Reading List

Books that shaped how I think about systems, change, and what it takes to build something better.

A living list of the writing I return to, particularly in the restorative and relational wing of transformative thinking. Updated as I go.

Reading list book covers organised by category
On how systems actually change

The writers who helped me understand that change doesn't happen the way most people think it does, that the structures and conditions surrounding people shape behaviour far more than individual intention ever can.

Thinking in Systems
A Primer
Donella Meadows

How systems behave in ways that surprise and resist us, and where the real leverage points for change actually sit.

Leadership and the New Science
Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Margaret Wheatley

What happens when you stop treating organisations like machines and start understanding them as living systems that self-organise around meaning.

Reinventing Organizations
A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
Frederic Laloux

A detailed map of how organisations can operate through self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose rather than hierarchy and control.

The Next American Revolution
Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
Grace Lee Boggs

Revolution as something you build locally, relationally, and generationally, from someone who spent seven decades doing it.

Change
How to Make Big Things Happen
Damon Centola

The research on how change actually spreads through networks, why weak ties aren't enough, and why the fringes matter more than the centre.

On the relational dynamics needed

The writers who taught me that building new systems starts with how people relate to one another, and that choosing love, accountability, and genuine community in a world designed against them is one of the most radical things you can do.

All About Love
New Visions
bell hooks

Love understood as a practice and an ethic rather than a feeling, and as the most direct path to ending the patterns of power that shape how we relate to each other.

Healing Resistance
A Radically Different Response to Harm
Kazu Haga

Nonviolence understood as a lifelong discipline and a martial art, something that requires the same consistent training and practice as any other form of mastery.

The Wake Up
Closing the Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change
Michelle MiJung Kim

An honest look at the gap between good intentions and real change, and what it actually takes to close it.

Sister Outsider
Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde

On difference as a source of power rather than division, and on the cost of silence to the people who can least afford it.

On building something different

The writers who are actually imagining the world on the other side and taking it seriously enough to describe it in detail.

Doughnut Economics
Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
Kate Raworth

Economics redesigned around what people need and what the planet can sustain, described with the specificity that makes it possible to imagine.

Designing Regenerative Cultures
Daniel Christian Wahl

The book that introduced me to the three horizons framework, and one of the most thorough attempts to describe what a regenerative society could actually look like.

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
Charles Eisenstein

On the space between the story that's ending and the one that hasn't arrived yet, and what it feels like to live there.

Becoming Wise
An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
Krista Tippett

What emerges when you spend years listening carefully to people across every discipline and tradition about what it means to live well together.

On the inner transformation

The writers who taught me that the person you bring to the work matters as much as the work itself, and that sitting with uncertainty long enough to understand it is its own kind of discipline.

What It Takes to Heal
How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World
Prentis Hemphill

On why transforming ourselves is not separate from transforming the world, and why the body knows things the mind refuses to admit.

The Road Less Traveled
A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
M. Scott Peck

Love, discipline, and spiritual growth as the unglamorous foundation of becoming a whole person.

Braving the Wilderness
The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone
Brené Brown

On belonging without fitting in, and the courage it takes to hold your own ground when the group would rather you didn't.

The Four Pivots
Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves
Shawn Ginwright

Four pivots that move from deficit to possibility, from transaction to relationship, and from the language of what's wrong to the practice of what could be.

A Way of Being
Carl Rogers

The quiet radical idea that being fully present with another person, without agenda, is itself transformative.