Have you ever had to work with someone you didn't like - or even trust? On December 8, author Adam Kahane comes to Concordia to discuss his new book, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Like or Agree With or Trust.
Kahane is an organizational planner and facilitator with over 25 years of experience bringing diverse groups together in the spirit of collaboration, having worked all over the world (including in post-Apartheid South Africa).
The talk is organized by the department of Applied Human Sciences’ Human Systems Intervention (HSI) MA program, and will feature a lively discussion and Q & A with the author.
The evening is being held in memory of Kahane’s mother, Naomi Kahane (BA 1997, MA 1999), who taught at the department for many years prior to her death in 2015.
The following is an excerpt from Collaborating with the Enemy.
Introduction: Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Like or Agree With or Trust
We face the same basic challenge everywhere: at home and work, in business and politics, on community and national and global issues. We are trying to get something done that we think is crucial. To do this, we need to work with others. These others include people we do not agree with or like or trust. And so we are torn: we think that we must work with these others and also that we must not. Collaboration seems both imperative and impossible. What do we do?
The reason such collaborations seem impossible is that we misunderstand collaboration. Our conventional understanding of collaboration is that it requires us all to be on the same team and headed in the same direction, to agree on what has to happen and be able to make sure this happens, and to get people to do what needs to be done. In other words, we assume that collaboration can and must be under control. Conventional collaboration looks like a planning meeting.
But this conventional assumption is wrong. When we are working in complex situations with diverse others, collaboration cannot and need not be controlled.
Unconventional, stretch collaboration abandons the assumption of control. It gives up unrealistic fantasies of harmony, certainty, and compliance, and embraces messy realities of discord, trial and error, and cocreation. Stretch collaboration looks like martial arts practice. Stretch collaboration enables us to get things done even in complex situations with people we don’t agree with or like or trust.
Stretch collaboration requires us to make three fundamental shifts in how we work.
