Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems

The Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement

About the book

How can you contribute to creating a better world? Adam Kahane, drawing on three decades working alongside leading changemakers, offers an answer: seven everyday habits for transforming systems. Through vivid stories of profound change, Kahane shows how these practices enable ordinary people to achieve extraordinary impact.

Whether you're battling climate change, reinventing healthcare, or simply trying to make your community better, this book is your essential guide. It's time to stop feeling powerless and start creating the change you want to see. Don't just survive in a changing world--step in to transform it.

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This book offers a carefully reasoned, deeply human way for us to address our toughest challenges. Essential reading.

Juan Manuel Santos

Nobel Peace Prize recipient and former President of Colombia

We face multiple global crises that we can solve if many more of us act, urgently and wisely. Kahane explains how.

Mary Robinson

former Chair of The Elders and President of Ireland

An important, beautiful, and honest work about the outer and inner work that is required of us.

Christiana Figueres

former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Change is hard but Kahane offers a powerful and compelling framework for making it happen, and wise guidance for creating a better world.

Mustafa Suleyman

CEO of Microsoft AI

A guide to the inner capabilities for being human, interconnected, interdependent, and at our best when we are consciously nested in the web of life.

Mamphela Ramphele

Cofounder of the Black Consciousness Movement and former Co-President of The Club of Rome

The story behind the book

Adam was inspired to write this book through three extraordinary live online conversations he had in late 2021, with 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.

About the author

Adam is a leading organizer, designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can work together to address such challenges. He has worked in more than fifty countries, in every part of the world, with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy and artists.

He is a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2022, he was named a Schwab Foundation Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

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“This book offers a carefully reasoned, deeply human way for us to address our toughest challenges. Essential reading."

Juan Manuel Santos

Nobel Peace Prize recipient and former President of Columbia

“We face multiple global crises that we can solve if many more of us act, urgently and wisely. Kahane explains how.”

Mary Robinson

Chair of The Elders and former President of Ireland

“An important, beautiful, and honest work about the outer and inner work that is required of us.”

Christiana Figueres

Former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

“Change is hard, but Kahane offers a powerful and compelling framework for making it happen, and wise guidance for creating a better world”

Mustafa Suleyman

CEO of Microsoft AI

“A guide to the inner capabilities for being human, interconnected, interdependent, and at our best when we are consciously nested in the web of life.”