Adam Kahane on how to work with people we don’t agree with, or like, or trust

On September 26th, 2017 Adam Kahane joined us to talk about his book ‘Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust.’ We have pulled together some highlights below for you and you can watch the replay at http://bit.ly/adamkahane.

Collaboration is increasingly difficult and increasing necessary. Often, to get something done that really matters to us, we need to work with people we don’t agree with or like or trust.

We need a new approach to collaboration that embraces discord, experimentation, and genuine co-creation. 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.

Adam, what led you to write the book Collaborating with the Enemy: How to work with people you don’g agree with, or like, or trust?

There are 2 reasons I wrote the book, one big and one small. The main reason was that I’ve spent all of my professional life promoting and facilitating collaboration, speaking and writing about it.

The tone was always about how great collaboration was and didn’t reflect my experience of how difficult it was. I am committed to making this field more realistic. I noticed that a lot of things I was trying to do in my career applied to my personal life with the same dynamics of working with other people being applicable across both the career sectors and ordinary life.

In stretch collaboration, what do you personally find the most challenging?

For me, the essence of the difficulty is the general trend for people to think ‘I wish things were the way I wish them to be.’ In Argentina they said ‘collaboration means you agree with me.’

Therefore, when I’m working with others coming from a different angle, there can be periods of great fun but also frustration and even danger.

In many languages, this word collaboration has two contradictory definitions — work together and also to betray, connotations drawn from the second world war.

One challenge is overcoming the question of how do I work with others, without betraying what’s really important to me and my community. This double meaning is not incidental but absolutely central.

My book is about how this tension can be managed and how conventional methods do not work, and the only way to move forward is through unconventional collaboration which I called stretch collaboration.

How can we overcome the fear of losing one’s identity and power?

These are two different aspects, when I think of power I think of being able to control what’s going on. With Identity — this thing we are talking about is requiring me to change who I am.

The bottom line is pluralism. If there is only one right answer, then you quickly find yourself blocked in and unable to move. Accepting multiple answers, players and identities allows you to work with all of that and that’s what is meant by stretch collaboration.

How come this approach hasn’t become mainstream?

On the one hand, fear is the clue to why this is difficult. A whole range of fears is related to collaboration. The other side of the coin, is what I’m calling stretch collaboration is what some people do every day, so I’m describing something rather than inventing it.

On the radio, a presenter asked me what advice I would give around Canadian political discussion to Trudeau in regards to working with Trump. I said I have no advice for him, what I’m talking about is obvious to politicians and diplomats. We may not like the people we work with but we have to figure out something that will work. What I’m talking about is extraordinary to many people, but this way of working with multiplicity and plurality is already in action.

Do you have an example of stretch collaboration in action?

1. One place I worked at for a long time is in Columbia, I started working there 20 years ago during the height of the armed conflict. Destination Columbia was a project which brought together all of the factions of the civil war and it was a remarkable experience. I was surprised when last year the president of Columbia referred to this modest project when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. When he said this, I was surprised that this was highlighted from 20 years ago amongst all the big things going on — I asked him this question when I had the opportunity to meet him. He gave a very interesting answer which gets close to the essence of stretch collaboration. The reason that Destino Columbia was completely contrary to my understanding of things is that it is possible to work with people that I don’t agree with and will never agree with. That for me is a large scale example on the possibilities of stretch collaboration, even if we don’t agree on the highest priority or methods. Most of us imagine that collaboration requires us to agree on who is going to do what, how this will happen etc. however, this is not necessary.

My second example is from a much smaller, more intimate scale — from my experience as a member of a small organisation of 50 people with lots of differences of background, education and needs, I have had the same experience that even though my assumption has been that we have to agree everything before we go forward, in practise we feel our way forward with lots of things not understood or agreed. “We’re crossing the river feeling for stones.”

In practise, we have to feel our way forward which is a contrary approach. How can we take responsibility for what we are doing without using our energy on what everyone else is doing.

What are some of the primary conditions that we should try to cultivate when initiating stretch collaboration?

Some challenges are not problems that have solutions but situations that need to be worked with. Often a situation is problematic to different people for different reasons. The crucial starting point is that there is a shared sense that the situation is problematic even if this is from a different perspective. It’s a sense of we can do better here, this is not good enough and secondly, none of us can address this on our own so we have to work together. When that precondition is met you can do anything. The most common way these collaborations don’t work is when it is for something that some believe is perfectly fine as it is. In such a situation you can be stuck.

Is there a need for there to be trust?

The need for trust is not practical and it’s not true. If we’re in a situation with low trust, the way we can build trust is through working together even if it starts out in small ways.

In 2 years, the confidentiality of a group I’ve been working with has not been broken even though they don’t necessarily trust each other. We can learn to work together. Trust is the result and not the precondition of working together. The second, more fundamental point, is that we can do things together even if trust is low — maybe I don’t trust you politically but I trust you personally. Or I would trust you to work on one area such as getting supplies to a town but it doesn’t mean we’re going to be in a political party together. Working together is not black and white. It is all about crossing the river and feeling for stones, with all kinds of ambiguity, tentativeness and plurality.

How do we learn to listen and stop being reactive when we have to negotiate against moneyed interests?

One of the most difficult circumstances for collaboration is ‘I really need to work with you but you don’t want to work with me.’ There’s no easy answer for this situation and it is very common for a beginning difficulty. In my way of thinking, the answer is already there in that the place to start is to try to understand them and what it is that they are trying to do and is there a way in which the situation is problematic from their perspective in a different way from mine. The first thing to do is listen — how do you see this situation and in what way is it risky for you?

The most fundamental shift is to be willing to suspend our own beliefs. Suspend rather than discard and you may see something about the situation you haven’t seen before.

I want to ask about non-violent communication, you write that we need to fight and this sounds a bit contradictory, could you explain this?

The point I’m making about fighting and power is, for me, very central. What I’m really trying to say is the same as non-violent communications, but I’m trying to push back against one idea within the community that the only thing that matters is unity and oneness. Martin Luther King Jnr said ‘power without love is reckless and abusive.’ I wrote my book Power and Love on this as there is so much emphasis on power without love, but there is not sufficient attention to the second part which is ‘love without power is sentimental and anaemic.’ We really have to make space in our work for people to reveal what it is that is important to them and to allow for the difference and non-harmony. If you say you’re not allowed to fight then that is love without power. This kind of work requires us to be able to work with conflict without panicking and trying to shut it down which is consummate with non-violent communication.

Any suggestions for setting up an experiential activity for training managers in organizations the four levels of talking and listening using the sentence starts from his book: “The truth is…”, “In my opinion…”, “In my experience…”, and “What I am noticing here and now is..”

Sharma talks of four conversational fields and for me the crucial field is not that there is always a best one but that we need to be conscious of which one we are using and can we move fluidly between one and another. It is about moving between the modes.

How much love would you suggest that Ukrainan people have towards their corrupt oligarchs who hide in the grey zone and try to stop every change they can?

One of the most important points I’ve made in my book is that collaboration is not the only option. When faced with a problematic situation we have four options: force things the way we want them to be. We can’t make them the way we want so we will make the best that we can and adapt. We exit and quit. We collaborate. It’s really important to understand that collaboration is not the only option.

If you have to find a way to work with oligarchs then the thing with the love part is to understand that on the one hand there is the interests of each of the parts which is the power dimension and the love dimension is to say we have lots of differences and conflicts and there is a whole here and we need to attend both to the power dimension and the love dimension. To be technical, the love dimension is where I see myself as part of something larger and the power dimension is the wholeness (my people, my party). This recognises that all of us are wholes and all of us are parts. You don’t have to collaborate if you think one of the other options would work better.

How to navigate and promote open conversations in hierarchical structures where power distance and difference in roles are remarkable?

Accept reality for being full of exception and turbulence. The first step is to recognise that that is the way things are and wishing they were another way is fantastical. In my experience things are almost never like that so get used to it and practise getting used to the world as it is. Coming back to the question of the motivation of the book, I detected a lot of fantastical elements like ‘wouldn’t it be great if all you need I love’, I don’t think that’s true so let’s try and find a practise that recognises the reality of the situation including the conflict.

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