Collaborating with the enemy by Adam Kahane: a practical book summary

This summary covers the substantially revised second edition (2025).

The book in three sentences

In the second edition of Collaborating with the Enemy, Adam Kahane suggests that working with people we don’t agree with, like or trust begins with noticing when we enemyfy them, and then choosing deliberately whether to collaborate, force, adapt or exit. He argues that collaboration needs love, power and justice together, and that it takes two forms: conventional collaboration for low conflict and low complexity, and stretch collaboration for high conflict and/or high complexity, which asks us to embrace conflict and connection, experiment a way forward and step into the game. Running through it all is a shift in how we respond when we feel threatened, from separation, hurry and certainty towards engagement, patience and curiosity, which he calls abiding.

Two terms stand out from this book: enemyfying and stretch collaboration.

What is enemyfying?

Enemyfying is Adam Kahane’s term for the habit of treating people we disagree with, distrust or feel threatened by as enemies. It simplifies a messy situation into us and them, which can feel reassuring and mobilise our own side. The cost, he suggests, is that it narrows our options and keeps our attention on what others should do.

His first practice offers a way to move from enemyfying to understanding: notice the signals, the narrative and the enemyfying pattern, shift perspective, choose a response and reflect on the effects.

What is stretch collaboration?

Stretch collaboration is Kahane’s term for working together across difference in contexts with high conflict and/or high complexity, where we cannot control the collaboration or agree a plan. It is horizontal, with autonomous collaborators and distributed leadership, and advances through experiments. It asks us to stretch in three ways: embracing conflict and connection, experimenting, and stepping into the game. Conventional collaboration, by contrast, suits contexts with low conflict and low complexity, where clear authority and boundaries keep the work manageable.

My three favourite ideas

Three ideas from the book that I keep returning to.

1. “Collaboration that doesn’t work with love and power and justice doesn’t work.”

Kahane draws on Paul Tillich’s definitions. Love is the drive to unite what has been separated, power is the drive to realise ourselves and achieve our purpose, and justice is the structure that allows both to be expressed fairly. Most of us feel at home with one or two of these and default to them under stress. Love alone tends towards sentimentality, power alone towards recklessness, and justice alone towards harshness. His suggestion is not to play to our strengths but to strengthen the drive we tend to neglect. At work this might mean noticing that we have smoothed over a real difference for the sake of harmony, or that we have pushed our own agenda without checking what it is doing to the relationship.

Practices:

• After your next difficult meeting, ask which of the three you leaned on and which you overlooked.
• Journal: which drive do I reach for under pressure, and what does it cost the people around me?
• Replace the question “How do I keep the peace?” with “What am I holding back that this collaboration needs?”

2. We have more potential collaborators than we think

Enemyfying sorts people into friends and enemies, black and white. Kahane proposes a scale of greys instead. We cannot collaborate with everyone on everything, and we cannot collaborate with no one, so the work is to choose, pragmatically, with whom, on what, and sometimes against whom. He tells the story of Juan Manuel Santos, who describes learning through the Destino Colombia project that it is possible to work with people you will never agree with. The bar for progress may be lower than we assume: we may not need to agree on the problem or the solution, and we may not need to like or trust one another. A principled red line can protect us, but it can also leave us holding out for everything and achieving nothing.

Practices:

• List one person you have been reluctant to work with and write down what they could contribute to something you care about.
• Journal: where have I treated a difference of opinion as a reason to exclude?
• Replace “Can I work with them?” with “What would I need to put in place to work with them on this?”

3. If we cannot see how we are part of the problem, we cannot be part of the solution

Kahane relays this reversal of the familiar activist line from Bill Torbert. Our habitual reaction in a stressful situation is that they need to change, and the question he hears most often is “How can we get them to…?” That question assumes we can direct others. In stretch collaboration we cannot, so our attention is better spent on what we are thinking, feeling and doing, and what we will do next. He learned this the hard way after a difficult project in India left him blaming colleagues for months, until a passage from Martin Buber pointed him back to himself.

Practices:

• Describe a difficult situation twice: once as an outside observer and once as someone inside the picture. Notice what changes.
• Journal: what am I contributing to this situation, in helpful and unhelpful ways?
• Replace “How can I get them to change?” with “What will I do next?”

This echoes the stance in Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting, which I summarised here.

The common thread: Kahane’s ideas point towards collaboration as a practice of attention and choice rather than a technique for producing agreement. We notice when we are making enemies, we widen the range of people we are willing to work with, and we take responsibility for our own part in the situation. Love, power and justice give us a way to see what is out of balance, and small experiments give us a way to move even when we do not agree.

Key takeaways: how to collaborate with people you disagree with

Enemyfying: the syndrome underneath the challenge

Kahane uses “enemyfying” to describe the habit of viewing the people we are dealing with as enemies. The label gets applied broadly, to people who seriously harm us but also to people we disagree with, feel threatened by or simply find uncomfortable. He opens with his own example: a dispute with fellow organisers during a project in Mexico, where he found himself defending his professionalism and casting colleagues as villains.

Enemyfying is appealing because it simplifies a messy reality and reassures us that we are not responsible. The cost, he suggests, is that it narrows our options, hardens conflicts and keeps our attention on what others ought to do. To move beyond it, the book’s first practice offers six steps:

1. Notice the signals: What is my body telling me about this person?
2. Notice the narrative: What story am I telling, and which parts am I simplifying?
3. Notice the enemyfying pattern: Where am I seeing a complex human being only as an enemy, and what power do I hold?
4. Shift perspective: What might they be afraid of or trying to protect?
5. Choose a response: What is one small action towards a more constructive stance?
6. Reflect on the effects: What changes in me, and what becomes possible?

Four options, and collaboration is only one of them

When we face a situation we want to be different, Kahane suggests we have four options. We can collaborate, force, adapt or exit. Seen through the lens of power, we collaborate when we can change the situation but not on our own, force when we can change it unilaterally, adapt when we cannot change it but can live with it, and exit when we can neither change it nor live with it. He draws the framework from a group of Thai leaders who named three scenarios for their country: we adapt, we force and we collaborate.

The point is that collaboration is a choice, not a duty. We also make that choice reactively at times, perhaps adapting because we dislike conflict or collaborating because we see ourselves as collaborative people.

The ten choices

The book is organised around ten questions, which Kahane suggests cannot be mapped in advance as a single decision tree:

1. Whom do you see as your enemies?
2. When will you employ collaborating?
3. With whom will you collaborate?
4. How will you work with love, power and justice?
5. Where will you employ conventional collaboration?
6. Where will you employ stretch collaboration?
7. How will you stretch to embrace conflict and connection?
8. How will you stretch to experiment a way forward?
9. How will you stretch to step into the game?
10. Will you abide?

Conventional and stretch collaboration

Conventional collaboration

Conventional collaboration works like an orchestra with a conductor. It narrows the scope of the work and the range of collaborators so that conflict and complexity stay manageable. People agree on the problem, the solution, the plan and who will do what, and they align with and subordinate themselves to the team. It is hierarchical, relies on authority and expertise, and works well where the context really is low in conflict and complexity.

Stretch collaboration

Stretch collaboration is for contexts with high conflict and/or high complexity, where cause and effect can only be understood in hindsight. It looks less like a team and more like a messy family, coalition or ecosystem. Organised horizontally, it keeps collaborators autonomous and leadership distributed. The trade off is that it is less predictable and carries more risk.

Why Kahane changed his mind

One thing I appreciated is that Kahane changes his mind here. In the first edition he wrote that conventional collaboration was becoming obsolete. In this edition, partly after time working in Dubai, he suggests it is a valuable option in the right contexts, and that the two ways of collaborating can be combined.

Combining both: the T shape

He describes the combination as a “T” shape. You can picture the vertical stem as what happens inside a team, organisation or nation, where clear authority, roles and boundaries often make conventional collaboration the sensible choice, with stretch collaboration added when a challenge there becomes more conflicted or complex. The horizontal bar is what happens across those silos, where nobody has authority over anyone else and stretch collaboration is needed. His example is the United Arab Emirates, where decisions within the system are made from the top, while an official described engaging pragmatically with countries such as China, India, Russia and the United States rather than sorting them into good and bad.

The practical point is that we do not have to choose one approach for everything. We can ask, in each situation, whether we are working inside our own boundaries or reaching across them. For anyone working in matrix organisations (see my pages on matrix leadership), I suspect this picture will feel familiar.

The love, power and justice thinking builds on his earlier books. If you want the everyday, small step side of his work, my summary of Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems is a useful companion to this one.

The three stretches

Kahane describes three dimensions in which we need to stretch, and each one asks us to pluralise: to move from one superior whole, one best route and one paramount leader towards multiple wholes, emergent possibilities and cocreators.

1. Engaging with our collaborators: embrace conflict and connection

Engaging (love) and asserting (power) are poles (see Polarities), not opposites, like inhaling and exhaling. We need both, alternately.

• If we engage for too long, we may feel ourselves capitulating. That is a signal to assert.
• If we assert for too long, we meet resistance. That is a signal to engage.

Kahane argues that pushing assertion into the shadows does not remove it, it makes it less conscious and less clean. He also suggests that every person’s actions make sense to them, however repugnant we find them, and that there is no such thing as “the whole”: every system is made of nested and overlapping wholes, each with its own interests.

One activity he uses is a thirty minute walk with the person in the room who seems most different from you. A participant explained its effect as mutual human acceptance: people reconsider their positions after they have felt accepted, not before.

The chapter’s practice asks you to list the agreements you think you need, then ask of each one how you could still work together without it.

2. Engaging with our context: experiment a way forward

In high conflict and high complexity contexts we cannot know the route in advance, so we feel our way forward, as in the phrase about crossing a river by feeling for stones. What we call an agreed solution is really a hypothesis to test.

Kahane draws on three ideas to explain why we advance by experimenting rather than planning:

• Karl Weick’s story, perhaps apocryphal, of lost soldiers who found their way with a map of the Pyrenees rather than the Alps, which suggests that acting helps us make sense of where we are (Sensemaking).
• Henry Mintzberg’s distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy, which suggests that in stretch collaboration strategy is mostly emergent.
• Gardening: we cannot make people collaborate, but we can remove some of the obstacles.

Creativity needs the willingness to paint over what we have made, as he saw in a film of Picasso at work, and a dolphin training game shows the value of acting, learning and pivoting. In his framing, a mistake made early is a success, and not acting is the failure.

The practice is simple: identify a challenge, design a small experiment, try it without overplanning, learn, adjust and try again. He adds a note of prudence, since experimenting is not safe in every context.

3. Engaging with ourselves: step into the game

The third stretch moves us from the sidelines into the action, as cocreators rather than directors or spectators. Kahane suggests we can fall out of balance in two directions:

• Overlooking ourselves, by focusing only on what others should do.
• Overfocusing on ourselves, by taking everything personally.

He offers the image of the pig, which is committed, rather than the chicken, which is merely involved in the ham omelette.

Another moment he describes is when a team’s work suddenly moves forward, when people see that they themselves, and not only others, need to change. He and a Paraguayan cofacilitator called it “el clic”. The basic question he offers is “What will I do next?”

Abide: the choice underneath the others

Kahane’s closing theme is a shift in how we are in the world. When we feel threatened we tend to react with separation, hurry, arrogance, certainty, anger and fear. He invites us to respond instead with engagement, patience, humility, creativity, curiosity and faith. The word he uses for this is abiding, which means to remain, continue or dwell, and to be with rather than apart from. He does not claim to have mastered it. He says he still enemyfies about as often as he did, but now notices it sooner, and recovery that once took months can take days or less.

The final practice helps you create the space to abide. You reflect on when you feel most at peace, then identify small repeatable activities that help, experiment with one for a week, and notice how you feel afterwards. His examples include a short walk without your phone, a few quiet minutes with a candle, or watering plants slowly.

Each chapter also ends with a practice you can use alone or in a group, and the book closes with a discussion guide and a solid list of supplementary resources.

Five things you could do this week to collaborate across difference

Five simple things I see from the book that you, or I, could do right now, even before you read the book:

1. Catch one enemyfying moment

The next time you feel frustrated with someone, pause and notice where the feeling sits in your body. Then ask what story you are telling about them, and which parts of it you may be simplifying. Even a minute of noticing may open a little space between the feeling and your response.

2. Walk with someone who sees it differently

Invite one person whose view differs from yours to take a thirty minute walk, with no agenda and no phones. The aim is not to persuade or to resolve anything. It is to meet them as a whole human being and to let them feel accepted, which, as one participant explained to Kahane, is what makes it possible for people to reconsider their positions.

3. Strike one agreement off the list

Think of a collaboration that feels stuck and write down the agreements you believe everyone must share. For each one, ask how you could still work together if you did not agree on that point. Cross off whatever you can. What remains is often a much shorter list.

4. Run one small experiment

Choose a challenge you can observe and turn it into a “What if…?” question. Design the smallest test that would teach you something whether it works or not, try it this week, and note what surprised you. Then adjust and try again.

5. Step into the picture

Describe a difficult situation first as an outside observer, then as someone inside it. Compare the two accounts and notice what you are contributing. Finish by asking, “What will I do next?” and choose one small action.

Like all of my book summaries, this one is written to help me absorb what I have learned and to share a glimpse of the ideas with you. It is not a substitute for reading the book itself. If the content here resonates, I encourage you to seek out the full text through an independent bookstore or your local library, and let the author’s voice speak directly to you. To learn more about the author and his work visit the book page at Reos Partners or his LinkedIn profile.

Sketchnotes

Below are the sketchnotes that I made as I read the book:

Sources:

Kahane, A. (2025) Collaborating with the enemy: how to work with people you don’t agree with or like or trust. 2nd edn. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Kahane, A. (2025) Everyday habits for transforming systems. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.