Collaborating with the Enemy (Second Edition): How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust

by Adam Kahane, Laura English (Narrator)

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with leaders in over fifty countries, Adam Kahane shows why conventional collaboration—requiring harmony and agreement—is obsolete.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

● 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.

Audible Audio

Published November 25, 2025

About the author

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 is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address such challenges. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.


Adam is a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2022 he was named a Schwab Foundation Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.