"In today's fractured world, collaboration is increasingly difficult yet more crucial than ever. Often, to get something done that really matters, we need to work with people we don't agree with, like, or trust. Drawing from thirty-plus years of experience working with leaders in over fifty countries, Adam Kahane shows why conventional collaboration—requiring harmony and agreement—is obsolete. Instead, he provides a groundbreaking approach that embraces discord, experimentation, and genuine cocreation.
Kahane introduces three key stretches to navigate difficult collaborations:
● Stretch to embrace conflict and connection
● Stretch to experiment and learn
● Stretch to step into the game
This substantially revised second edition adds multiple new chapters exploring how to work across deepening divides and with those we may never agree with. Using new case studies, a discussion guide, and frameworks for navigating permanent plurality in our polarized times, Kahane offers essential tools for transforming conflict into positive change."
"Revolutionize Your World: The Power of Radical Engagement
In a world crying out for change, Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems is your guidebook for action. Adam Kahane, the bestselling author of Collaborating with the Enemy and a global authority on solving tough problems, delivers game-changing advice for anyone ready to make a difference.
This is a manifesto for world-changers. Drawing on decades of work with leaders from national and organizational presidents to front-line managers and grass-roots activists, Kahane distills seven potent habits that enable ordinary citizens to become extraordinary agents of transformation.
Through riveting real-world examples, Kahane shows how these habits have sparked revolutions, brokered peace, and reimagined societies. Now he's handing you the keys to that transformative power.
Whether you're battling climate change, reinventing healthcare, or simply trying to make your community better, this book is your essential guide. It's time to stop feeling powerless and start creating the change you want to see.
Don't just survive in a changing world—step in to transform it."
"Making progress on complex, problematic situations requires a new approach to working together: transformative facilitation, a structured and creative process for removing the obstacles to fluid forward movement.
People today face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people across more divides. But the traditional ways of advancing-subsuming individual interests to the good of the whole, or providing total autonomy for all stakeholders to work out their own solution-aren't adequate to resolving these difficult situations.
Drawing on his experiences working with Black people and white people in post-apartheid in South Africa, First Nations people and the government in Canada, multiple stakeholders in war-torn Columbia, and many more, Kahane describes what he calls transformative facilitation. It combines the two approaches, cycling back and forth between them. The facilitator pays careful attention to what is going on in the group and decides which approach will work best at any given moment.
Adam Kahane describes precisely what the facilitator needs to watch for and how to manage the delicate balance between a focus on the collective and a focus on specific stakeholder needs. This book is for anyone who helps people collaborate in any setting. Not only does it offer a way to facilitate breakthroughs, it is a breakthrough in itself."
"International consultant Adam Kahane teaches us how to work with people whom we might not like or trust. He explains how flexibility and improvisation can lead to what he calls 'stretch collaboration.' He outlines the five misunderstandings that keep people from effectively collaborating with 'those people' and shows readers how they can successfully engage with positive results instead.
As our societies have become more complex and globalized and our organizations flatter and less hierarchical, more of us need to collaborate across more organizations, geographies, and cultures than ever before. But this increases the chances that we're going to get stuck having to collaborate with people we don't agree with or like or trust. But we've got no choice. We have to learn to work with people we might actually have come to think of as 'the enemy.'
International consultant Adam Kahane, who has worked in some very fraught contexts in his career (South Africa after apartheid, Guatemala after a civil war), has found that in these low-control, high-conflict situations, everything we think we know about what makes collaboration work is wrong. The neat black-and-white thinking that underlies conventional collaboration-us/them, harmony/conflict, problem/solution-won't work. You need to be more flexible, accept a level of uncertainty and improvisation, and practice what Kahane calls 'stretch collaboration.' In this very timely book he takes on five misunderstandings that keep us from effectively collaborating with 'those people' and tells us what we should do instead."
"This is the first book focused on how to do and use scenario planning - which is one of the most widely used tools in the world for strategic planning, change management, innovation, problem solving, and similar purposes - for social change at the community, national, and global levels. Adam Kahane is one of the world's pioneers and leaders on this topic and he is the author of two bestselling books."
"War and peace are the two main ways that people try to solve our toughest group, community, and societal conflicts. Kahane shows why neither approach works and offers a different, better way - combining love and power - to solve these conflicts."
