Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust Paperback – June 5, 2017

Immediately after reading the first paragraph of the forward by Peter Block and then the first chapter of Adam Kahane's book, I knew I was "hooked"!This is an easy to read but profound clarification of the versatility needed to approach life's difficult situations.Across my six decades of consulting I have been frustrated by the cyclical ascendancy of various forms of collaboration (9/9, consensus, self-managed teams) as the only true way! The Forest Service in the USA was once sold on the notion that all managers should manage 9/9, as was the City of Calgary in the late 1960s. I had the privilege of spending a couple years there helping them recover from the notion that every situation could or should be managed in the same way.As I write this review I am very aware that Kahane's international conflict experience goes way beyond my experience in business and community development. I do not intend to minimize his broad scale by my more limited scope, but to indicate what appears to be a similarity.His four styles seem very similar to the Jay Hall conflict management styles. I have used Hall's instrument with several thousand people and have trained them in how to effectively use each of the styles in an effective way.One of my contracts was with an industry that was the first American manufacturing plant to open with self-managed teams. I started to work with them as closure looked imminent in the early 80's due to an appalling lack of productivity. These errors have been repeated by Volvo and by Saturn, among many others. We had to help them get the other styles honored and in place to succeed. We built on the autonomy intended by self-management by especially putting in place more clarity about authority and single-point decision-making which had been absent.It is my belief that Jay Hall's mistake was to idolize collaboration (as in the 9/9 as the desired style). This thus led to the tendency to the enemyfying (more about this word later ) of other styles. Kahane brilliantly avoids this and supports versatility. Further he spells out the steps one needs to take to successfully do this collaboration when appropriate!He mentions the third party possibility. Having been a third-party between people who deeply mistrusted and disliked each other dozens of times, we began by having their authorities above them tell them that they did not ever have to like each other! They simply had to work together more effectively. Of course, many (but not all) of them came to enjoy working with each other eventually.Gems are spread throughout this book. In various ways he mentions the common "rational" style where experts develop solutions and then promulgate these throughout an organization with the resulting familiar problems, and even failures, in application. By contrast, in his chapter called, "The Second Stretch", he references a statement by the Columbian President Juan Manual Santos in which he, in launching a report developed in the organization of American states by 46 leaders (on the drug phenomenon in the Americas), says, "The four scenarios are not the recommendations of what should happen or forecast of what will happen; they simply provide us with realistic options without prejudices or dogmas". Kahane further quotes José Miguel Insulza, the Secretary General of the OAS, saying 16 months later, "The report had a huge immediate impact".This approach reflects what Ronald Lippitt and Charles Jung had formulated in 1960: "Knowledge Retrieval/Implication Derivation". That is to say that knowledge experts and leaders retrieve information for people working on issues. The experts do not tell them what the implications are. They may offer opinions and even recommendations, but these also must be seen in a "knowledge retrieval" way and not as directives. It is the task of the people working the problem to derive implications with the benefit of having knowledge retrieved, such as successful (or failed) practices or important concepts! This almost completely eliminates push back to the knowledge such as in the statement "The expert's do not understand our situation".Kahane has nailed it! It's not the job of the experts to understand situational details where application is expected. It's their job to bring possibilities to the problem solvers who live in the situation every day!A complete review could be written about the spiritual dimensions of this book. For instance, I was caught off guard by his use of the word "enemyfying"! Yes I have done that, and in the current political situation, am doing that! Yes I have distanced those who hold views very different from my own by seeing them as the 'impossible to converse with' enemy. As a student of Howard Thurman, "The godfather of the civil rights movement", I was touched continually by the connective reach in Kahane's stories. The Latin root for religious means "to bind together- to connect"! In any profound "religious" sense, it includes reaching out for connection with the enemy!Practical and applicable! This book will help any practitioner more clearly see these alternatives and understand when and how collaboration may be effective. Plus Kahane, with his vast experience and unique capacity to learn from that experience, outlines how to do it in ways I have not seen spelled out so succinctly before.Robert P. CrosbyCreator, in 1973, of the first Masters in the Applied Behavioral Sciences degree. His latest business book is, "Cultural Change in Organizations".Founder, 1969, LIOS, Leadership Institute of Spokane/Seattle with it’s subsequent Alcoa Corporate Graduate Masters Program.

This book was recommended to me from our Senior VP in HR. So, I was very eager to order it and get my hands on it. I also promised a review within a week, so as you can see, mission accomplished. Reading a book like this within a week means that its highly valuable (more below) and compact or else you cannot read them. Case in point is the Robert Greene's books, which I love to read, but I cannot promise to read them within a week.I struggled between a 3 and a 4 for this book (below on things that could be better), but decided on a 4 for the book being concise. If this book was 300 pages, with the same amount of insights, I would have given a 3.1) The concept of stretch collaboration was eye opening for me. I have always seen collaboration as a boolean, either do it or don't, but seeing a different variants of collaboration was an eye opening moment, which will entice me to approach these situations with an open mind rather than yes or no.2) Collaboration being the last option is also an important concept. For a long time, I've seen collaboration as the first step of a process and I have invested varying degrees of energy put into making it happen. Collaboration slows us down was a concept I pushed later on in my management path, but some people found it hard to be palatable. I suspected that it was me and my natural penchant for delivering results, but its highly comforting to talk those in a more informed fashion.3) In stretch collaboration, take the onus on you to deliver results as opposed to listing problems with others is also a very relieving notion. Again, its something I intuitively do, but I'm so glad to have an informed opinion around doing that, rather than seeing it instinctive and at times viewing it as a crutch for my career advancement.Things that could have done better:1) I struggled to get the "collaboration" part of stretch collaboration. In stretch collaboration, you don't insist on a shared understanding or a shared plan and each of us advance with our own agenda. Is "discussions" and "informing", the only parts of the stretch collaboration? Or are there ways to convert stretch collaboration to conventional collaboration at least for some portions later.2) A lot of examples particularly at the latter stages seem to be confined to author's emotions and feelings. The India example was one such incident, where I wanted the author to spend sometime going into the learnings he had. Similarly, the author talking about conventional collaboration and contrasting some of it would have also been illuminating.Overall enjoyed reading the book and its something I plan to refer to my colleagues and friends as well.

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