This bestselling conflict resolution book has helped thousands of people effectively collaborate across deep divides. Now it’s been updated with 50 percent new material for an increasingly polarized world.
“Adam Kahane worked with us on the future of our country. The four scenarios we built have come to life one after another, and today we are living the best one....Kahane explains how scenario planning can transform the future. In Colombia we can attest that such transformation is really possible.” —Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia and Nobel Peace Prize recipient
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with leaders in over fifty countries, Adam Kahane shows why conventional collaboration—requiring harmony and agreement—is obsolete.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 connectionStretch to experiment and learnStretch to step into the gameThis 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.
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.