Collaborating with the Enemy by Adam Kahane
Organizational Theory (2017 - 109 pp.)
Adam Kahane's Collaborating with the
Enemy rests on a very sound premise: that to work through conflict, we must
seek out and embrace it, and then be experimental in how we solve our problems.
The premise harkens back to post-World War II industrial pluralism, which encouraged
management-union cooperation, and to the problems I looked at when I wrote a
master’s paper on the psychological and economic pitfalls negotiators face in
hostile collective bargaining. Expanded further, much like Freakonomics doesn’t just apply to
economists, Collaborating with the Enemy
becomes part of a series of books on how to industrial relations-ize your life.
At only 109 pages, Collaborating
with the Enemy still feels overly long. Realistically, it contains a 25-page
article’s worth of material. Most of the rest of the book is Kahane repeating
himself, and sometimes telling personal anecdotes that don’t feel connected to
the underlying premise. Reading about the political conferences in South Africa
and Colombia was interesting, but those conferences needed to be tied into
conflict resolution theme more. A 55-page book on conflict resolution and a
54-page book on political conferences Kahane has attended would be a compelling
2-in-1 bookstore purchase, but I doubt it’d sell as well. The how-to guide at the end of the book can be removed.
Kahane’s most effective argument is his four methods of
coping with conflict, presented as a decision tree: force, collaborate, adapt,
and exit. (19) He then expands them to five by opening collaboration up into traditional collaboration, which works when the situation is well understood, and stretch collaboration, which is necessary when the situation is not well understood. (47) Stretch collaboration is what Kahane needed to understand the problems in South Africa and Colombia: a willingness to work together even within relationships had previously been adversarial, and a willingness to try something new.
These decision trees are also effective because they recognize force and exit as valid options. Not every situation lends itself to
accommodation or horse-trading. The decision trees also unpack collaboration
based on whether the conflict can be controlled, which starts readers thinking
about whether they can control the situations they face.
What really makes the decision trees special, though, is that
they attack the problem like a first-entry deterrence game* rather than like a
Myers-Briggs test.** There’s no Thomas-Kilmann conflict type. There’s no
imputed personality. Anyone can use any combination of the five methods, and Kahane frequently emphasizes that
everyone should.
Ease of Reading: 9
Educational Content: 4
*For example, the second game tree in this overview from Vanderbilt Business School.
**I'm an ENTJ and proud.
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