Creating the Conditions for Transformative Collaboration
“Collaboration is not about liking each other. It is about co-creating something we cannot create alone.”- Adam Kahane, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People you Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust, 2017
(Adam Kahane, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People you Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust, p. 19)
As Adam illustrates in his decision tree of “Four Ways to Deal with Problematic Situations,” collaboration is only one of several options and it’s not always the right one. It becomes essential when we cannot effect change unilaterally and refuse to accept the status quo. In these moments, collaboration becomes the only path forward, not because it’s easy, but because it’s the only way to move together through complexity.
The kind of collaboration I work to build, whether in grassroots community, multi-stakeholder labs, or organizational healing processes, starts with a hard truth:
We don’t have to agree. We don’t even have to trust each other at first. But we do need to commit to something larger than any one ego. And yes, to some degree both cynicism and willingness can co-exist.
This is the spirit that animates my work at Mending the Chasm, where we root every engagement in four essential pillars: accountability, resourcing, conflict transformation, and social capital. These pillars help us move from performative collaboration to real, relational, and often uncomfortable co-creation.
They also help us navigate the pitfalls of collaboration itself, because not all collaboration is created equal.
When Collaboration is a Conflict Style
The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) outlines five conflict styles: competing, accommodating, avoiding, compromising, and collaborating. The collaborating style, often considered the “ideal”, aims to integrate both parties’ needs for a win-win.
In theory, collaboration sounds perfect. But in practice? It’s complicated.
The Upside of the Collaborating Style:
Encourages depth and creativity in solutions by valuing all voices.
Builds trust over time through mutual investment.
Addresses root causes, not just surface-level symptoms.Strengthens relationships by honoring multiple truths.
But there’s a Shadow Side:
Time-Intensive: Collaboration is slow. In urgency-driven or under-resourced systems, this can feel inefficient.
Power-Oblivious: If power dynamics are unacknowledged, collaboration can mask domination as dialogue.
Emotional Labour Gaps: People most harmed by the issue often carry the emotional burden of making collaboration “work.”
False Equivalence: When every voice is treated as equal without context, the lived experience of those most impacted gets diluted.
Real collaboration doesn’t center equality in voice, it centers equity in impact.
Which is why, in collaborative processes I facilitate, I ask:
Who is directly impacted by the issue we’re discussing?
Whose labour is unpaid, unacknowledged, or assumed?
Who has had to fight just to be in the room?
Who risks the most if this process fails?
Collaboration Without Containers is Just Chaos
You cannot collaborate meaningfully without designing for the human complexity in the room. That’s where Mending the Chasm’s four pillars come in:
1. Accountability: Naming Power, Holding Boundaries
Without accountability, collaboration can quickly become another form of gaslighting, especially for marginalized participants. True collaboration requires safety to speak hard truths and structures to ensure those truths are met with more than silence.
We integrate accountability by:
Providing or co-creating community agreements that guide how we will be in relationship with each other.
Offering or co-creating guidelines like “listen with curiousity and compassion” or “we listen to and prioritize voices with lived experience” helps us all to know the boundaries within which we will do this work together.
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. Boundaries give us the space to do the work of loving ourselves. They might be, actually, the first and fundamental expression of self-love.” - Prentis Hemphill, author, psychotherapist, and Somatics practitioner
Establishing feedback and harm-reporting mechanisms.
In a multi-partner project, we set up anonymous forms and named a trusted contact person so participants could safely share concerns. This made it easier for people to speak up when power imbalances or harm showed up in the group.
Creating supported pathways for rupture and repair.
When a tense moment occurred in a coalition meeting, we paused the process and offered a facilitated conversation for those involved. That space for honesty and repair helped the group rebuild trust and recommit to the work.
Reflection Question: What are the agreements that allow truth to emerge without retaliation?
2. Resourcing: Redistribution is Collaboration
You cannot ask people to collaborate if you are not resourcing their participation. Full stop.
Resourcing means:
Offering collaborative tools and foundational capacity-building.
When facilitating strategic planning or equity, inclusion and belonging action plans, we introduce a set of tools that support collaboration so that teams can have support to understand what phases of collaboration, lenses to look through when considering values, objectives, and impact. One of the tools we use includes this one, from Sam Kaner:
Offering child care, translation, trauma-informed and healing centred supports.
During a community consultation process, we provided on-site child care, language interpretation, and access to a counsellor/support person to support anyone, in a private space, who may be feeling triggered or activated, or need space to debrief afterwards.
Giving enough time for reflection, processing, and thoughtfully responding, especially across power lines.
Rather than pushing for quick decisions, we built in pauses between sessions so participants, especially those navigating power dynamics, had space to reflect and respond with intention.
Reflection: Are we resourcing collaboration and building relational/social capital, or simply extracting unpaid wisdom?
3. Conflict Transformation: From Reaction to Relationship
Collaboration is fertile ground for conflict, and that’s a gift, if we know how to use it.
Informed by Kahane’s work on Power and Love and the TKI’s framing of conflict styles, we help teams recognize their defaults and consciously shift toward generative engagement.
That means:
Learning your conflict style and when it serves, or sabotages trust.
I'm beginning to integrate conflict style reflection into collaborative work by inviting participants to notice how they typically respond to tension and how those responses might affect trust in the group.
Creating shared language and norms around tension.
Before diving into strategy work, we often co-develop phrases like “naming the tension” and “calling in with care” to create a shared way of navigating disagreement.
Integrating somatic/embodied practices in process to support regulation during moments of difference.
During a facilitation, we offer grounding exercises as a part of our container-setting, like deep breathing and feet-on-the-floor to help participants stay present in the discomfort.
Reflection: What’s your default conflict style under pressure? What would choosing “collaborating” require of you, not just intellectually, but relationally?
4. Social Capital: The Invisible Infrastructure of Trust
Zaid Hassan, writes that effective social labs are rooted in trust-building:
“Successful social labs bring together diverse groups of stakeholders—people who are part of the system and who have a stake in the problem—and create spaces where they can experiment together over time. These teams need to be diverse not just in identity or professional background, but in perspective and lived experience. It’s through this sustained and inclusive collaboration that trust is built, relationships deepen, and truly innovative solutions emerge. There are no silver bullets—only the long, patient work of building the social fabric that can hold complexity.”
But none of this works without trust, and trust isn’t built only during meetings. It’s also built in between them.
Relational trust is built through:
Sharing meals, not just agendas.
At a multi-sector collaborative that I worked on, we would provide healthy and delicious meals as a part of our meeting process. It helped create social opportunities for connection before the formal agenda began.
Listening deeply before debating fiercely.
We open each gathering, whether it is a board meeting or a facilitation, with a reflective listening practice (opening reflection) so that we hold space for every voice.
Inviting personal storytelling alongside professional roles.
At the beginning of a collaborative process, each person shares a story about what brought them to the work, not just their title, helping to humanize the group and deepen connection and purpose beyond roles.
Reflection: What would shift if we saw relationships as part of the deliverable, not just the backdrop?
What Makes Collaboration Possible
Over the years, I’ve learned that collaboration isn’t just about shared goals, it’s about shared commitment to the conditions that make trust, repair, and courage possible. These aren’t nice-to-haves. They are the ground we build on.
Acknowledge power—not pretend we’re all “equal at the table.”
Resource participation—including the emotional, cultural, and spiritual labour.
Embrace conflict transformation—not just “keep things civil.”
Center those most impacted—not tokenize them for appearances.
When these conditions are met, I’ve seen miracles unfold:
Movements align across what feels like impossible differences.
Healing starts to unfold in containers that previously felt
Policy shifts emerge from grassroots truths.
Coalitions hold through rupture because the trust is real.
Final Thought
If you are in a position of influence, whether you’re leading a team, funding a program, or coordinating a coalition, I invite you to ask:
What are the conditions we need to make collaboration real, not performative?
Because real collaboration is less about harmony and more about intentional and inclusive design process.
Less about agreement and more about accountable relationships.
Less about optics and more about organizing love and power in equal measure.
Reflection Questions to Take Into Your Work:
What assumptions do I hold about collaboration that might no longer serve our work?
Who has been centered in our collaborative spaces. And who has been sidelined?
What would it take to move our team from “conflict avoidance” to “conflict transformation”?Am I using my power to invite more voices in or to keep control? And am I making space for people whose views are like mine, or more diverse?
What resources need to be redistributed for collaboration to be truly equitable?
Let’s build collaborations that can hold truth, conflict, and transformation, not just assumed consensus that comes from participant silence.
If your team, coalition, or organization is navigating difference, complexity, or repair, I’d love to support you in building collaborative conditions that don’t replicate harm, but transform it. Reach out at leena@mendingthechasm.ca