Episode 6: Adam Kahane – Collaborating with the Enemy

Adam Kahane is the director of Reos Partners – a consulting, facilitation, and teaching firm that helps people move forward together on their most important issues. He’s worked in some of the world’s most challenging situations in more than 50 countries and has been praised by Nelson Mandela, Colombian president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Juan Manuel Santos, and many other important figures working towards peace. He is the author of multiple books, including “Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust.”

Adam talks about:

• Pluralism and the Aga Khan
• Being pleasantly surprised that the President of Colombia thanked him after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for their work together 20 years ago
• Quotes he finds inspiring, including one from the musical “Rent”
• His problems with the question “How do I get people to the table?”
• We’re not stuck in traffic – we are traffic!

Resources

Adam Kahane’s social media and websites:

• Twitter: @adamkahane 
• Websites:
  • Reos Partners
  • Reos’ blog 

Resources referred to in the episode:

• Book: “Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust”
• Book: “Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change”
• Quote by Vaclav Havel: “I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart.”  –Source
  
  
• Quote from the musical “Rent,” by Jonathan Larson: “The opposite of war isn’t peace… It’s creation!” –Source
  
  
• Aga Khan and the new Global Centre of Pluralism in Ottawa
  
  
• Information about CEO Khalil Z. Shariff of the Aga Khan Foundation of Canada
  
  
• Article on Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos receiving the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize
  
  
• Article on Adam Kahane and Juan Manuel Santos’ work together twenty years ago
  
  
• William Ury and “third side work” in conflict

Adam Kahane – Quotes From The Podcast

• (Some times may be different due to audio editing done after)
  
  
• 2:06: “This confluence of the increasing need to collaborate and the increasing difficulty of collaborating is what keeps me up at night.”
  
  
• 3:28: “What’s required is to embrace not only connection, but also conflict.”
  
  
• 5:19: “In many settings, political and organizational and personal, these patterns of ‘othering’ or polarization or even demonization seem to be increasing.”
  
  
• 6:03: “The challenge of collaboration is in situations of real complexity and different and conflict, and so how do you do that?”
  
  
• 6:40: “This is a very effective political ploy or political move: if you want to get people with you, the easiest way to do that is get them to be against other people, and we see this often.”
  
  
• 7:05: “The world of social media allows people to be connected primarily to people they agree with, rather than the people around them that they have to deal with everyday, so there’s a lack of a common intellectual and social and political space, and therefore the tendencies to difference gets more easily amplified. And hence the polarization and demonization, which makes situations which are already challenging because of real difficulties and differences, makes them more difficult.”  
  
  
• 7:57: Julia: “I just want to bring you back to the Havel quote, and I’ll need to look it up because when you spoke about that idea that you have lots of fear and you have lots of hope, I just felt tears coming to my eyes because we really care, many people really care about having a more peaceful world, and yet at the same time, you expressed a way to be able to hold the tension of fear and hope, so thank you.”
  
  
• 9:04: “I think for many of us who are worried about conflict and war and destruction and terrible things happening in the world, we imagine that the opposite must be not those things, or at which we call peace. I think that in a way, this is true, but in a way, it’s counter-productive. The wish for everything to be peaceful can really lead to a suffocation.”
  
  
• 9:52: “I come back to this line from ‘Rent,’ that the opposite of war might not be peace, but might be the tumultuous, disruptive, conflictual creation. To wish away conflict is a big mistake.”
  
  
• 10:54: “The reason collaboration seems so difficult, the reason it seems like collaborating with the enemy, like betraying what you, or posing the risk of betraying what you really believe, is that the conventional model, or the conventional assumptions about collaboration are just wrong. So this is the solution, or this is the different way forward that I’m proposing: that conventional thinking about collaboration, maybe not in the mediation world, but in the social problem-solving, organizational problem-solving world, implicitly assumes that collaboration is about, ‘Let’s all be on the same team and let’s agree on what the problem is and the solution is and what the plan is and who has to do what.’ In other words, that we deal with this by keeping things under control, and at least in my work, or Reos’ work, which is about addressing complex social challenges that cannot be controlled by any one organization or sector or actor, that this assumption is, it never holds.”
  
  
• 12:18 (Gord): “When you talk about the problem, as we all know, one of the aspects of some models that mediators use is to get people to agree on what the problem is as a step forward, so they have an agreement on the problem and they can start working on it. It’s sort of helps narrow the conversation, keep people focused, etc. But you seem to be saying a few things that are quite different, because I’m hearing more than one thing. I’m hearing that people won’t agree on the problem. You’re also saying though that we may need multiple understandings, but I think it goes even further, because I think you’re saying that sometimes the problem itself is perhaps not understandable.”
  
  
• 13:53: “It’s not necessary to know and agree once and for all what ‘The Problem is,’ capital T capital P, in order to get moving on trying stuff out. Particularly in complex social settings, which is where I work, there’s different understandings of what’s really going on. In fact, it’s almost never correct to even refer to something as ‘the problem.’ There’s a situation that different people find problematic for different reasons.”
  
  
• 14:44: “What I discovered through my work is that often, it’s not possible or even necessary to agree on what the problem is.”
  
  
• 15:13: Gord: “We’re moving in the direction of a more peaceful world, or at least we’d like to think we are, we’re trying to create a more peaceful world, but at the same time we’re also saying that conflict is alright and conflict has potential benefits to it, so what do you think conflict would look like in a peaceful world?”
  
  
• 15:51: “Difference is completely inevitable and highly productive.”
  
  
• 16:00: “The concept that I’m becoming more and more interested in is the concept of pluralism, that there is a plurality of perspectives and interests and worldviews and needs, and that is inevitable and okay and helpful, and trying to make those go away is a really really terrible idea.”
  
  
• 17:08: “Genuinely embrac[ing] pluralism means accepting that there will be permanent difference and permanent disagreement, so this means permanent conflict.”
  
  
• 17:22: “Now the question is, is there a way to deal with conflict that doesn’t involve people getting upset and murdering each other? So that, for me, is what’s important is, can we deal with difference and pluralism and conflict in a way that makes space for everybody, or does the conflict cause a contraction that says ‘No no no, I can’t put up with this anymore, you must go away, or you must stop doing this, or you must be like me, or you must leave the country, or go to a residential school, or I’m going to force you to do it the way I do.’ So that, for me, is the basic challenge.”
  
  
• 18:20: “What we need to do is be able to live with disagreement that may never go away.”
  
  
• 19:05: Julia: “We [Canadians] seem to aspire to pluralism, and I wondered if you can speak to that in terms of Canada’s situation in the world, and our potential embracing of pluralism. And a small interest for me, coming from Quebec: do you see any links to the original history that Pierre Trudeau tried to put in place with regard to multiculturalism?”
  
  
• 24:53 (In response to the question of what we can do starting tomorrow to make the world a better place): “Recognize that the picture of what’s happening that you have in your head, the idea you have of what the problem is, what the solution is, what ought to be done, is just a model. It’s your opinion. […] When you find yourself very certain about what’s going on, put ‘In my opinion’ at the beginning of the sentence. And if that’s not enough, put ‘In my humble opinion.’”
  
  
• 26:25 (referring to what a friend said): “If you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution. If you don’t see how what you’re doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are, then it follows logically you have absolutely no leverage to do anything about it except from the outside.”
  
  
• 27:30: “What matters is, what are you going to do next? That’s the only thing that matters.”
  
  
• 29:33: “Have the courage to ask the question, ‘How am I contributing to things being the way they are, to this problematic situation, and what can I do differently?’ This can be very frightening for those of us who are well-protected by our fantasy that if everybody else would just get their act together, everything would be fine. It’s not true, and it’s also completely impractical.”
  
  
• 31:59: “People almost always ask me the following phrase: ‘How can I make people come to the table?’ or ‘How can I make people collaborate?’ And in a way, this question reveals the first and most important and most difficult step, which is people coming together. But once people have come together to work on something, then there’s lots that could be done. […] But the problem in this phrasing, ‘How can I make people do this,” I always catch it because it’s almost always asked with that word, and I think it betrays a common but fundamental error, which is that in general, you can’t make people do anything. […] So the alternative, and what I call the practical alternative, is to specifically search out who is it that finds the situation problematic, in what ways? So I spend no time trying to make people do anything at all, but I’m very interested in looking for the people who find the current situation problematic – maybe for a different reason than others, and therefore already have the frustration with the way things are, and the willingness to try something different. If you can find that sense of a situation being problematic, this sense of frustration of ‘What I’ve been doing up to now just isn’t getting me where I want to go,’ then you have the basis for, ‘Okay, can we try this other thing?’”
  
  
• 34:10 (Julia): “What I’m hearing from you is there’s this key distinction where people who perceive themselves as peacemakers or third-siders might be in a place where they want to make somebody do something, and if that’s the mindset, you’re suggesting a shift to a completely different place which is two-fold, I think. One is getting a sense of ‘Well, where are those other people coming from?’ and almost more importantly, ‘Where is that dissatisfaction?’ because that’s where you’re going to find the motivation to change.”
  
  
• 34:43: “Change is hard enough, for all kinds of obvious reasons, so start with the people who have already figured out something’s not working, rather than what I view as a complete, not only a waste of time, but potentially even an immoral activity.”
  
  
• 35:09: “It’s not that people don’t like change; they don’t like being changed. They don’t like being made to change. That, for me, is the ethical dimension of this. And there’s more than enough to be done among people who already think that the situation they’re in is problematic and they’re looking for ways to address it constructively.”
  
  
• 37:13 (Gord): “I’d just like to add, Adam, that from what we know of you, and it’s particularly evident in some of your writing, that you exhibit a kind of vulnerability, right? You’re open to talking about where you’ve made mistakes, and I think that’s one of the characteristics that makes your writing really valuable.”