We’re excited to share an excerpt from Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems by Adam Kahane, one of the world’s leading voices on navigating complex change. Adam is the author of several influential books—including the bestselling Collaborating with the Enemy—that offer practical guidance for people working to tackle deep systemic challenges in their organizations, communities, and societies.
In Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems, Adam builds on decades of experience facilitating change processes around the globe. He offers a fresh perspective on how transformation happens—not through grand strategies or heroic leadership, but through small, intentional shifts in how we show up every day. Grounded in real-world stories and deeply human insights, this book is a powerful guide for anyone seeking to make a difference in the systems they’re part of.
Below is an excerpt that captures the essence of Adam’s approach: practical, grounded, and full of hope.
INTRODUCTION
TRANSFORMING SYSTEMS REQUIRES RADICAL ENGAGEMENT
How can we contribute to transforming the systems we are part of? I’d spent thirty years doing this, so thought I knew the answer to this question. But three thirty-minute conversations, on September 16, September 28, and October 7, 2021, revealed that I didn’t.
DISCOVERING THAT I DIDN’T KNOW
My colleagues and I help teams from across a given system—be it an organization, sector, community, or country—work together to transform that system. We facilitate processes through which civil society, government, and business leaders collaborate, over months and years, to implement solutions to complex problems related to food, education, health, energy, climate, security, justice, peace, and democracy. I had just published my fifth book about this work, Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together, and had the idea of publicizing it by conducting brief live online interviews with famous “facilitators.”
So I reached out to three people I knew who had played significant roles in important transformations: Trevor Manuel, a South African activist and later politician involved in the extraordinary transition from apartheid to democracy; Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat and later United Nations official who led the negotiation of the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change; and Juan Manuel Santos, a Colombian journalist and later president who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending his country’s long civil war.
I was nervous because I had never conducted public interviews like these, but confident that I knew my stuff.
The interviews didn’t go as I’d expected.
I thought we’d talk about things I was expert in, but we didn’t. I discovered that although I did know something about systems transformation, it was as a sometime supporter and observer from the outside. I didn’t know much about what it takes to do this work, day in and day out, from the inside. I realized that there is something vitally important in the everyday work of transforming systems that I and others—not only top leaders like these three but all of us at all levels who want to contribute to creating a better world—need to understand.
This realization led me on a journey that has produced, after many twists and turns, the book you are reading now, and the way of understanding systems transformation that I will summarize in this introduction.
AN EMBLEMATIC EXAMPLE OF SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATION
When scholars make lists of historic systems transformations, they always put near the top the transition in South Africa from brutal settler colonialism and racist apartheid (a system that worked much better for White than Black people) to liberal, nonracial democracy. Many people, in many places, over many decades, through many battles, employing many strategies— mass movements, boycott and divestment, parliamentary opposition, diplomatic pressure, armed resistance, moral argumentation—together effected this change.
(I am starting this book with the extraordinary South African example because it illustrates many key characteristics of systems transformation and because it provides the background to my first interview, with Trevor Manuel, which I recount in the next section. If you already know this background, you can skip ahead now.)
The South African story is a powerful tale of the transformation of a system away from fragmentation, oppression, and inequity, toward connection (across racial, ethnic, and national divides), agency (of every person, Black as well as White), and justice (overcoming colonial and apartheid injustices). But it is not a fairy tale in which everything changed and everyone lived happily ever after. Some of the fundamental structures of South Africa have changed: there are new institutions, infrastructures, and ideas, and everyone now has equal political and legal rights. And some of the fundamental structures have not changed: many of the old institutions, infrastructures, and ideas are still there, and the degree of social and economic inequality are still the highest in the world.
Real-world transformation always includes victories, defeats, surprises, compromises, reversals, and unfinished business. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “no straight thing was ever made.”2 Transformation can be wonderful and joyful— but, as you will hear me say many times in this book, it is never easy or straightforward.
AN EXEMPLARY SYSTEMS TRANSFORMER
One of the people central to the South African transition was Trevor Manuel, whom I first met in September 1991 when I was thirty years old and he was thirty-five. Journalist Alex Perry describes how Manuel had begun his activism:
Under the apartheid racial-classification system, he was considered “colored,” or mixed race, and thus confined to a home in the Cape Flats, the hot, treeless townships between breezy Table Mountain and leafy Stellenbosch. As a 5-year-old, he witnessed apartheid’s bite when his classmates were divided by color. “Suddenly half the kids in my class at school were no longer there,” he says. “And so politics came to me.” In the 1970s, Manuel gravitated towards Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement. But in 1979, determined to become “a revolutionary with a big beard and a big gun,” he traveled to Botswana to join the African National Congress guerrillas in exile. To his disappointment, the ANC sent him back to work in Cape Town. He quickly became a key figure in the city’s opposition and by 1985 he was in jail. Regular detentions followed. During one release, Manuel, who had married, met his toddler son for the first time.
In 1991, after the African National Congress (ANC) was legalized, Manuel was appointed head of its Department of Economic Planning; in 1994, when the ANC won the first national democratic election, he entered parliament and served twenty years in the cabinet of President Nelson Mandela and his successors (thirteen years as the country’s first Black Minister of Finance, overseeing a period of sustained economic growth); and after he retired from politics in 2014, he became the chair of the country’s biggest insurance company. So for decades he has been a prominent and popular player in the transformation of South Africa.
I got to know Manuel when I was facilitating the first of four weekend workshops at the small Mont Fleur (Flower Mountain) conference center in the beautiful wine country east of Cape Town. In these meetings, he and twenty-seven other leaders from across South African society—Black and White, women and men, from the opposition and the establishment, left and right—energetically hammered out a set of four scenarios of possible futures for their country, as a way to figure out how to get to democracy.4 They chose to participate in the meetings because they knew that, with the release of Mandela from prison and the legalization of the opposition parties, they had a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the future.
From across their diverse positions, this team of leaders wrestled with the basic questions that are crucial for any transformation: What in this system is working and not, and for whom? What must and can be changed? The conclusion of their intense arguments was that if South Africans could avoid several particular political and economic risks (failing to negotiate a settlement, constraining the capacity of a new democratic government, ignoring fiscal constraints), then they could start to build a democracy. And South Africans did avoid these risks and did, in April 1994, start to build a democracy.
The Mont Fleur project contributed to the transformation of South Africa, in part by helping Manuel and others deepen both their understanding of and their relationships across this fractured system. Beyond this it came to exemplify, within the country and beyond, the wonderful possibility of diverse people working together to transform a system so that it works better for more people.
During the time I was facilitating the Mont Fleur project, I was working for Shell, the international energy company, as leader of the London head-office team that studied global political, economic, social, technological, and environmental futures. The project organizers had asked Shell to lend me to the project because of my methodological expertise. The team noticed the incongruity of a Canadian corporate expert facilitating a group of mostly leftist South African leaders; Manuel joked about this when he introduced me to the team as “a representative of International Capital.” But they could tell that my intention was to support them in making their own assessment of possible futures for the country rather than to impose my own. Howard Gabriels, a former official of the socialist National Union of Mineworkers, later told me: “When we first met you, we couldn’t believe that anyone could be so naïve: we were certain that you were trying to manipulate us. But when we realized that you actually didn’t know anything, we decided to trust you.”
Working with this team was my first experience of engaging with people who were trying not just to do well within a given system but to transform it, and it upended my career and life. By the end of the project, I had resigned from Shell, emigrated to South Africa, and taken up a vocation of supporting such system transformers.
Many of the members of the Mont Fleur team had devoted their lives to “the struggle” against apartheid. Some had been in prison or in exile or underground; all had done difficult and conflictual work. Among the members of this remarkable group, Manuel struck me as especially charismatic, moving constantly around the room, engaging in friendly banter with everyone, encouraging them to work together across their differences. I connected with him personally because Dorothy Boesak, the project coordinator whom I met during the workshops (and later married), knew him as “a nice young man,” and it was Manuel who mischievously announced to the team that she and I had become romantically involved.
At that time and over the decades that followed, Manuel was at the center of the country’s debates about policies to enable Black people to move from the margins of the economy to the center. He was generous but measured in his assessment of the impact of Mont Fleur on the decisions of the ANC government. When two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology interviewed him in 2000, he reflected: “It’s not a straight line. It meanders through, but there’s a fair amount in all of it going back to Mont Fleur that we were able draw through. I could close my eyes and give the scenarios to you just like this. I’ve internalized them and if you have internalized certain things then you probably carry it for life.”
Manuel knows firsthand what it takes to transform systems. He summarized the whole period of transformation and what it required of the people involved: “You see, there was the degree of flux. That was a real strength. There was no paradigm, there was no precedent, there was nothing. We had to carve it, and so perhaps we were more willing to listen. . . . What you need to equip people with is a set of skills which allows them to ask questions: to actively engage in their everyday lives. If you can crack that, you will have cracked it.”6 He understands that when people are working with a system that is in flux and ripe for transformation, listening and asking questions are vitally important.
THE EVERYDAY WORK OF TRANSFORMING SYSTEMS
When I contacted Manuel in 2021 to ask to interview him, he accepted graciously. But after a warm start, our interaction became testy as I kept interrupting him to try to get him to affirm the model of transformative facilitation that I had written about in Facilitating Breakthrough, and he kept trying to get across to me his very different understanding. He explained what he had done to build consensus in support of the transition in terms of days and days of tough meetings with many diverse groups of people, working to find a way forward together:
What we needed to do was to persuade a diversity of institutions and views. In one morning I would be with a group of business leaders in an affluent area, and in the afternoon at the university campus with some very radical students, and in the evening in a very poor community.
We needed to persuade everybody that the struggle needed to find a conclusion. Bear in mind that there were very deep and gaping scars then, still: many of us had been to prison, many had been in exile, many had lost friends and associates. All that we and I could do was to try and persuade people that we had one shot at this, and that persuasion created the basis for the absence of significant resistance.
That was kind of the day job; the night job was to work with other groupings in the African National Congress to try and define what the shape and form of South Africa would be.
Then he described his later work as minister of finance, also in terms of finding a way forward that made sense to many groups with different perspectives and interests:
The minister of finance gets this one big shot a year, which is when you table the budget proposals. I would speak to four hundred members of Parliament who have to vote these proposals into law. And you’re also speaking to traders sitting on trading floors around the world, who are judging what you’re doing. Then you have a constituency of people—and I’ve always taken the view of my mother, who was a pensioner (sometimes she would be in the gallery at Parliament and other times with others at home)—whom I needed to satisfy about the decisions I was taking. Also trade unions, who have a vested interest in this as well, and they have voice. So whilst we had the ability to present the budget in highfalutin economic language, it was also important that we communicated with people.
So you take all of these constituents and you need to be conscious of them, and your strength and the consensus that you can arrive at is through speaking to all of those.
Then he told me a story that I thought was off topic:
A few years ago, I was in discussion with an academic who said that he was in awe of my ability to engage and arrive at conclusions and not feel threatened by other people. So we had a long discussion about this, and he said to me that in his life as an academic from the time he gone to graduate school, he was on his own, either in the library or at a desk working on his dissertation. And then when he graduated with a master’s degree, he needed to do a PhD, and that was even longer, but it was entirely isolated, and the ethos of that kind of academic is to produce for yourself.
But we in the anti-apartheid movement came from an environment where it was not competitive: our thoughts needed to be developed collaboratively so that we could get other people to come along.
Only later did I grasp that this story was very much on topic— that Manuel was trying to explain that transformation doesn’t happen the way I thought it did.
As soon as the live interview was over, I got messages from Dorothy and my colleagues telling me that in pressing Manuel to agree with my thinking about what it takes to effect transformation I had been a terrible interviewer and shouldn’t quit my day job.
I was mortified, and also perplexed.
I was used to thinking about systems transformation in terms of exceptional, compressed, high-level, elegant, heroic, macro efforts. But Manuel had spoken in terms of everyday, extended, on-the-ground, messy, collective, micro conversations. I realized that systems transformation looks different to a peripheral observer and facilitator like me as compared to a central protagonist like him.
This is when I started to wonder about everyday habits for transforming systems, and to realize that I needed to write this book—not only for others but for myself.
METAPHORS FOR TRANSFORMING SYSTEMS: CARVING, WEAVING, SAILING
In the weeks after this conversation with Manuel, I talked with Christiana Figueres and then Juan Manuel Santos. (I recount these latter two interviews later in this book.) I came away from this set of encounters energized and intrigued.
Through the high-profile roles these three leaders have played over decades— activist, politician, businessperson, diplomat, negotiator, warrior, thought leader, elder— they have contributed, as significantly as any people I know of, to transforming big, important systems. (These transformations were, as always, incomplete and imperfect, and all three have their critics.) Even in their most powerful roles, however, they were not able to force the systems to be the way they wanted, so they had to engage with others, including their opponents, to shape the way the systems have continued to evolve.
But I wasn’t yet able to make out from their stories a pattern in what they had been doing, day-to-day, that had enabled them to achieve what they had and that might be instructive for other people working on systems transformation in their own contexts.
I began to think back about what I had seen over the years of working with system transformers: not about the macro processes that I had been paying attention to but about these individuals’ micro actions, which I had been ignoring.
I saw a clue in the metaphors that my three interviewees had used. Manuel spoke about “carving,” which I understood to mean working with our hands, creatively, to bring into being something new—carving is not the same as assembling. Figueres spoke about “weaving,” meaning bringing together diverse contributions to make something jointly owned and beautiful—not the same as manufacturing. And Santos spoke about “sailing,” meaning working with forces beyond our control to get where we want to go—not the same as steamrolling.
These three images all hinted that transforming a system involves a craft of working intentionally and intimately with the natural material of the system (including the people who are part of it), not to impose on it but to bring out its potential.
To make sense of the everyday actions of systems transformers, I realized that I first needed to answer a basic question: How are systems transformed? And I started on this by answering the opposite question: How are systems not transformed?
HOW SYSTEMS ARE NOT TRANSFORMED
A system tends to keep doing what it’s doing; that’s what it’s for. It can be transformed so that it does something different if and only if enough people want to transform it, have the power to transform it, understand how to do so, and are willing and able to act on that understanding.
A system is not transformed if most people think that what it’s doing is fine—that as far as they’re concerned, it doesn’t need to be transformed.
A system is not transformed if most people think it’s doing terribly but that there’s nothing they can realistically do to change it—that they have no option other than to live with the system as it is or adjust it so that it works a little less terribly.
And a system is not transformed if most people don’t understand that it’s a system—a set of elements that is structured such that it keeps doing what it does—and so don’t understand how to change what it’s doing.
HOW SYSTEMS ARE TRANSFORMED
The first thing we need to understand is that we live in systems that we have created and can recreate. Journalist Naomi Klein says,
We should stop treating a great many human-made systems—like monarchies and supreme courts and borders and billionaires—as immutable and unchangeable. Because everything some humans created can be changed by other humans. And if our present systems threaten life to its very core, and they do, then they must be changed.
A system can sometimes be changed by a few people with power forcing it to change. But such transformations are usually degenerative: they produce more fragmentation, oppression, and inequity—and therefore usually don’t last. This book is about how to transform systems generatively and sustainably: to produce more connection, agency, and justice.
Systems are transformed generatively not by one person or team taking one big transformative action but rather by many people taking many small actions, separately and together, for many reasons. So this book is addressed not to people who are in control of a system (few of us ever are) but to all of us who are part of a system and want to contribute to changing it.
Many aspects of many systems are working terribly and need to be transformed, but many other aspects are working well and so need to be protected and maintained. Systems are therefore transformed generatively not through general or black-andwhite actions (“Change everything!”) but rather through specific and nuanced actions that address what, why, and when to transform, by who and for whom, and how.
Systems include some people and exclude others. They benefit and empower some people more than others, whether these elites are constructed along the lines of caste, class, color, rank, race, ethnicity, education, ability, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, country of origin, or other characteristics. Generative systems transformation that increases justice by changing who gets what can be wonderful and joyful, but the process is never serene, straightforward, or safe; it is always disruptive and difficult and often dangerous. (And remember: the status quo is also difficult and dangerous for those people whom the system is currently not benefiting.)
In summary, generative systems transformation is not routine, controlled, predictable, simple, linear, quick, calm, or easy; it is contextual, responsive, surprising, complex, emergent, cumulative, rough, and challenging—like the dynamics of life and death on an African savanna among elands, lions, vultures, trees, dung beetles, and others.
THERE IS A CRACK IN EVERYTHING
So how can systems be transformed generatively? Poet Leonard Cohen offers another metaphorical clue in his song “Anthem” when he says that illumination and possibility arise through “cracks.”
Systems might appear to be solid, but they aren’t. Cracks are places in a system where things are shifting—breakdowns and bright spots—and creating openings for something new to emerge, like cracks in the earth out of which plants can grow. (I’ll be developing this point further in the chapter on Habit 4.)
We transform systems generatively by feeling our way forward—step by step, sensitively, imperfectly, through trial and error—to discover, open up, and move through cracks. Feeling our way forward means working intentionally, fully present, and hands-on with a system that is in the process of changing—we’re not just forcing change.
Contrary to what people will try to tell you or sell you, there is no universal recipe for transforming systems, so this book doesn’t provide one. There is no one right thing—be it politics or community or entrepreneurialism or change management or self-development—that everyone must do. There is no silver bullet, master plan, sure bet, shortcut, or easy victory. And there is no guarantee that what we do will have the impact we intend.
The best we can do, then, is to pay attention and make a next move that we think will enable us to advance, a move that f its with the particularities of our capacity and context: who we are, in relationship with whom, with what influence, where, and when. Then we step back, observe our impact, and make another move.
Entrepreneur Charly Clermont uses the analogy of prospecting for gold to describe his decades of efforts to create a better Haiti. He told me,
Transforming a system requires transforming its structure, which requires looking for the places in the system at which we can act: leverage points or cracks. It’s like a group of us are looking for gold. We know what we are looking for, but every day we have to decide where we’re going to go and what we’re going to do. Every day we do and then we talk: What did you find? This is how we learn and build a community of people who can make a difference.
We transform systems through working with cracks.
THE CATALYTIC POWER OF RADICAL ENGAGEMENT
How do we discover a next move that enables us to contribute to transformation? When I looked at the approaches used by Manuel, Figueres, Santos, Clermont, and others, I couldn’t see a simple answer. I ended up staring at long lists: everyone has their particular approach to making their way forward in their particular context.
When I stepped back from these lists and squinted, however, I could see one simple, ordinary, practical pattern.
Manuel and the others had told me stories of the day-in, day- out processes of meeting, listening, talking, arguing, convincing, cajoling, compromising, and working together. Manuel spoke of doing this, before the 1994 election, with business leaders, radical students, poor communities, groups within the ANC, and other political parties, and later as minister of finance with members of parliament, traders, pensioners, trade union representatives, and constituents. In his interview in 2000 he had referred to such processes as follows: “We had to carve it, and so perhaps we were more willing to listen,” and this had required equipping people “to ask questions: to actively engage in their everyday lives.” This is the fully engaged, hands-on, conflictual, and collaborative approach to transformation that neither I nor the ivory tower academic in Manuel’s “off-topic” story had been able to recognize.
Finally I was able to see what Manuel had been pointing me toward: the pattern that had been in front of my eyes for thirty years that I had missed.
The way to transform a system generatively is through working with cracks. We do this not by sledgehammering the system but by engaging in give-and-take with it, meaning “taking part in; pledging oneself to; holding fast; entering into conflict with.” And not by engaging superficially in a way that keeps the system as it is (as in “I have a dinner engagement”), but by doing so radically (from the Latin radix or root), meaning “going to the root(s); affecting the foundation; naturally inherent, essential, fundamental.”8 (In this book I am using this primary and original meaning of the word radical, not its secondary meaning of “extreme.”)
The core message of this book is that the foundational way of being, relating, and acting required to transform systems generatively is radical engagement:
- Radical engagement refers to the day-in, day-out practice of intentionally and consciously colliding, connecting, communicating, confronting, competing, and collaborating with people from different parts and levels of the system, at the cracks, working together with them to transform that system. Radical engagement is the simple—but not easy—activity of meeting others fully.
- Radical engagement with a system doesn’t mean participating in that system distractedly, resigned, knowing it all, hierarchically, at arm’s length, with arms crossed, super ficially, impatiently, saying take it or leave it. It means taking part in it alertly, with hope and curiosity, hori zontally, leaning forward, hands-on, digging deep, persisting, and above all reciprocally and relationally.
- Radical engagement is a way of creating more connection, agency, and justice through interacting with others, exercising our own agency and inviting theirs, justly. It is a way of being and acting that reduces fragmentation, oppression, and inequity. It is an antidote to the poisons of othering and authoritarianism that are sweeping the world.
- Radical engagement consists of small actions—moves, nudges, probes—that can create big impacts. It is a powerful catalyst of systems transformation. It is the fundamental practice underneath all strategies and tactics for transforming systems generatively.
A system—be it a family, an organization, a sector, or a nation— is transformed generatively through the actions of different people in different positions in the system doing different things over time. Anyone in any position can engage radically with others around them to work the cracks within their reach and thereby, one step at a time, through trial and error, contribute to effecting transformation.
THE NEED FOR TRANSFORMATIONAL HABITS
Generative systems transformation is a long-term process that requires sustained radical engagement. It’s not a “one and done” job, so a spasm of engagement, no matter how fundamental or radical, usually doesn’t make much of a difference. To be able to contribute substantially, we therefore need to develop our capacity to engage radically not just as an exceptional, occasional action but as an everyday practice or habit. These habits are essential for all of us—not just a special few in highfalutin professional roles—who want to contribute to transforming systems in our daily lives, day in and day out.
Developing everyday habits isn’t about welding on new extraordinary capacities, but about unblocking and releasing capacities that, deep down, most of us already have. We do this by stretching, as we would physical stretching: by practicing these actions regularly, with perseverance and discipline; going beyond our comfort zones, sometimes painfully; and taking rests, thereby over time expanding our range of comfortable motion. We have to stretch to become more able to engage radically and to contribute to generative systems transformation.
THE SEVEN HABITS OF RADICAL ENGAGEMENT
I’ve written this book to clarify and share the everyday practices of radical engagement. My three interviews in 2021 showed me how crucial these practices are, even though I did not yet understand them.
To write it I’ve engaged with accomplished systems transformation practitioners, talking about their experiences in a wide variety of contexts: climate, democracy, education, energy, food, health, housing, land, peace, security, and self-determination; locally, nationally, and globally; from across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia. These practitioners work in government, business, research, nonprofit, and community- based organizations, but most of them—like most of you—also approach the work of systems transformation as concerned and committed citizens.
Through this inquiry, I have gradually been able to identify seven habits of radical engagement—and to discern how these radical habits involve consciously stretching beyond the comfortable conventional habits that many of us unconsciously fall into (see figure I.1).
HABIT 1: Acting Responsibly—not just doing what is expected of us, nor just whatever we like
HABIT 2: Relating in Three Dimensions (engaging with others as fellow actors, parties, and kin)—not just in the one or two dimensions that we’re most comfortable with
HABIT 3: Looking for What’s Unseen—not just seeing what we always see
HABIT 4: Working with Cracks—not just ignoring or shying away from them
HABIT 5: Experimenting a Way Forward—not just doing what’s familiar or safe
HABIT 6: Collaborating with Unlike Others—not just with people who are like us and whom we like
HABIT 7: Persevering and Resting—not just sprinting for a short while, nor pushing on until we burn out
These habits also aren’t new. Many people have written books to help professionals use one or another of the habits— learning, experimenting, collaborating, and so on—to act effectively within current systems. The purpose of this book, however, is different: to help anyone use these habits to act effectively to transform systems.
As a set, these habits fit together into an integrated, holistic way of being and acting. The stories I tell in the coming chapters are of diverse practitioners who each practice many of these habits (not only the habit described in the chapter in which I narrate their story). When, overall, our habitual everyday engagement is constrained, cautious, and comfortable, then we are able only to engage superficially and to contribute to keeping things as they are. But when, like these practitioners, we stretch our habitual everyday engagement beyond our comfort zone in some or all of these seven ways, then we become more able to engage beneath the surface and thereby contribute to generative transformation.
The system transformers I have spoken with have, collectively, revealed a vision of what being radically engaged looks like. Writing this book has helped me get clearer about what I have been doing (even if I wasn’t thinking about my actions in these terms) and what I need to do to contribute to transforming systems: which habits I already do quite well (2, 3, 5, 7) and which I need to learn to do better (1, 4, 6). This vision has nudged me to make different everyday choices: to stretch beyond my cocooned comfort zone and into the less comfortable but more effective zone of radical engagement. As I wrote it, every chapter challenged my way of being, relating, and acting.
The purpose of this book is not to enable a few of us to employ radical engagement perfectly but to enable many of us to employ radical engagement better.
Systems transformation practitioner Fyodor Ovchinnikov, referring to the challenges his colleagues face in Russia, explained why these habits and stretches really matter:
If you are in a place that is really crying out for transformation—not just like, “Hmm, maybe I should transform something because that’s what I like to do”—then these habits help you stay sane and on purpose. Habits shape strategy. In complex systems, you can’t have a good plan but you can have a good presence, and these habits design our being. A lot of times habits are imposed by the system and include ones like, don’t say anything, don’t trust anyone, or don’t look outside of your tunnel vision. When we become more conscious about our habits, they can actually be lifesavers, by enabling us to get unstuck and build cohesion for collective action.
These habits enable all of us to contribute to transforming the systems we are part of.
WHAT THIS BOOK OFFERS
This book explains how any of us, whatever our position and power, can contribute to the long-term, collective, extraordinary, often-overwhelming work of systems transformation through practicing a set of seven daily, individual, ordinary, doable habits.
The book isn’t saying that if we can just heroically change ourselves, then systems will change. It’s saying that if we practice this particular engaged way of being, relating, and acting, then we’ll be able, together with others, to more effectively contribute to changing systems. And changing systems to become more connected, just, and agential in turn enables all of us to more readily change ourselves. Individual and collective change are mutually reinforcing.
The next seven chapters spell out the seven habits. Habit 1, Acting Responsibly, is a foundational way of being, relating, and acting through which we take responsibility for the roles in the system that we are currently playing and need to play. By exercising Habit 2, Relating in Three Dimensions, which is grounded in the foundation of Habit 1, we engage with others in the system as fully rounded people. Habit 3, Looking for What’s Unseen; Habit 4, Working with Cracks; and Habit 5, Experimenting a Way Forward, enable us to discover and realize opportunities for transformation. Habit 6, Collaborating with Unlike Others, focuses on working across differences to advance more powerfully. Practicing Habit 7, Persevering and Resting, is a resilient and joyful way to sustain the journey over the long haul. The conclusion, “Begin Anywhere” suggests ways to start and to continue moving.
Each of the seven habit chapters closes with a simple everyday practice that you can work with, and the book ends with a discussion guide that you can use with others to deepen your understanding and practice.
This book will help you grow your capacity to engage radically and to contribute to transforming systems. You can do this. We can do this.
If this excerpt resonated with you, we invite you to explore the full book. Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems is a thoughtful, practical companion for anyone committed to making meaningful change—whether in a team, an organization, or the world at large. Adam Kahane’s insights will leave you feeling both challenged and inspired.
Order your copy today and take the next step in your journey toward transforming systems from the inside out.
1 See Adam Kahane, “Facilitating Breakthrough on Equality: Adam Kahane in Conversation with Trevor Manuel,” “Facilitating Breakthrough on Climate: Adam Kahane in Conversation with Christiana Figueres,” and “Facilitating Breakthrough on Peace: Adam Kahane in Conversation with President Santos,” October 2021, https://www .reospartners.com.
2 Cited in Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), ix.
3 Alex Perry, “Trevor Manuel: The Veteran.” Time, March 25, 2009, https://time.com/archive/6688002/trevor-manuel-the-veteran/.
4 See Adam Kahane, Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future (Oakland, CA: Berrett- Koehler, 2012), 1–13.
5 Unpublished interview notes for Glennifer Gillespie and Elena Díez Pinto, “The Footprints of Mont Fleur: The Mont Fleur Scenario Project, South Africa, 1991–1992,” in Learning Histories: Democratic Dialogue Regional Project, ed. Katrin Käufer (New York: United Nations Development Programme Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2004).
6 Gillespie and Pinto.
7 Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (New York: Knopf, 2023), 342.
8 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 7th ed. (1983), s.v. “engage,” “engagement,” and “radical.”
