How to work with people you don’t agree with

Most of us, given the choice, would rather collaborate with people who think like us. Same instincts, same values, same general view of the world. It's faster, it's smoother, and there's less friction. The trouble is, the problems actually worth solving rarely sit inside a friendly group of like-minded people. They sit at the intersections, where different views, different politics, different traditions and different interests collide.

So how do you work with people you don't agree with, or like, or maybe even trust?

Adam Kahane, who spent years working on intractable conflicts in places like apartheid South Africa, wrote a book on exactly this. It's called Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust. It's a useful read for anyone leading anything that involves more than a handful of people.

His starting point is interesting. The word "collaboration" itself carries two opposite meanings. In one sense it means working with someone to produce something. In the other (think wartime Europe) it means cooperating with the enemy. Both meanings live inside the same word. That tension is built in.

The leadership trap

Most leaders end up stuck in a particular kind of bind. They know they need to work across difference. The big challenges in their organisation, their community, their sector, won't move without it. But they also don't want to compromise their own values, dilute their identity, or end up signing off on something they don't believe in.

So they convince themselves that real collaboration requires unanimity. Everyone aligned. Everyone on the same page. Everyone moving in the same direction. And because that level of agreement isn't realistic with people who genuinely think differently, they quietly stop trying. Or they keep things polite and ineffective. Or they retreat back into their own tribe and call it strategy.

Kahane's argument is that this whole framing is the problem. Collaboration doesn't require everyone to agree. It just requires everyone to keep moving.

Stop trying to engineer harmony

The instinct, when you're sitting in a room with people who don't agree, is to try to engineer your way to a smooth process. Set the agenda tightly. Get the right protocols in place. Define the problem, the solution, and the plan up front. Tidy it. Control it.

In a complex situation with diverse stakeholders, that almost always backfires. The tightness becomes the thing people fight against. The neat process becomes a constraint that nobody trusts. The harmony you're trying to manufacture starts feeling fake to everyone in the room.

The alternative is harder, and counter-intuitive. Welcome the friction. Welcome the trial and error. Treat collaboration as something dynamic and improvised rather than choreographed. Let it be messier than you'd like, because the mess is often where the real progress happens.

Loosen your grip on two things

Kahane points to two specific places where leaders need to let go.

The first is rules. Stop insisting on watertight agreements about what the problem is, what the solution should look like, and how to get there. Try things. Experiment. Replace the language of meetings, minutes and deliverables with the language of gatherings, encounters and conversations. The structures you're used to were built for predictable problems. These aren't predictable problems.

The second is relationships. Stop focusing only on the goals of your own team or tribe. Lean outwards. Spend time with people whose group you don't belong to. Hear their stories. Try to see the issue through their eyes, properly, not as a debating exercise but as genuine listening.

That second one is the harder of the two. It requires staying connected to people you'd find it easier to write off, and being open to the possibility that part of what changes through the collaboration might be you.

The uncomfortable bit

The reason this kind of collaboration is so difficult is that it asks us to do the opposite of what comes naturally. Our instinct, when we don't agree with someone, is to try to change what they think. Kahane's argument is that real collaboration starts when we accept that we might also need to change.

That's not weakness. It's the price of working on things that actually matter with people who actually disagree.

You don't have to like the people. You don't have to trust them in every dimension. You don't have to agree with them. You just have to be willing to keep moving with them, and to let the process change everyone involved, including you.

So who are you currently refusing to collaborate with because they don't think like you, and what could you build with them if you stopped insisting they had to?