Eva Keiffenheim

Eva Keiffenheim — research and writing with leaders reshaping learning and systems

“Kepler knew what we habitually forget—that the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort.”

Maria Popova, Figuring

What is systems change

The transatlantic slave trade was once allowed by governments and embedded in international commerce, until resistance by enslaved people and abolitionist movements helped make it illegal and morally indefensible. In most societies, women were denied political rights, until suffrage movements transformed the meaning of citizenship. Leaded petrol was once used around the world, until evidence of its harm drove a global phase-out.

These shifts remind us that no social order is inevitable: when we question the assumptions that sustain it, what once seemed normal can become unacceptable, what seemed permanent can give way, and a new horizon of possibility can emerge.

But change on this scale is never the achievement of a single person. It is a collective and often generational effort.

My work contributes to that effort by strengthening connections and building shared understanding among the people and organisations working to transform systems. I research and document how change happens. The research is often collaborative and participatory. Its outputs take many forms, including stories, case studies, provocation papers and reports.

Selected Work Get in Touch

Selected Work

Teach For All — The Missing Piece

The Missing Piece was developed through three connected strands of research and learning: a review of evidence from around the world, ten original case studies, and a cross-case synthesis created with practitioners across the Teach For All network.

I collaborated with nine writers based in the contexts represented, using participatory methods adapted to each place to develop the case studies. Together, these strands revealed patterns across the network while preserving the differences that matter from one context to another.

Read The Missing Piece

Big Change — Leadership for a Thriving Future

Created by Big Change with eight partner organisations, Leadership for a Thriving Future brings together the experience of more than 30 leaders around the world, wider research, personal narratives and candid reflections. Their differing perspectives are woven into a collective exploration of what it means to reshape systems so that all young people can thrive.

Rather than treating leadership as a title or a fixed set of qualities, it is a practice — something expressed in particular moments and developed over a lifetime. It speaks to people leading from formal positions, as well as changemakers, activists, social entrepreneurs and others working to create change.

Read Leadership for a Thriving Future

What collaborators say about working together

“…you facilitated a process of reflection that I did not realize I needed…”

“…your brilliant writing, exceptional responsiveness and creative thinking…”

“…thank you for your leadership and partnership and making sense of collective voices…”

Work to build upon

Systems change never begins with a blank page. We inherit insights, practices, institutions, unfinished struggles — and the consequences of choices made before us.

The resources below offer different ways of seeing what holds a system in place and how it can change: by tracing interdependence, naming power, organising collective action, redesigning institutions, learning across difference, and challenging the assumptions that make the present order appear inevitable.

  1. “In nature nothing exists alone.”

    Revealed how synthetic pesticides move through connected living systems — and showed how evidence, communicated with clarity, can shift public understanding and policy.

    Explore Silent Spring

  2. Placed praxis — the relationship between reflection and action — at the centre of transformation. Freire argued that people living within oppressive systems must be agents of change, not passive recipients of solutions designed for them.

    Explore Pedagogy of the Oppressed

  3. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

    Made clear that transformation requires more than changing a system’s outcomes: it also means confronting the forms of power and exclusion embedded in its methods.

    Explore Sister Outsider

  4. “All that you touch
    You Change.
    All that you Change
    Changes you.”

    Named the reciprocity at the heart of systems work: whatever we set out to change, changes us.

    Explore Parable of the Sower

  5. Mapped different places to intervene in a system — from parameters and feedback loops to goals and paradigms. Meadows showed why changing the assumptions beneath a system can be more transformative than adjusting its most visible parts, while warning that leverage points are often pushed in the wrong direction.

    Read Leverage Points

  6. Made research itself visible as a system of power: who defines the questions, what counts as knowledge, whose account becomes authoritative, and who benefits from inquiry. Smith challenged supposedly neutral research traditions and opened space for Indigenous communities to shape their own research agendas.

    Explore Decolonizing Methodologies

  7. “What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”

    Made love a practice rather than a feeling — the daily ground that collective change is built on.

    Explore All About Love

  8. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”

    Framed hope and critical thinking as a paired discipline for sustaining long-horizon change work.

    Read the essay

  9. “What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”

    Reframed social change as fractal: small, relational practices set the patterns larger systems repeat.

    Explore Emergent Strategy

  10. Offers a practical map of six conditions that can hold a social or environmental problem in place: policies, practices, resource flows, relationships, power dynamics and mental models. It also asks organisations and funders to examine how their own behaviour may reproduce the conditions they seek to change.

    Use The Water of Systems Change

  11. Examines how experiences commonly treated as private problems — including trauma, chronic stress and illness — are shaped by relationships, institutions and cultural expectations. It invites us to ask not only what is happening within an individual, but what conditions around them have made distress widespread and come to be regarded as normal.

    Explore The Myth of Normal

  12. “Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that’s climate change or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic.”

    Reframes ambition as a resource for systems change: talent pointed at big neglected problems, not status.

    Explore Moral Ambition

About

Eva Keiffenheim
CV & Portfolio

Eva Keiffenheim is an independent researcher and writer at the intersection of systems change, learning, and leadership. A former public school teacher and Teach For Austria Fellow, she now partners with global organizations to document and drive paradigm shifts.

Her essays and newsletters — spanning over 400 articles — have reached more than eight million readers. She is a TEDx speaker and a Salzburg Global Fellow. Eva approaches change as both an intellectual and embodied practice, grounded in daily meditation, yoga, and somatics. Outside of work, you can find her hiking in the Alps, hanging out with cats, or dancing outdoors.

If you think we should work together, get in touch.