Working with People You Don't Agree With, Like, or Trust with Adam Kahane
Most of us know the feeling. There's someone at the table we don't agree with, don't particularly like, or don't quite trust, and the situation isn't going away. Whether it's a difficult peer, a misaligned executive, a stakeholder relationship that's gone a bit stale, or a cross-functional partnership that feels like it's going nowhere, the instinct is often the same: work around it, avoid it, or wait it out. And as Adam Kahane will tell you, that rarely works.
Adam Kahane is founding partner of Reos Partners, a global organisation specialising in collaborative approaches to complex challenges. Over more than 35 years, he has worked in over 50 countries supporting governments, corporations, and civil society through some of the world's most difficult situations, from the democratic transition in post-apartheid South Africa to peace processes in Colombia. He is the author of six books, including the newly revised Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust (Second Edition, 2025), which carries a foreword from Nobel Peace Laureate Juan Manuel Santos. Nelson Mandela described his earlier work as addressing "the central challenge of our time: finding a way to work together to solve the problems we have created".
In this conversation, Adam unpacks why working across difference is becoming harder just as it's becoming more essential, and what leaders can actually do about it. We explore his concept of "enemyfying", the limits of conventional collaboration, and why the real breakthrough in any difficult collaboration is rarely about changing the other person.
In this episode, we cover:
Why our capacity to work across difference is declining just as the need for it is increasing, and what's driving that gap
What "enemyfying" actually means, why we all do it, and why it's such an unhelpful starting point for getting anything done
The difference between conventional collaboration and stretch collaboration, and how to know which one your situation actually calls for
Why telling people to "think of the whole" or "leave your interests at the door" is often unrealistic, and in many cases manipulative
How complexity and conflict change the rules of collaboration entirely
The four options we have in any difficult situation, and why collaboration is just one of them
What Adam calls "The Click", the turning point moment that shifts a stuck group toward real progress
The most practical thing you can do when you're tempted to keep telling someone they're wrong
I loved Adam's framing that working with people we don't agree with, like, or trust is not a new idea at all. What's new is how much we've retreated from it, and how much the quality of our leadership, our teams, and our organisations depends on us getting better at it again.
If this conversation resonated, share it with a leader or team navigating a difficult stakeholder relationship, a silo situation, or a collaboration that feels more stuck than it should be.
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