Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust: Summary & Key Insights

Most of us have been taught that collaboration is a matter of alignment: you gather stakeholders, find common ground, and reach agreement. This works when the problem is simple, when interests and values converge, and when control is possible. But in contexts of deep polarization and complexity, that model breaks down. In such situations, waiting for agreement only ensures paralysis.

In my work with teams across nations and sectors, I realized that conventional collaboration assumes too much coherence. It asks us to suppress disagreement for the sake of progress. But disagreement, I discovered, is not the obstacle—it’s the raw material. Adaptive collaboration begins by acknowledging differences and uncertainty. It replaces ‘agreement first’ with ‘engagement first.’ Instead of focusing on consensus, we focus on understanding each other enough to move forward together despite friction.

This demands a new mindset. You must let go of the idea that collaboration is about control. It’s about connection amid tension. Adaptive collaboration works through dialogue, experimentation, and shared action; it thrives precisely because participants bring distinct perspectives. It feels messy—and that’s by design, because complexity cannot be managed through neat alignment. The very discomfort of difference becomes the energy that propels transformation.

Everywhere I traveled—South Africa after apartheid, Guatemala after civil war, corporate tables where unions and CEOs barely spoke—I found the same pattern: polarization makes people withdraw. One side sees itself as righteous and the other as misguided, malicious, or ignorant. Collaboration seems impossible because the psychological distance is immense.

But polarization, though painful, is not the end of conversation—it is the starting point. When we resist that instinct to retreat, we begin to recognize that both sides usually want the same underlying thing: safety, recognition, and agency. Yet each defines those differently. My role as a facilitator was never to erase those differences but to create conditions where they could be expressed safely, where each person could remain fully themselves while still contributing.

I learned that polarization is fueled by stories—stories that tell us who belongs and who doesn’t. To collaborate across such divides, we need to hear those stories in full. Listening does not mean agreement; it means willing exposure to perspectives that threaten your certainty. Through genuine listening, the field begins to shift. People stop defending positions and start noticing patterns. That’s when a shared future becomes possible.

Polarization can be reframed as an invitation to stretch—to see the world not as black and white but as a complex web of interdependence. True progress requires us to stand in that complexity and work with it, not against it.