which diverse ambitions, energies, and creative directions are being welcomed even if they create tension.
• Reflect on the degree to which the collaboration will address inequalities in voice, ownership, or access.
• Consider what the leadership structure, decision-making process, conflict resolution, goal establishment, and role of expertise would be under a stretch collaboration approach.

6. Embrace Conflict and Connection

The first stretch of collaboration is to embrace both conflict and connection by recognizing that engaging and asserting are complementary and mutually reinforcing.

In high conflict contexts, striving solely for harmony and avoiding discord suffocates social systems. This approach leads to failure or authoritarian interventions like military coups. Effective change requires both engaging through dialogue and asserting through campaigns, protests, or competition. These two drives act as poles like inhaling and exhaling, requiring participants to make countervailing moves when an approach becomes degenerative.

In 2022, Duane Kurisu contacted Adam Kahane regarding tensions over the Thirty Meter Telescope. Native Hawaiian activists and corporate leaders formed Rediscovering Hawai'i's Soul, working through intense historical conflicts to find common ground without abandoning their communities. After three years, more than 150 organizations were involved in the initiative.

Working with multiple wholes

Every social system consists of multiple wholes that are simultaneously parts of larger wholes, a concept known as a holon coined by Arthur Koestler. When someone demands focus on the good of the whole, they usually mean the good of the specific whole that matters most to them. Effective collaboration requires honoring these multiple nested identities and acknowledging that individual and organizational objectives cannot simply be left at the door.

US President Lyndon Johnson succeeded in passing civil rights legislation by intimately tracking the specific motivations, strengths, weaknesses, and lobbying pressures of each individual senator rather than treating the Senate as a homogenous whole. Forty-eight Democratic senators were part of Johnson's group of material.

Practices for microstretching

Microstretching involves challenging required agreements and adjusting personal biases between love and power to find a sustainable balance.

• Start by listing all the agreements you believe everyone in your collaboration must share across scope, goals, values, methods, structures, norms, and roles.
• For each agreement listed, ask how you could still work together even if you did not agree on this point, and strike it off if possible.
• Reflect on whether you were prioritizing love so much that differences were suppressed, or prioritizing power so much that cohesion broke down.
• If you leaned too much into love, experiment with power today by expressing what you held back and asserting your own interests.
• If you leaned too much into power, experiment with love today by creating space for those with different perspectives to feel heard and valued.

7. Experiment a Way Forward

Conventional collaboration relies on agreed problems, solutions, and plans. These methods fail completely when results are unpredictable.

In high-conflict and high-complexity contexts, collaborators cannot agree on solutions in advance, requiring instead a process of trying out multiple options one step at a time.

Stretch collaboration involves treating an agreed plan merely as a hypothesis to be tested through a portfolio of small experiments. Management professor Henry Mintzberg notes that perfectly deliberate strategies require predictable environments, which do not exist in complex settings. Creativity and experimentation require what poet John Keats called negative capability. This is the ability to remain in uncertainty without reaching prematurely for fixed answers, much like Pablo Picasso painting over his canvases until the composition emerges.

Adam Kahane visited the Basque Country in 2024 to study its economic and social turnaround. This included the Arantzazulab democracy innovation laboratory and the Mondragon Corporation, where people use participatory practices and social capital to adapt their traditional K factor to global complexities. The violent conflict between Spain and ETA in the Basque Country lasted from 1959 to 2011. The Mondragon Corporation employs 70,000 people and maintains a salary ratio cap of 7:1 between its highest- and lowest-paid staff, compared with 77:1 for companies listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange. During a workshop in México Posibles, a community organizer named Carlos Cruz played an improvisation game as the dolphin, having to discover a set of actions solely through the audience clapping when he moved closer to the correct behavior.

Emergent strategy and negative capability

Progress in complex situations is achieved through emergent strategies realized by iterative trial and error rather than pure deliberate planning. You can implement this approach directly in your own initiatives:

• Identify the challenges you're trying to tackle.
• Create a small experiment based on a How might we... or What if... question and test your assumptions.
• Try without overplanning, focusing on speed and learning over perfection.
• Learn by examining what happened, what surprised you, and what worked.
• Adjust, try again by modifying one key element, and repeat the process.

8. Step into the Game

When facing high conflict and complexity, you must stop blaming others and step from the sidelines into the game by taking personal responsibility for your role in the situation.

Moving from spectator to participant

People habitually focus on demanding that others change. This pattern of enemyfying avoids personal work. Unless you recognize how you contribute to a problematic situation, you cannot be part of the solution. You must shift from the role of a detached director or spectactor to an active participant.

Adam Kahane co-led the Bhavishya Alliance in Maharashtra, India, between 2005 and 2006 to reduce child malnutrition. The alliance included 26 organizations and 56 staff members assigned full-time to the social laboratory. When corporate and government bosses rejected their proposals at the end of an eight-week process, Kahane initially blamed others. He spent months feeling victimized until he realized he needed to begin with himself.

Systemic transformation requires absolute commitment rather than mere involvement. Jorge Talavera coined the term el clic to describe the exact moment in workshops when team members realized they themselves had to change.

Choosing to abide and collaborate

You can examine your own part in any conflict by shifting perspectives:

• See the situation from the outside by imagining yourself as an observer describing what others are doing and what they need to change.
• See the situation from the inside by imagining yourself as an actor describing your own experience and how your actions shape the reality.
• Compare the two perspectives to understand your own role and responsibility.
• See both sides by reflecting on when you focus on others versus when you accept full responsibility.
• Take the next step by deciding what concrete action you will do differently.

To collaborate across difference, you must dial down enemyfying and choose to abide rather than defaulting to force, adaptation, or exit. Abiding means remaining together rather than apart.

10 Key Ideas

1. When individuals or groups face problematic situations, they generally have four strategic options: collaborating, forcing, adapting, or exiting.
2. Pragmatic collaboration requires moving beyond rigid black-and-white boundaries to engage selectively with a grayscale spectrum of potential partners.
3. Successful collaboration requires the integration of three universal drives: love, power, and justice.
4. Conventional collaboration relies on a hierarchical model where smart people make a plan, authorities approve it, and subordinates execute it.
5. Stretch collaboration enables people to work together effectively in contexts characterized by high conflict and high complexity without requiring harmony, shared understanding, or a single leader.
6. The first stretch of collaboration is to embrace both conflict and connection by recognizing that engaging and asserting are complementary and mutually reinforcing.
7. In high-conflict and high-complexity contexts, collaborators cannot agree on solutions in advance, requiring instead a process of trying out multiple options one step at a time.
8. When facing high conflict and complexity, you must stop blaming others and step from the sidelines into the game by taking personal responsibility for your role in the situation.
9. To collaborate across difference, you must dial down enemyfying and choose to abide rather than defaulting to force, adaptation, or exit.
10. Unless you recognize how you contribute to a problematic situation, you cannot be part of the solution.