Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems - A Conversation with Adam Kahane

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I realized that this radical engagement involved not so much leaning back and pointing your finger, telling people what they ought to do, but this fundamentally different stance of leaning forward, hands-on, trying to feel what's happening and what can I do.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. On this episode, it's my huge pleasure to be talking with Adam Kahane about the everyday habits and radical engagement that young people, as well as educators and leaders, can learn to do the coordinated and constant work of transforming systems. Over the course of his career, Adam has done incredible work in more than 50 countries with executives and politicians, generals and guerrillas, clergy and artists, organizing, designing and facilitating complex and conflictual multi-stakeholder processes, all the time working to address deep structural and societal challenges. Adam is the director at Rios Partners, which is a global social impact company dedicated to supporting sustainable and equitable progress on humanity's most crucial challenges. Adam's also a prolific and amazing author, having written many books, including the one we discuss in this episode, his most recent book, Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems: The The Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement. You can find links to Adam's amazing work in the show notes, and I really hope you enjoy this conversation.

Thank you so much, Adam. It's a real pleasure to be able to talk to you. I've been very, very interested in your work, particularly recently with the release of your new book, so super excited to talk about that, but also I mean, just phenomenal amount of amazing spaces you've been engaging in, in different places in South Africa, in Copenhagen, in Colombia, throughout your work in peace and conflict and scenario planning and apartheid, you know, rebuilding of countries post-apartheid. I mean, just unbelievable stuff. So thank you very much firstly for joining and just, yeah, super excited to bring some of that wisdom into this space of the podcast.

Well, thanks, Tim. I, um, yeah, I've been able to be in a lot of rooms with a lot of amazing people, and so have been able to learn a lot, mostly through trial and error.

Wow.

But it's been a privilege and a pleasure.

Beautiful.

So I'm happy to be with you.

Lovely. No, thank you so much. One of the ways I thought maybe we might start is that I heard you say something about, I mean, you're, you're firstly an incredibly wonderful and prolific writer. So there's lots of different aspects of different books I'd love to dip into, but I heard you say that all your books are based on experiences of failure or confusion in some way or another. And I just wondered, maybe slightly provocatively, if this latest book on Transforming Systems is a broader commentary on our epic failure over the last 50, 60, 100 years to transform these systems that we seem— they seem to be from many perspectives more and more in crisis.

Well, the book that we're talking about, Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems, was published on April 8th, and so I've been talking about it a lot this last month. And when you talk about a book, you get clear on what it really says, even more than or beyond what's in the text. So in a way, the implicit message of the book is the one that you which is we have systems, they're big, they're, they're really hard to change. We can chip away at them. But if there's one gift of the past months, it's that this no longer seems the case. It's, it seems increasingly obvious, at least to me, that we're living in systems. They, some aspects of them work well for some people and other aspects of them don't work well. For other people and that they, they need to be transformed and that they are being transformed and that they can be transformed. So they can be transformed in a way that makes them work worse for more people, or they can be transformed in a way that makes them work better for more people. But it's not as though we're living in a solid world. We're living in a fluid world. And this is clearer to me than it was. Yeah, even on April 8th.

Yeah, interesting. To mix metaphors, maybe you talk about the crack, there's a crack in everything in the book, and maybe the cracks are becoming wider and more evident as we look around.

Yes, the cracking and collapsing and constructing is all getting louder. We hear it all around us, and some people find that terrifying and other people say, wow, you know, finally we can change something. I spent the past 6 months in South Africa. Working on a different book. I've lived in South Africa half the time for the last 30 years because my wife is from South Africa. And in many ways, South Africa is suffering from the current cracking of the global order and especially vociferous attacks on South Africa by the new US administration. And yet, when I talk to South Africans, South African thinkers, many of them are are excited. Finally, we have an opportunity to change structures and systems that we wanted to change for decades.

Wow.

And these cracks offer opportunities for different ways of doing things. So yes, and this book arose from a genuine failure and confusion on my part, smaller rather than larger, which I recount in the introduction. Which is that 4 years ago I conducted a 30-minute online live interview with Trevor Manuel, who's a South African I've known for a long time. He was the head of the economics desk of the African National Congress before democracy in '94, and he joined the Mandela cabinet, became the Minister of Finance for 13 years, which is a big job, and went on to play lots of other roles in South Africa and globally. And I interviewed him because I wanted to talk to him about his experience of participating in the transformation of South Africa from apartheid to democracy, an epic transformation. Some things changed fundamentally, some things haven't changed at all, some things are better for some people, some things are worse for other people. But anyhow, you can't say that nothing changed. And it was an amazing interview in that I kept trying to get him to endorse the way I thought about such processes. He had a completely different understanding. Anyhow, it was an absolutely terrible interview. As soon as I hung up, I got messages from my colleagues and my wife saying, "Don't quit your day job. No future as an interviewer at all." So I was embarrassed, but also confused, because what was it that I was missing? And it was in digging into what Trevor had been trying to, to tell me that I realized that although I had some ideas about how systems get transformed in a big way, I really didn't understand what it takes day to day by people who are, yeah, hands-on as Trevor was more than I was. And so anyhow, that was the inspiration for the book Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems, because I realized it was something very important that I wanted to understand and that maybe other people would find interesting. And so this book unlike my other ones, is based on something I didn't understand. And so mostly through talking to other people, first Trevor and then tens and hundreds of other people. So it's what I learned from them about what it takes day to day to make a difference in the world.

Yeah, amazing. No, that's really useful context. And I mean, that's actually one of the questions I wanted to ask you was this phrase everyday habits. And that seems to, you know, obviously what you're speaking to there So, I mean, firstly, just to say my interest in this is very much, as I said to you previously, a dual focus of A, transforming education systems. There's serious cracks appearing there and we need much more generative open spaces for young people with the futures they are facing, we are all facing. And then secondly, and relatedly, how might we help those young people to also develop those everyday habits, let's say, for transforming systems as part of their education? So it's, there's a, I think there's many things going on that very directly relate to some of these learnings that you've had. But maybe if we could just dwell on that idea of the everyday habits, what is it that's different for you about living it, being in the system, being part of the system? Because I think sometimes we describe systems as something out there. And I think one of the pieces I'm interested in from a kind of, you know, from second-order cybernetics and, you know, some of the work around complexity is, I guess, why is that shift to being in and part of the system that's so significant as a framing for how we work with and in systems?

Yeah, so there's a lot there. So let me say a few things. Firstly, systems are obviously bigger than one person, and transforming systems is a collective activity, not an individual activity. Almost none of us will get the opportunity to all by ourselves transform anything but very small systems. So it's a collective activity, but that still begs the question, what can I do? Not just occasionally by voting or by going to a workshop, but what can I do day to day? So that's the question that arose in my mind from my interview of Trevor. And in particular, what was obvious in that interview is even though we had worked together 30 years ago when I first started working in South Africa, my main role then, and and in the years since has been as a consultant and facilitator and author. And he had been an activist and cabinet member and, and now businessman. So we have different positions and we see different things. And that was the essence of what he was trying to explain to me. What does this look like to a protagonist? Now, there is a, a very crucial idea about this that you've alluded to, and that was mentioned to me some years ago by a a brilliant guy named Bill Torbert. And he said, Adam, you know this expression from the 1960s, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. This isn't actually the crucial point. What's much more important is if you're not part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution. In other words, if you can't see how what you're doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are, then it follows logically there's nothing you can do to change the way things are except from the outside by force. And a much more productive stance is to ask, how am I part of what's going on? And therefore, how— what's my role? What's my responsibility? And above all, what's my agency to change the way things are?

Yeah.

I think the final thing you asked is how we are in the system. And this is a— this is something I've been thinking about a lot just recently, that there's a difference between being in a system and being angry and directive and trying to force things to be the way we want them to be. Sometimes that's helpful, sometimes it's unhelpful, but it's different from the idea of being with what is in the system and figuring out how to work with it. And the word I've come across for that, in a bit of a funny roundabout way, is the word abiding. Which is not a very common word.

Okay, interesting.

Well, I came to it because it's the last word in my favorite movie, The Big Lebowski, but we don't necessarily have to get into the wisdom of The Big Lebowski.

But anyhow, there is a lot of it, let's face it.

There is a lot. There's a lot to say there. But anyhow, the word abiding, which means to remain or to continue or to dwell— I'm coming to think that this stance of abiding Being with rather than being apart from is a fundamental choice in system transformation, is the meta habit. In the book, I use the term radical engagement for a particular way of being with, but I think even underneath that is this idea of abiding. Wow.

Yeah. Interesting. That, I mean, that speaks to me about the love piece, but which may, maybe we'll get onto, but that's, no, that's really powerful. And the other thing I was curious about is the other words that felt quite important words that you use in the book, these metaphors of carving, weaving, and sailing as other ways, yeah, metaphorical descriptions of how we engage. And I just wonder if you could speak to those a little bit, just as different ways that we might kind of show up in these spaces.

Well, as I said, the work— this book was inspired by 3 interviews I did in September 1991. The first one was with Trevor Manuel, and then I did 2 others in the weeks that to follow. They became a little less disastrous as the weeks went on.

You got some practice as an interviewer.

Yeah, I realized that the gist of it is to ask the interviewee what they think rather than telling them what they ought to say. Anyhow, I didn't quit my day job, but the other two interviews were with Christiana Figueres, who was the Secretary-General of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, played a big role in the Paris Agreement on climate. And Juan Manuel Santos, who I'd worked with a little bit for a long time in the country of Colombia, and who was president and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for signing a treaty with the main guerrilla army, the FARC. And one of the things I noticed in reading over and over the transcripts of these three 30-minute interviews is the metaphors that they used, the ones that you mentioned: carving, weaving and sailing. And what I realized they have in common, even these people who had, you know, senior powerful positions, were using metaphors of hands-on working with a situation that you can't just make it as you want it to be. And so that, that's what gradually led me to this idea of what's the stance or what's the approach to take vis-à-vis the world, vis-à-vis the system, vis-à-vis other people, and eventually got me to this notion of radical engagement. Engagement meaning taking part in, pledging oneself to, holding fast, entering into conflict with. And radical meaning not extreme, but the original meaning from the word root, affecting the foundation, essential, fundamental. And I realized that this radical engagement involved not so much leaning back and pointing your finger and telling people what they ought to do, but this fundamentally different stance of leaning forward, hands-on, trying to feel what's happening and what can I do and what can I do with what's in front of me. And that's where the everyday habits comes in.

Yeah, and I mean, I like that idea of feeling because then it's, it's, there's a contact with reality somehow, right? I mean, reality is a tricky word, but with a carving or with the sailing, you're, you know, particularly you are responding to the actual conditions. And if you're not in touch with the actual conditions of the wood that you're carving or the wind that you're sailing with, or the, you know, the waters, then fundamentally you are, you're not gonna succeed, right? I mean, in a way that feels like it comes through in a lot of your habits. I mean, acting responsibly as you talk about Habit 1, experimenting a way forward, Habit 5, maybe, you know, working with the cracks. I mean, without being in contact, you're not actually able to do many of those things.

Yes, that's exactly it. And, you know, carving and weaving and sailing, don't leave out the idea that you're trying to do something or get somewhere.

Right.

But to do that, you're working with what's in front of you, with the material and the conditions you have. You're not simply trying to force things to be the way you want them to be, that this picture in your head of how they have to be. And so yes, the radical engagement is the meta habit, and the 7 particular ones— the book's very simple: an introduction, 7 chapters on 7 habits, and a conclusion laying out these 7 more specific ways of working with the situation in order to transform it so that it works better for more people.

Yeah, absolutely. And just one other question on that. Why did you go with the frame of habit rather than, let's say, practices? Or, you know, a lot of people are talking about practices.

Yeah, no, that's not an important distinction to me. They are practices, they're approaches. I chose the word habits because it's a word that lots of people are interested in. But for me, the distinction is not very crucial. And another thing to say is, in a way, these are 7 habits for breaking habits. These are 7 habits for escaping from habitual action. But the main thing is that I wanted to talk about practical things any one of us can do every day rather than just big general occasional strategies.

Yeah. And as you say in the conclusion, I mean, the idea of beginning anywhere, this is not something that you need to kind of get everything, get all your ducks in a row before you can start and, you know, build up your, all these different competencies before you can begin the work. I mean, in a way, what I understood from that is just wherever you are, you can get started on building these systemic habits.

And that's become more clear to me over the last few weeks because For those people who are surprised and shocked and terrified by what's happening in the world, which is not everybody— some people say, 'Where have you been? This has been happening for a long time.' But anyhow, lots of people are surprised and shocked and terrified and paralyzed. Yeah, like, 'What can I possibly do? This is so big. This is so difficult.' I think in a way the key message of the book is there's always something you can do within your immediate reach. To take this feeling our way forward metaphor, you have a— we all have agency. You may well need to take an hour or a day or a month to just settle yourself down, because many of us are in a very difficult situation. But you do have agency, and that's the opposite of, oh, I can't do anything, I'm overwhelmed. And it's the opposite, as you said, of I have to know everything and I have to, with others, agree on everything before we can get started. And that's really not true. And that assumption makes a situation which is difficult, it makes it impossible.

Yeah, it's, it's an interesting one for me, just that point about agency, because, you know, that comes up a lot in the educational conversations and, and it, to an extent, as a young person in quite a rigid formal education system, there is not always a lot of space to step into that agency, you know? So it's an interesting question for me because yeah, the habits feel very agentic in that sense that, you know, someone can start from anywhere, but it's also an interesting question about the enabling or disabling structures around, particularly as in my context around young people where they're actually not given that space to act responsibly or to look for what's unseen or working with the cracks because actually the particularly in moments of, I think, moments of heightened uncertainty, more complexity, there is one response, which is a doubling down on, we know how this goes, you know, the top-down, we're going to just actually limit your agency because actually, you know, we know what's best for you. And we're just going to keep going this way because it's too uncertain out there for you to just be given the space to kind of try some of these things. So that's a I guess I'm just articulating again a tension that comes up in this, in the more formal education spaces around some of these things.

Yeah. Well, I, I do think we're, we're in a period where authoritarianism is having a good run. And so in a way, this is an anti-authoritarian book. And I'm not a teacher. So my main contact with younger people is with my 10 grandchildren and certainly the ones that are in their 20s have lots of agency and are teaching me about Yeah, what it means to try to change the world. In a way, in a way, I think the, the difficulty in my upbringing in this sense wasn't just that I'm an enthusiastic rule follower as an eldest child, but that the culture I grew up in, I grew up in Montreal in Quebec, which is a quite a statist society relying on the state, is I sort of had the idea that things are just the way they are. And one does the best one can within things being the way they are. And it was actually when I traveled to the place that is the furthest extreme different from Montreal, which is Houston, Texas, where I suffered the most dramatic culture shock of anywhere I've ever been in the world.

Oh, wow.

Uh, but the thing about Houston that really impressed me is at least the people I met were very aware that Houston is the way it is because of things they and their predecessors had done. There is this, I think, wonderful sense in this respect that we make the systems we're in. It's partly an anti-statist politics that said, God, we certainly don't want the government to do it, so we'd better do it. But I had just never met people who really thought, no, we, we can change things. And in that sense, it was very inspiring, even though our politics was pretty diametrically opposite.

Yeah, no, that's interesting. And it is a, I mean, I had a previous episode with Susan Blum, an anthropologist, and as an anthropologist myself, that is a very strong feeling for me that culturally things have evolved through, you know, different interactions and it could have been different. I mean, you know, it really, it really could have been different if we'd made different choices or different dynamics had evolved and different people had made different choices along the way. But that is very, yeah, it's not a familiar sense, I think, for everybody. And again, particularly for young people, they are not, I mean, in compliance-based systems, they are usually encouraged to accept the norms of the way things are rather than question the norms of the way things are. And I think, you know, that's one of the challenges that we face in really empowering them differently for this moment and learning from them, as you say about your grandchildren, right? Learning from them about what it is they need. But yeah, no, it's a very real need, I think. And maybe it's useful for people, obviously I'd encourage everybody to buy the book and read the book, but maybe it'd be worth just grabbing a couple or three of the habits that you think are most resonant to the things we've already been talking about, or that might add a different dimension, just to give people a taste of what's there.

Well, it was interesting for me. As I said, I started the book because there's something I realized I didn't know and I wanted to discover, and I talked to these initial 3 people and then tens others and ultimately had several hundred working with me on the book. And it's not straightforward to write a book about this, to say something that is true and useful and fresh. But I'm pleased with what we did, mostly by through iterating it over and over and over. And some of the habits are things that I've thought about for a long time, and I think I'm pretty good at looking for what's unseen. My training in scenarios, what are different stories about what is happening and could happen. And collaborating with unlike others is something that I've worked on forever. I wrote a book called Collaborating with the Enemy. Most of my and Rios's work over the decades has been helping people work together with people they don't agree with or like or trust. But there were, there were several things that came up in the book that I really hadn't thought about before. And I, and so I learned a lot. And so let's focus on those.

Yeah, nice.

Just in reverse order, number 7 is called Persevering and Resting. And it arose from an interview with a, a man named Phila Ateba Solomon, who is the chair of the Department of African American Studies at Yale and the CEO of a media company and the founder of an NGO that works on police violence in the United States, particularly police violence against Black people. And obviously he's deeply committed to what he's doing. And he realizes that these systems have been built over generations and will take a long time to change, and he might not see the changes within his lifetime, and he doesn't want to die early through burning himself out. And so this idea that this work takes persevering and resting, I think, is important. And I've noticed it really resonates with system transformers who are always at risk of just trying to sprint through everything and burning themselves out and not doing their work or themselves any good in the process.

Yeah. If I may, just the idea of strategic rest in that chapter I thought was interesting because I think the other piece going on there, maybe I'm wrong, but is perhaps that by resting, you're also acknowledging that you are working with not just first-order dynamics, but you're also working with second and nth-order change, the way that ripples 'Cause I think sometimes some of the burnout comes from the feeling of failure, in inverted commas, of not affecting the change that you've decided you want to see. But actually there's something, there's somehow something larger and more systemic going on when there's a deeper understanding of the dynamics that of course we're gonna play our role, but then many other people are also playing their roles and there's this broad systemic thing happening, right? But you know, this part, this unity we're participating in, let's to bring Tillich in perhaps, that is bigger than all of us and somehow a faith that you are doing the right things, playing your role in the best way you can, and strategically resting is somehow giving then space to observe and notice what's shifting around you. I don't know how that lands.

Yeah. No, let's come back to Tillich in a few minutes. I've got a lot I'd like to say about that. But yes, this idea that just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing and pushing others It really has limits and the ability to step back and, or stop and say, what's going on here? What's going on in the system? What's going on in me? And I, my most direct experience of this is as an author. I love to write and I think of writing, you know, as mostly just hard work, having to write for hours and hours over and over, you know, and redo things over and over. But what I found without exception is when I get stuck, the way to get unstuck isn't to try harder, but to step away from the desk. And 100% of the time when I step away from my desk to go for a walk or a drive or a run or have a nap or whatever, I know what to do next. Doesn't mean I have the big picture, but I know the next thing to do.

Yeah.

So that's very instructive and, and is the opposite of no, no, I have to stay at the desk, I just have to push harder. Right now.

Yeah.

But this also relates to the other, the second habit I wanted to mention of the 7, which is number 4, working with cracks. And this metaphor of cracks had never occurred to me. Bayo Akomolefe writes beautifully about cracks.

Yeah, he does.

Yeah. It's an interesting metaphor. But what I realized is trying to transform a system by working with what is cracking or being cracked in the system is the opposite of saying this is all wrong, let's just blow it up. I'm not saying it's never a good idea to blow anything up, but I think most of the time we're trying to preserve some things and change other things and work in a way which doesn't have big rocks falling on people's heads. And so this image of, again, being close enough to what's really happening to see the cracks, small and large, and working with them working through them or enlarging them, or— but working with what is changing, or what's the potential there, rather than this all just looks immovable and solid, so let me dynamite it and see what I can build from scratch.

Yeah.

Of course, I'm from Montreal, so it is a rule that in every podcast I have to quote Leonard Cohen once. And there is, of course, his famous line Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. So I think that's, I think that's important.

Absolutely. Really powerful. And I think it makes me think of, I don't know if you've heard Daniel Schmachtenberger talk about Chesterton's fence, just the idea that it's really important to have humility when you come towards these things, because actually you don't know all the reasons. So the thought experiment is that you are going to take down this fence cuz you've decided you no longer need, need this fence. You are taking it down for certain reasons, but you don't actually, you're not aware of all of the reasons why the fence was put up in the first place until you've taken it down, because then it becomes evident that this fence was there for many other reasons other than the ones you thought. And so it's just a, you know, it's, it's just an example of, as you say, if you dynamite everything, you know, you might be dynamiting it because you, you think it's blocking the thing that you are interested in, but actually it was holding space for all these other things that you hadn't realized. And so I think there's something there about working with cracks that allows for, I don't know. Yeah. A, a more sensitive, responsive approach that is a perhaps a bit more, bit more humble maybe.

Yes, for sure. And I didn't know that. And that's a, a beautiful image. Chesterton's Fence.

Yeah.

So the, the other habit I want to mention, just because you asked for a few, which is the one that is first in the book, it's called acting responsibly. And this arose from a conversation I had with a woman I admire very much named Marcia Anderson, who's a First Nations medical doctor in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and talking about her work trying to transform health systems so they work better for marginalized people, amongst others. And in the course of the interview, she said, "That's an all my relations perspective." And I heard this phrase before. If you spend time with Native Americans or First Nations people in the US or Canada, you'll hear this phrase, especially in ceremonial activities, "all my relations." So I asked her, "What's, you know, what does that mean, Marcia?" And she said, "Well, it's this teaching that we have to take account not just of our immediate family, but of larger circles of people, and for that matter, larger circles of non-human beings.

Yeah.

And so this is a short chapter, and what I realized is acting responsibly is not a recipe, it's a riddle. I don't know what you should do, Tim Logan, and I don't— I really have zero advice or admonition for you. But I think this question, this is a question that all of us need to wrestle with, which is, going back to the Bill Turbert, given the way in which we are part of the system, part of the problem, what is our role? What is our responsibility? What is our capacity? And what does acting responsibly mean for us in any given situation on any given day? So, yeah, I'm saying that not because it's a prescription, but because It's something I hadn't thought about very much and I think is crucial.

No, I think that's beautiful and so important. And it, it actually makes me think of, I don't know if you saw the little spat between JD Vance and Rory Stewart online about love. And so maybe that takes us into a Tillich space, but it's just a really interesting public disagreement on X between JD Vance and Rory Stewart, the British ex- politician, about love and just that idea that it's kind of more fragmented nuclear perspective that J.D. Vance has, which is like, there are some people who are just more important to me, my closest kin, that I have to prioritize over the others. And it's this, it was this really kind of zero-sum view, whereas Rory Stewart was pushing back on that and just saying, actually, this is not, it's not a scarce resource. That we are deciding how to share this love with, and we therefore have to prioritize our nuclear family, our closest people, and then get progressively less and less as we go out of the circles of, you know, connection. But what you are saying there is this idea of all my relations, maybe past, future, human, non-human. I mean, that's a, yeah, it's a real invocation to kind of take your interconnectedness seriously, right? With and I think have a, take a slightly different, more abundant view of the idea of love or, you know.

Well, yes and no. So thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk about this, 'cause it's something I've thought about a lot and I've tried to write about over and over and over, and I'm, I think, gradually making my way forward. But I haven't read that exchange and, but I think I agree with both of them because I think there's not one thing That's important here. There's 3 things that are important here, right? And I'm going to speak now in abstract terms, but I've been— years ago, Otto Scharmer, who you had on the podcast, passed me a piece of paper that contained a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. where he said, "Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic." And sometimes, you know, you just read something and you think, wow, this is really important, which is what happened to me then. And I wrote a book inspired by that one sentence, which is a book called Power and Love. And in trying to understand what King meant, because I didn't want to write a long book possibly based on a misunderstanding, I read some things about King and his theology and his, and his influences. And I realized that he had studied the work of a man named Paul Tillich, who was a very famous German-American Protestant existential theologian. Very popular in the '50s and '60s. And I'm pretty sure that when King talks about power and love, he's using the definitions that Tillich gave. And Tillich wrote a book called Power, Love, and Justice. And it's, it's an odd thing to say, but I find the book impossible to understand. I'm not a professional philosopher, let alone Protestant theologian, and it's a very tough text. And yet I have been inspired by it. Now for several decades, that there's something here that I really needed to work out. And so I think the idea of love, that we are part of larger wholes— Tillich defines love as the drive to unite the separated. This is important, but as King said, love without power is sentimental and anemic. What's often overlooked in this by many people, especially among our friends and colleagues is the power part, which Tillich defines power as the drive everything living to realize itself. So that everybody's trying to do something, whether in their job or in their family or in their community or in their work, and that matters. And to ignore that and to say, hey, you're just part of something larger, why don't you just let your own agenda go, is sentimental and anemic and will enable you to do absolutely— you can't get anything done without recognizing and working with power. So you'll hear the, the intensity in my voice because I think this is a very common error and a terrible error to say, well, you know, I don't really like power or selfishness or self-interest, so I'm just going to focus on love. And you get results that are sentimental and anemic. Now, love is the fact we're part of larger wholes. Power is the fact that we are wholes in ourselves. And justice relates to the nature of the relationships amongst us. And my point, which has taken me a long time to formulate, is that we have to pay equal attention to all three of these things. And most people, or many people, focus only on one or two of them. There's the love people, the power people, the justice people, and each of these singular foci is inadequate. And so, so yes, all my relations is the justice aspect that we're all related, we're entangled, and that's true, but we're also separate. Or yeah, anyway, when my son got married, I had just published Power and Love, and he made the mistake of asking me to say something at the wedding, and I said something that It might have been a little too academic for a wedding speech, but I think was very good advice. I said to him, "What I wish for you and your bride is that you will become one, but also properly two." That requires a certain kind of relationship. So there's the love, power, and justice.

Yeah.

No, I love that.

I mean, it feels like a— So a couple of things. It feels like a duality in the sense of, so a friend and previous podcast guest, Ray Ison, talks about the difference between dualisms and duality. So it's not a dualism, they don't negate each other. They're, they're a duality in that they, yeah, I mean, we are individual and also interconnected, and that's both of those things are true and not negated by the other. But it's, there's a question again in relation to, I dunno if you know Ian McGilchrist's work, but who's, what is the framing whole that holds the broader relationship of those things? I dunno, maybe, maybe I'm hearing you say that justice is the is the relationship between the two somehow. I'm not sure. I would say that personally, I think I would say that love is the broader framing container for the power and the justice, but maybe that's just me being sentimental and anemic and romantic.

Well, the difficult is, so I've enjoyed trying to understand this power, love, justice thing. And one of the reasons it's difficult is these are words used by lots of people in different senses. So it's possible to have very confused conversation and really bothers me when people say, oh, you wrote a book called The Power of Love. No, it's sort of the opposite idea. So I'm using very specific definitions, Tillich's definitions. And yes, it's a duality. Another word is a polarity. Barry Johnson's work on working with polarities is essential in all of this. But yes, I think the, the framing relationship in my language relates to, to justice.

But, and just, I mean, maybe to bring it back to the systemic conversation and the, you know, transforming systems conversation, you said as part of your The Power and Love book in 2010, 2011 at the, at the RSA, if we want to address our toughest challenges, we must understand and work with both of these drives. I guess we might amend that now to say all three of these drives, but it is, as you're saying there, a fundamental set of concepts and understandings that we have to work with and work with all three of them if we want to take the work of transforming systems seriously.

Yes. And this is in, in, in the Everyday Habits book, the second habit, it says relating in three dimensions. And the vocabulary is a little different, but it's the same idea that we have to understand the people we're working with as actors in larger systems, as parties in themselves, and as kin or relatives. And all three are important. Anyone is inadequate.

Amazing. And just maybe just to, to wrap it up and bring it back to the relevance to my audience, where if you were addressing a group of young people on these questions, what would be your advice to young humans aged, you know, 11, 12, 13, 14, who are seeing things they, that really upset them about the way that the world is, they're seeing the cracks and they want to do something about it. What would be your advice to them?

Well, I, I didn't write this book for young people, but I don't see anything in it that isn't relevant for young people. And in particular, this idea that if you are concerned about what's going on in the world around you, you know, of course you can and should look after yourself. So I'm not telling people they have to work on larger systems, but If you want to work on larger systems, you can. And all of these 7 are practical things any of us in any position and of any age and in any context can do on an everyday basis. And again, coming back to what I think is the underlying habit of radical engagement, it is advising, well, old and young people that This stance of leaning back and from a distance deciding what other people ought to do and who's right and who's wrong and what the right answer is and directing or forcing or bullying people produces completely different results than leaning forward and listening and trying to understand where's this person coming from and what are they trying to do and what can we do together. So I, yeah, I think that's beautiful. That's good life advice and I would give it to others and I try to live by it myself. Mm-hmm.

I agree. It sounds, yeah, it's beautiful advice and it is interesting when, because I do a lot of my work with young people around this exact question and you sometimes the narratives of change, you know, you want to be a changemaker are about deciding what you want to do and then just creating that change. And while there is an invitation there to lean in and get involved, there's not always the invitation to really listen and see what we can do together. So I think it's, I really appreciate what you're saying there. Yeah.

Well, in rewriting Collaborating with the Enemy, the, one of the things that became clearer to me is that this tendency to decide who's a friend, who's an enemy, who's right, who's wrong, who's good and who's bad. Has terrible consequences.

Yeah.

And so the opposite is to, yeah, to approach other people not as black and white but as, as gray, and what's going on for them, and what do we have to do separately, what can we do together. I may oppose you, I may try to defeat you, but the idea that, that we have to decide who's right and who's wrong, I think, is a terrible cultural tendency.

I would, would agree. And yeah, Absolutely. No, thank you, Adam. Beautiful stuff. I really, really appreciate everything you've done and are doing, and the book is amazing. I would absolutely recommend to all educators to be reading it, for particularly those working with young people to try and help them understand these questions about engaging with systems. So no, thank you so much for everything.

Thanks, Tim Logan.

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