Adam Kahane
Adam Kahane is a Director of Reos Partners, an international social impact company that helps people move forward together on their most important and intractable issues.
In June I drove from Montreal to Boston to spend a morning with Francisco de Roux, a Jesuit priest and peacemaker who had just finished five years as chair of Colombia’s Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition and was now at Boston College for a period of reflection on this experience.
I have been immersing myself in the varied and voluminous literature on systems transformation and think that perhaps there are three distinct ways that people look at systems and how they get transformed, and therefore the actions they see as important to effecting transformation.
Club Note #2: On October 10 and 11, 2023, we held the first pair of Zoom calls for Book Club members. The invitation was to share: What can we learn from our first- and second-hand experiences with the transformations of different systems, about how such transformations occur? Around 100 members participated in these calls, from all around the world.
When you filled in the Book Club sign-up form, you were asked, "What do you see as the potential contribution of this book?" Here is a ChatGPT summary of your answers.
The way I started to write my previous books was to reflect on and derive lessons from my first- and second-hand experiences with systems transformation. This approach has worked well enough—I have had a broad set of experiences, some successful and some not, and have been disciplined about learning from these—but I see a big risk, in my and others’ writing, of self-servingly exaggerating the value of our own work.
I have started to work on a new book, and am inviting anyone who is interested to join me on a two-year learning journey that I expect will be both engaging and challenging.