Reos Partners is pleased to announce that the second edition of Adam Kahane’s best-selling book, Collaborating with the Enemy, is now available.
First released in 2017, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust has helped thousands of people rethink what it means to work across difference. Today, as polarization intensifies and collaboration becomes both more essential and more difficult, Adam Kahane returns with a substantially revised and expanded edition, bringing new insights, stories, and practices for working with people we don’t agree with, like, or trust.
This second edition is more than an update; it is a timely and necessary evolution of the work.
“Collaborating across difference isn’t straightforward, but it’s necessary and possible,” says Kahane. “This book offers you, for whatever roles you’re playing—sibling, spouse, neighbor, team member, manager, official, activist, politician, president, ordinary person—a fresh way of thinking about and doing collaboration, including with people you don’t agree with or like or trust. It offers new, practical, hopeful options for getting where you want to go.”
Across the world, we are confronting challenges that no single actor, or aligned coalition, can solve alone. From organizational transformation to climate action, democracy, and community resilience, progress requires working with people who see the world differently from us.
Yet conventional collaboration models assume we already share values, trust, and goals. When we don’t, they break down.
This book offers a clear, honest, and practical alternative: stretch collaboration, a way to work across deep differences without pretending those differences don’t exist.
“To succeed in collaborating across difference, we must understand collaboration as it really is: possible but not straightforward; human rather than mechanical; offering both opportunities and risks; demanding that we be open to changing ourselves; and involving many twists and turns and so requiring many choices,” says Kahane.
Three Essential Stretches
Together, these practices invite us to collaborate not because it is easy, but because it is necessary and possible.
"Peace, progress, and justice are only possible when we find ways to work with those we do not agree with, do not like, and do not trust...That is why this book matters. Adam Kahane has spent decades helping people navigate the most intractable challenges by doing what seems counterintuitive: collaborating with the enemy. His approach does not rely on harmony or consensus. Instead, it embraces complexity, uncertainty, and disagreement as essential ingredients of meaningful change. This is not the traditional model of collaboration: it is a deeper, more courageous, and ultimately more effective one.”
—Juan Manuel Santos, Nobel Peace Laureate, former president of
Colombia, and Chair of The Elders
“Kahane writes with humility, sharing what he has learned from both his successes and his failures over a long career dedicated to helping address some of the world’s toughest problems. Collaborating with the Enemy offers practical guidance for how to work with diverse others, which is a precondition for confronting many of the complex challenges we face.”
—Morris Rosenberg, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada
“Kahane addresses an important challenge that we face every day: how can we move forward together in situations where we are in conflict and unable to construct a shared vision of the future? In doing this he overturns conventional practice—including his own—and proposes a new approach to collaboration that is better suited to our difficult current context.”
—Jan Kees Vis, Global Director, Sustainable Sourcing Development, Unilever
“Our societies face really hard problems—poverty, injustice, unsustainability, corruption—that are insoluble by conventional means. Conflicts of interest and profound uncertainties about the future are producing paralysis and inaction. Adam Kahane has, more than anyone, developed and successfully employed tools that enable us to create futures of shared progress and profit.”
—Peter Schwartz, Senior Vice President, Salesforce.com, and author of The Art of the Long View
Whether you are leading institutional change, building cross-sector coalitions, or navigating complex relationships within your team, this book offers a grounded and hopeful approach to working with difference.
We invite you to explore it and to join us in strengthening our collective capacity to collaborate in a divided world.
About Adam Kahane
Adam is a co-founder of Reos Partners and an internationally renowned organizer, designer, and facilitator of complex and conflictual multi-stakeholder processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders collaborate to address their most important and intractable challenges.
Adam has worked in more than fifty countries with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.
He is also a best-selling author of six books about this work, is a Member of the Order of Canada, and in 2022 was named a Schwab Foundation Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
About Reos Partners
Reos Partners is a purpose-driven company dedicated to supporting sustainable and equitable progress on humanity's most crucial challenges.
Our proven approach enables transformative collaboration even in the most complex, uncertain, and polarized situations. Our methodologies create practical pathways for developing, implementing, and institutionalising equitable and durable solutions.
Having partnered with diverse teams in over 80 countries, we work with leaders and institutions committed to advancing effective and inclusive collaboration on the most critical global challenges.