Dialogue Recording and Synthesis. The Reluctant Collaborator: Finding Common Ground in Uncommon Times

A Conversation on the Complexity of Working Together

Watch the recording on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/llfqB4dSMSc

Last week’s conversation between Kirsten Dunlop (CEO of Climate Kick), Adam Kahane (Reos Partners, author of “Collaborating with the Enemy”), and Fabian Pfortmüller (Together Institute) explored the nature, possibilities, and complexities of collaboration, particularly in challenging contexts where there may be reluctance, power imbalances, or differing agendas.

Kirsten framed the conversation as “a live experiment in collaborating online, in a conversation together about collaboration.”

Defining Collaboration: The Essence and Challenges

Asked about the essence of collaboration, Adam emphasised his tendency to return to (the 1984 Concise Oxford) dictionary definition to avoid overcomplicating:

“The dictionary definition of collaboration is to work jointly with… I don’t need to add self-transformation and system transformation and and and …. I’m always trying to get down to the essence.”

He noted, however, the dual meaning in many languages:

“The word ‘collaboration’ also means to betray. And that double meaning is not an accident. It gets to the difficulty. Collaborating across difference always runs the risk of requiring me to betray something important to me, that would require me to compromise”

Fabian added a different dimension to measuring successful collaboration:

“How do you measure success of relationships? To what degree am I being changed?”

He also explained why he shifted from calling himself a “community builder” to a “community weaver”:

“I realised that communities, and maybe even collaborations, are not something that can be built—it uses a mechanical engineering metaphor. Instead, I realised I had to change my own mindset to acknowledge I was working with a living, breathing organism. It’s not a machine. It’s a flock of birds.”

Entanglement and Meaning-Making

Kirsten expanded the conversation to explore how collaboration connects to questions of identity and meaning:

“The relationship that perpetually fluid, perpetually mutually adjusting relationship between identity, one’s identity, and the context, whether the one is individual, familial, community, national, organisational, business and the changing context, for me, is the essence of meaning. Meaning is the exchange, is the weaving together of those two things.”

She explained her interest in quantum thinking precisely because it provides a framework for understanding these relationships:

“I am so deeply interested in quantum thinking and quantum philosophy precisely for this notion of entanglement that we begin to have a language to name the state changes that happen in a dynamic relationship on both sides.”

She further introduced a “negative space” perspective, drawing from cultural history and architecture:

“If you study sculpture, you never look only at the form of the sculpture. You look also at the form of the spaces created by where there is air around it. So, if you study cities, especially medieval Renaissance cities, you don’t just look at what the buildings are. You look at how they have created negative space, public space, because it’s often the largest single investment that they make.”

This approach to collaboration focuses not just on the visible connections but on the spaces and possibilities created between different actors.

Stories of Collaboration in Action

Adam shared his formative experience with the Mont Fleur scenario exercise in South Africa in 1991, during the transition from apartheid to democracy:

“What was remarkable about that exercise is that it included a few academics, but not many, but mostly leaders of different parts of South African society—politicians from the left and right, opposition and establishment, men and women, businesspeople, trade unionists, community leaders, entrepreneurs… This was the first time I had ever encountered what we now call a multi-stakeholder leadership group.”

He was amazed that people who had been in prison or exile, who had real reasons to hate and fear each other, “were able to work together very constructively and creatively and with a lot of joking around.” The key insight:

“It is possible for people that don’t agree with or like or trust each other, including people who see each other as enemies, to get stuff done together in all of their disagreements… It didn’t happen through them agreeing on things, but it came from them having the experience of working together.”

Fabian shared how his Sandbox community evolved over 18 years:

“We didn’t see real collaboration the first few years. But now, with being able to zoom out over 18 years, an enormous amount of collaboration has happened… For a while one of my success metrics became how many weddings, I was invited to that were both Sandboxers, and I can proudly say I’ve been to five of those weddings.”

He observed that collaboration emerges when multiple factors align:

“They had to have time, they had to be interested in the same thing, they had to have the same risk appetite, the same values, be in a similar stage of life … it’s “very, very hard to predict.”

He also highlighted a crucial insight about leadership and collaboration:

“A core lesson that I learned with Sandbox was that if you bring change leaders together, it is actually quite hard to get them to collaborate, because, by definition, leaders very often have their own project or their own projects that they’re bringing in. That’s why often when they are invited and we expect them to collaborate, do we mean we hope they are to collaborate on their existing projects, or are we expecting them to start something new?”

His solution was to “make sure that people could truly just bring whatever their personal interest, their agendas was, and allow them to gently, slowly align them over time,” highlighting the patience and non-directive approach needed.

The Myth of “From Me to We”

Adam highlighted what he sees as a common misconception in collaboration theory which is that the “challenge” of collaboration is to move from “me to we,” saying:

“I think this is completely incorrect. It’s unrealistic. It will almost never happen. And if that’s what you expect to happen, you will be disappointed and frustrated and give up. Collaboration is always about multiple wholes. People always have their own projects or ambitions or organisations or things they’re trying to do in their life or in the world. That’s not an incidental thing, that’s 100% of the time, and they’ll almost never abandon those.”

He offered a marriage metaphor to illustrate: “I hope that you will become one, and that you will become properly two. I was gently advising him not to imagine that marrying means we lose our separate selves.”

Kirsten agreed, describing the “T-shaped” model of collaboration that the Systemic Climate Action Collaborative follows:

“The essence of learning how to work together with others is to work that relationship between what you know, what you inquire, what is meaningful, and the glimpses of possibility and of becoming a larger self, which is not the same as becoming a we, but becoming a larger collection of selves because of your entanglement with the work of others.”

She elaborated on her concept of “space forms” as an alternative to traditional platforms:

“So much of the work that I have done for years with my partner who leads Cora Foundation, Luca Gotti, is on the idea of, let’s not talk about platforms where you flow a thing across and transect through it, but of space forms, forms of space and spaciousness that allow for this positive and negative charge, that allow for this entanglement to take place and continuously reconfigure.”

The Tension Between Fluidity and Structure

Kirsten observed an interesting tension between structure and fluidity in their collaborative work, noting that different contexts demand different balances between the two:

“What I find fascinating about the work that we are doing in the collaborative right now is exactly this point where you feel a social system as a codification of social practice, not a living system, but a social system that starts to ossify. You know, in our case, we’ve just taken on money and we’ve started to distribute it, and you can feel this sort of slight ossification around ‘how do we bring on new partners’ and that little bit of ossification around ‘well, now we’ll need to really carefully codify that and work out what the agreements are.'”

She reflected on how this tension represents a fundamental human dynamic:

“I often wonder whether one of the things we need to keep coming back to is the DNA stranding of difference between nomadic and settled peoples, because that fundamental stranding keeps us oscillating between the desire to kind of lock, own, categorise, and the desire to be fluid.”

Adam responded with an important qualification:

“I would just put a question mark beside the idea of ossification being a bad thing. It’s a habit. Yeah, but I guess we need fluidity, and we need our bones and our solidity. So, they’re both required.”

He noted that his own thinking had evolved on this point:

“It’s the big change in the new edition of collaborating with the enemy is to realise that what I wrote off as conventional collaboration in the first edition is actually a very helpful way of working in certain contexts.”

Collaboration in Today’s Context

Kirsten surfaced a question about the current global context and the paradoxical nature of collaboration at this time asking whether and how this context changes, the way we collaborate, why, with whom and how we collaborate. Adam suggested that to say we are in favour of collaboration might be a ‘nonsensical statement,’ highlighting that we are often collaborating with some against still others. He noted

“Collaborating is becoming increasingly important and increasingly difficult… It’s an irresistible force and an immovable object. There’s really a crisis, because we need to work together more, and I think there’s many signs that we have less capacity to do so.”

Fabian wondered if growing urgency might change how we collaborate:

“I wonder if, as we are starting to sense a higher urgency, that we’re becoming more willing to collaborate, that we’re becoming more willing to actually align our priorities beyond our individual agendas.”

Adam responded, highlighting

“When I was a shallow university student, I was very good at reading the back of the back cover of books and having enough to carry on at a party, and so I haven’t read Machiavelli’s the prince, but I did read it back cover of an excellent edition. And what stood out in my mind is this particular translator said that you won’t go wrong betting on power or on self-interest. So Fabian, I would just, in my opinion, in my experience, you’ll never go wrong betting on own agendas. And the idea that people would leave their agendas at the door to me is a, I mean, their agenda might change or evolve, or they might review it or see it in different way. But the idea of leaving one’s agenda at the door to me is a is a non-starter…”

Participant Perspectives: Power, Reciprocity, and Cultural Context

As the conversation opened to participants, several crucial dimensions emerged.

Samantha Waki raised questions about shared values and cultural context, highlighting Western cultural assumptions:

“One of the things I’ve noticed is we don’t have shared values anymore in the same way that we used to in the past. And a lot of our shared values came from shared religion, and that’s non-existent. … There’s a whole westernised context that is used a lot in these spaces… If you’re doing it in my part of the world, you’ll lock out a large number of people.”

When asked about the essence of collaboration from her perspective, she offered:

“We have wisdom that we’ve always had, ancient wisdom, indigenous wisdom. And how can we get us all back to the place where we are reading from the same page, which is that foundational wisdom?”

Mille Bojer brought attention to power dynamics:

“We’re talking a lot about the different perspectives and different points of view and divergent interests, but we’re not talking that much about the different power levels that are involved in the collaboration. … Fluidity is very comfortable for the people with most power in a certain group… I know that the people who most need the structure are the people who are not the most privileged on the team. We’ve gotten away in the past with the definition of collaboration being ‘you collaborate with me,’ for the people with most power, and that’s not going down any longer.”

Gerry Salole introduced the concept of reciprocity:

“I believe a lot in the power of reciprocity; it guides practically everything. It’s one thing to collaborate with the enemy if you are agreeing to a set of reciprocal responsibilities… It’s quite different if the people you are trying to negotiate with or with collaborate don’t share any sense of reciprocity with you.”

Adam acknowledged these challenges, particularly relating to power:

“Collaboration is most straightforward when there is not too big of a power differential. If I can get what I want without collaborating with you, and anyhow, I don’t really want to collaborate with you, then I won’t, or it’ll be a sham, a pretend collaboration.”

But he highlighted the original question:

“If you don’t have [power], what do you do then?” He shared an insight from Juan Manuel Santos, former president of Colombia, who valued their collaboration work because “this is the first time I realised that it is possible to collaborate with people you do not agree with and will never agree with.”

Kirsten added a fresh perspective on power itself:

“If we pay a lot of attention to symbiosis in nature, how do our discourses about power hold the relationship between insects and elephants symbiotic relationships? How would you define power in that? Because you could easily type yourself fast into assuming that the bigger, larger animal that can squash anything is more powerful.”

She suggested

“We might be limiting the space in which we can act together with others by hanging on to something that we are using as a shorthand to describe inequalities, but not necessarily looking for what’s the whole that’s bigger outside the edges.”

Melody Song added a perspective from Daoism:

“Daoism talks about not fighting and forcing collaboration but to listen to the nature of ways. In terms of collaboration, this means working with others in a way that is natural and unforced, allowing the group to find its own rhythm and flow without unnecessary conflict or competition. In a way, collaboration also not just about the actors and collaborators it’s also about the ‘nature of ways’.”

Practical Approaches and Methods

Adam shared a simple but powerful technique:

“Years ago, somebody taught me a method for a paired walk… At a certain point, say, ‘We’ve been talking for several days or hours. We have lunch in 45 minutes. I just invite you to look around the room, find the person most different from you and go for a walk. … People almost always say this was the best part of a workshop and explained why: “You are meeting first as fellow human beings, and then maybe as a result of that, you will change your relationship or your action or your thoughts at least a little bit.”

Kirsten described her organisation’s principle:

“‘Where there’s a way, there’s a will’—an inversion of the usual phrase. A lot of our work is about creating the mechanics of working in fundamentally different structural ways, so that people discover that that’s possible. And when the rails of the system are in, they start using them.”

She wondered about “proxies” that could create collaborative experiences without requiring ideological buy-in:

“What are the proxies that we could put in place—experience proxies, method proxies, process proxies—that have people doing a thing or tapping into a thing without necessarily buying into any of the ideology of it?”

Drawing Lines: When to Collaborate, When to Stop

Kirsten raised a challenging question about boundaries: “When would you stop? When would you say enough?”

“I don’t think the choice to collaborate is a once-off choice. I think in practice, we can and do move between collaborating and forcing, adapting, and exiting, what I call the other three alternatives, often… We don’t collaborate when we think it’s not worthwhile, not helping us get where we’re trying to go  … I think the biggest obstacle is the idea that there is a red line, that there’s black and white, there’s friends with enemies… I think a more helpful idea is not that it’s black and white, but that it is a large grey area, and the challenge we have is to navigate in this large grey area.” (Adam)

Kirsten summarised what both Fabian and Adam had said, in different ways, reflecting that

“When we start to define an intention of collaboration or a practice of collaborating, you are defining it in relationship to something that you’re not collaborating with, which in some ways is the flip side of that you are always in collaboration with something. You are always in an entangled relationship with something. It’s a question of how you draw that boundary around what your intention is and what and who’s involved in it.”

Beyond Words: The Embodied Experience of Collaboration

Kirsten closed with a reflection on the physical, embodied aspect of collaboration:

“One of the most powerful experiences I have had was working with a remarkable woman in Australia who trains actors, getting a group of people who had never worked together and never known of one another come and hum—hum, as in loud, had different tones—touching their heads to one another. And I’m talking 30 people, and there is a completely extraordinary shift in a sense of connectedness. … There’s a somatics in this, not just a cognitive element, and understanding the chemical signals, the somatics, the physical nature of the way in which this creates a whole bigger than the sum of the parts.”

Closing Reflections

As the conversation drew to a close, Kirsten thanked the speakers for “an absolutely mind-stretching conversation I need to go and reflect upon.”

The dialogue revealed collaboration as a complex, messy, and necessary practice that requires navigating individual agendas, power dynamics, and cultural differences. Rather than a simple process of “coming together,” effective collaboration demands honouring distinct identities while finding ways to work jointly toward shared purposes—and sometimes, simply experiencing our shared humanity first.

Key Questions for Further Exploration

• Power and Structure: How do we build collaborative structures that acknowledge power differentials while allowing for both the necessary structure for less privileged participants and the fluidity for creative emergence?
• Beyond Cultural Assumptions: How might indigenous wisdom traditions and non-Western perspectives on interdependence provide alternative frameworks for collaboration that don’t depend on shared Western values?
• Experiential Pathways: What proxies or embodied experiences can create collaborative breakthroughs without requiring ideological alignment first?
• Boundaries and Reciprocity: When is collaboration appropriate despite differences, and when does the absence of reciprocity or shared values make it unproductive or unethical?
• Identity and Wholeness: How do we honour both distinct identities and collective purposes, creating “larger collections of selves” rather than expecting individuals to subsume their interests?
• Urgency and Time: How might the increasing urgency of global challenges transform our collaboration capacities, while honouring that authentic collaboration often requires extended time to develop?
• Nature’s Models: What can symbiotic relationships in natural systems teach us about collaboration across power differentials and apparent incompatibilities?

See more about the Systemic Climate Action Collaborative here.

See the the blog for more on their work and the substack Entangled Together.

See this opportunity to engage further with Adam Kahane Everyday Habits for System Transformers.