Should you Collaborate with the Enemy? | Adam Kahane

Adam Kahane, guest · [02:30]Well, I'm from Montreal. I, I grew up there in a Pretty quiet suburban family. And I studied physics at McGill. And so I have a, I guess you could say, quite an abstract way of thinking about things. And then I studied energy and resources at Berkeley and went to work for Shell International in London. I tell the story that way. I'm writing another book now and was writing a bit about that progression, so that's why it comes off my tongue quite quickly. And at Shell, I was responsible for doing what they call scenarios, stories about what might happen in the world outside the company. And it was while I was there that I was invited To facilitate a scenario exercise in South Africa that included people from across the South African society, leaders, 28 leaders, black and white, women and men, business people, politicians, activists, trade unionists, community workers, academics, who were trying to think together about the transition from apartheid to democracy. And that was very much the hinge in my life from having been trained as an analyst to facilitating a group of leaders who had something they wanted to do together, but who had many, many deep differences between them.

Adam Kahane, guest · [10:09]It's very practical that way. You raise, what I think's a, a crucial and maybe the first crucial point in the book. When I started the second edition, I put a note on LinkedIn. I tend to do a lot of I engage a lot on, on LinkedIn. I asked people who'd read the first edition, is there anything you think I should change or keep? And several people said, well, you know, I actually didn't get very far in the book, but, but that first chart on page eight, that's, you really ought to keep that. And, the first chart makes exactly the point you just made, and it is a good chart, and I did keep it. And it just makes the point that's obvious when you say it, which is that collaborating is not the only option. It's literally impossible to work with everybody on everything, and collaborating is a challenging way to get things done. And so the first thing to realize is I have other options. I can just do what I want to do. I call that forcing. It may or may not involve violence. It may just be me doing what I think I need to do without consulting people or without taking a lot of notice about whether other people like it or don't like it. And we do that a lot every day, stuff we just do. Sometimes we're trying to change things, we can't force them to be they want them to be, we have to adapt to them as they are. Again, not at all unusual, probably most of the things we do every day are adapting to things, whether it's the weather or the politics or our cranky boss that we can't necessarily do much about. The third option is exiting, saying I just can't change this, I can't live with it, I'm out of here, whether that's emigrating or getting a divorce or quitting our job or just tuning out. And collaborating is a fourth option. And so I do agree with the reader who said don't drop that first chart because it makes a crucial framing point. I think people speak too casually about collaboration as though It's the only thing we can do when we have to about everything, and that's obviously untrue, and so this simple point is a good starting place.

Adam Kahane, guest · [12:53]Well, when you write a book, you're allowed to make up one new word, and so that's the one I made up, and it's "emnifying." So the process of labeling others as enemies, and again, this is something that I I looked at much more carefully in the second edition. In the first edition, I don't, I introduced the word enemy-fying, and I, the title is collaborating with the enemy. But I didn't take the word very seriously. In a way, the first edition said, well, you know, it's in the title, but when you get into it, you find that you can work with lots of people, even people you don't agree with or like or trust. And I thought this wasn't really, this didn't stand the test of time. And sometimes we do have enemies. I eventually looked up the dictionary, somebody who's trying to hurt or injure us. So sometimes we do have enemies. And we have to decide, do we try to defeat them, destroy them, work around them, work with them? That's a choice. The problem is, and I think this is closer to the zeitgeist, is taking this very specific label Somebody who's trying to hurt or injure us and applying it more broadly than it deserves to people we don't agree with or people we don't like or people who look at us funny or people who irritate us or people who we wish we didn't have to deal with and we enemy-fy them. And so the second big change I made in the, in this new edition is to say, well, actually dividing the world into friends and enemies is not very sensible because often we don't need to work with our friends. They're our friends, but we don't have anything to do with them. And contrary wise, sometimes we do have to work with our enemies, including as the way to deal with the, the fight or war between us. And so what I argue in the second edition is rather than black and white, these are the people we can work with, these are the people we can never work with. It's more useful to understand the world as many shades of gray, and where the large middle is people we might need to work with at particular times, under particular circumstances, and the book is, in those cases, what do you do? How do you work with people that may be your enemies, you may consider your enemies, anyhow, you don't agree with or like or trust, but you think that you need to collaborate with them. How do you do that?

Adam Kahane, guest · [23:40]Attilik defines power as the drive of everything living to realize itself. So that power is essentially about, well, people or teams or organizations or nations just trying to do what they're trying to do, to grow, to achieve their destiny, their ambition. And yes, often that ends up nudging against or steamrolling over or hurting or colonizing others. But the origin is the drive to self-realization. And so I find that I'm writing again, I'm speaking so fluidly because I'm writing again about these three words in a new book now. And to me, it's Crucial that power is not a unfortunate thing or a thing that must be done away with, but actually that literally nothing happens without power in the world, and we have to understand it and work with it. Tillich defines love as the drive to unify the separated. So again, that includes the notion of romantic love, but goes long, far beyond it, and is about why we come together, whether it's in families or teams or internationally, because we understand we're part of a larger whole and we need to act accordingly. Just to finish the trilogy, and then we can take this wherever you want it, the part that's been hardest for me to understand or has taken the longest is what does justice mean in this context? And I think what Tillich means says, or my understanding of it is, power and love are intention. you know, everybody's doing their thing and we're trying to come together. That's true of teams, that's true of families, that's true of the, the international order. and justice is the, the structure or the form or the, the rules that enable you to balance, you could say, wholes and parts. The fact that I'm a whole in myself, but I'm also part of larger wholes. And so anyhow, the reason you've noticed it in my books, the reason I'm writing yet another book to try to take this idea further is I think so much of what we deal with in life, in family life, in work life, in politics, in geopolitics can be understood as the tension between these three drives when they're defined in that way.

Adam Kahane, guest · [33:39]I think the, I think maybe the basic thing is understand the difference and disagreement and conflict are inevitable. But unless you're in an organization where everybody can just do whatever they want, and so it doesn't matter, in most cases, including many aspects of universities and other organizations and families and neighborhoods, the reality is, if I can put it that way, that different people are trying to do different things, and there's going to be friction and conflict. So for me, that's the starting point. It's not a problem, it's a reality. So the question is how you deal with it. Well, you can ignore it, you can close your eyes, you can pretend it's not there, that works to some extent, but that has limits. And so when you get to that limit, you have to, yeah, find a way to deal with it or, or to work through it or work around it or make a tough call or quit or expel somebody. All of these are options. And the reason I'm saying it in that way is I've been very taken, and there's a famous marriage researcher whose name is John Gottman. He's written a lot of books on marriage from having tens of thousands of hours of recorded marital therapy sessions. And he has this amazing statistic that 69% of marital disagreements are not resolvable. They, they deal with things that are personality differences or differences in lifestyle needs. I think the point is the idea that we can work through everything and come to agreement, whether it's at a university or internationally or in a marriage, is just a fantasy. And he, he, he argues, as I think is what his, his work is famous for, is successful marriages are ones that find a way to deal with persistent non-agreement. So it's in that context that I don't think politeness is per se a problem, but acknowledging that, you know, we don't disagree about this thing, we can, maybe we'll be able to resolve it, or maybe we'll just have, and may, or maybe we'll have to get divorced, or maybe we'll just have to live with it. And that, it's neither true that We can't have, so it's not true we can't have any disagreement. It's not true that disagreement is fatal. That's, I think, the Gottman point.

Adam Kahane, guest · [45:14]Well, this, was a point, made to me by a great, person in our field, Bill Tolbert, recently deceased, so a blessed memory. And, he said to me years ago, you know, that 60s expression, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And that's not actually the crucial point. The crucial point is, as you said, if you're not part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution, which means that if you can't see how what you're doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are, then it follows logically there's nothing you can do to change the way things are except from the outside by force. and this is the third stretch of recognizing or stepping into the game, recognizing the extent to which you, you're in the game, and that the scope for changing things by instructing other people what they ought to do is rather limited. I've said this for years. That's a mistake I keep making. Thinking I can just tell people what they ought to do, I find it doesn't work very well, neither at work, nor at home, nor in the world. And so the alternative is to ask, how is what I'm doing, or not doing, contributing to things being the way they are? And what can I do differently? What can I do differently that would change the way things are? And maybe it's what I would do differently that would influence what other people do, or inspire, or cajole, or force other people to do with it, things differently. But it starts with this, yeah, more, more closer to home question about what am I doing? And when I've asked people to, to consider that switch from thinking about what other people ought to do, to thinking about what they themselves can do, they report a very interesting phenomenon. I've, I've asked this question many times in workshops. They say, well, when I think about what I am contributing, two things happen. First of all, I feel more guilty, because I see, oh, this thing that's bothering me, I'm contributing to it. And I feel more agency, because now I can do something about it right away. I don't have to sit around being frustrated or angry at what these other people ought to be doing. And so that's the third stretch.