Written by Josephine Sorciere, Strategic Coherence Architect, specializing in decision clarity before commitment. Josephine works with visionary founders, innovators, and purpose-led leaders to reveal whether their solutions, leadership, and the systems they seek to influence are truly aligned for sustainable success.
This article is the fourth in a twelve-part thought leadership series exploring Relational Coherence: a way of seeing the relationships, conditions, and underlying architecture that influence what becomes possible within people, organizations, ventures, and living systems.
The series invites readers to look beyond the individual parts of a situation and consider what is happening between them. Across the twelve articles, Josephine explores how inherent nature, conditions, relationship, timing, participation, and stewardship shape outcomes, and how greater perception of these influences can bring greater clarity to the choices we make.
Future articles will continue to explore these principles and their relevance to life, leadership, business, innovation, land and complex decision-making.
We tend to think of relationships as something that happens between people.
Our relationships with partners, colleagues, friends, clients and communities are easy to recognize because we experience them directly. We know that the quality of those relationships influences how we feel, how we communicate and what becomes possible between us.
Yet relationship extends far beyond human interaction.
A business exists in relationship with its customers and the environment in which it operates. A technology enters into relationship with the organization adopting it. A crop interacts with soil, water and climate. Capital influences the venture into which it flows, just as the needs and direction of the venture influence how that capital is used.
Even an idea changes once it enters the world.
Nothing exists in isolation.
Looking at the Space Between
We are accustomed to examining things individually.
When something goes wrong, we naturally look for the part responsible. Is there something wrong with the strategy? The technology? The leadership? The market? The person? We separate the situation into components because doing so helps us understand complexity.
There is considerable value in this approach. Yet something important can disappear when our attention remains fixed on the individual parts.
The relationship between them.
Ponder for a moment: what if the outcome you are trying to change does not belong to any one part of the situation, but is emerging through the relationship between them?
A highly capable person can flourish within one team and struggle within another. The person has not suddenly become less capable. Place the same crop into two different environments, and its expression may vary considerably. Introduce identical technology into two organizations, and one may integrate it successfully while the other encounters resistance at every stage.
The individual element matters.
So does everything it is in relationship with.
Relationship Changes What Becomes Possible
This becomes particularly interesting when we stop thinking of relationship as something requiring consciousness.
Consider a new technology.
Before it is created, it exists as an idea or possibility. Through human imagination, expertise, and intention, that idea gradually acquires form. It develops a purpose, capabilities, requirements, and limitations. Once introduced into the world, it begins interacting with systems that already exist.
The technology may require particular infrastructure. People need the capability and willingness to use it. Regulations may influence its deployment. Existing processes may need to adapt. The surrounding environment may respond in ways its creators never anticipated.
None of these elements exists independently of the others once they come together.
Something new is being created through their interaction.
The same is true of a venture. A founder may bring the original intention, yet over time the venture develops structures, relationships, responsibilities and pressures of its own. Decisions made within it influence employees, investors, customers, suppliers and communities. Those relationships, in turn, influence what the venture can become.
This is where our conventional understanding of relationship begins to expand.
What Is Something Here to Be?
There is another layer worth considering.
Everything has an inherent nature.
An acorn carries the inherent capacity to become an oak tree. It will never become a rose, regardless of how carefully we nurture it. Yet whether that oak reaches maturity depends greatly upon the conditions and relationships through which its nature is expressed.
The same principle can be observed elsewhere.
A piece of land has particular characteristics, capacities and limitations. A technology is designed to perform certain functions. A venture begins with an intention and develops an identity through its creation. An organization has a purpose, culture, history and existing way of operating.
Before asking how we can make something perform differently, there may be value in asking:
What is this inherently capable of becoming, and what is influencing its ability to express that capacity?
That question moves us away from looking solely at individual performance and towards understanding the wider conditions through which potential is expressed.
It also changes the way we approach intervention.
When Good Things Meet
Perhaps one of the most useful examples is the assumption that two individually strong elements should naturally work well together.
We recognize from human relationships that this is rarely guaranteed. Two intelligent, capable people may bring very different values, rhythms or ways of operating into a partnership. Each can remain exceptional in their own right while the relationship between them struggles to flourish.
Why would we assume other systems behave differently?
A proven solution can meet a highly capable organization and still encounter difficulty. An innovative agricultural intervention can be introduced onto productive land and produce an unexpected result. Investment can enter a promising venture and alter the pressures influencing its development.
Each element may be valuable.
The relationship creates its own conditions.
This is why assessing the parts can only take us so far. Eventually, we have to look at what happens when they meet.
We Are Always Participating
Once we begin seeing relationship more broadly, another realization follows.
We are already participating in the systems around us.
Every decision introduces something into relationship with something else. Changing a leadership structure influences how people participate. Introducing a technology changes workflows, expectations and capabilities. Altering how land is used changes relationships between soil, water, biodiversity and human activity.
The consequences may be immediate or take years to become visible. Either way, participation has occurred.
This is where relationship becomes more than an interesting philosophical idea. It becomes profoundly practical.
Before introducing change, we can begin asking different questions.
What already exists here?
What relationships are supporting the current situation?
Which conditions may be constraining it?
What will this decision enter into relationship with?
And what might become possible, or impossible, once those relationships change?
These questions do not give us absolute certainty. They give us something potentially more valuable: a fuller picture of what we are actually participating in.
Seeing the Living Architecture
This wider understanding of relationship sits at the heart of Relational Coherence.
It asks us to see beyond the individual elements of a situation and become curious about the living architecture connecting them. The people matter. The solution matters. The environment matters. Their inherent capacities and existing conditions matter.
Then there is the space between them.
That space is not empty.
It is continually influencing what can emerge.
Once we begin noticing this, situations that previously seemed confusing can start to make more sense. We may discover that neither side of a difficult relationship is inherently the problem. A promising solution may need different conditions in which to flourish. An organization may possess considerable capacity that its current relationships prevent it from expressing.
Perhaps this is one of the most important perceptual shifts available to us.
We can continue becoming increasingly sophisticated at analyzing the parts.
We can also learn to see what is happening between them.
Because once the relationship becomes visible, we are finally seeing more of the whole.
More from the Relational Coherence Series:
Previous article: What Are You Not Measuring?
Relational Coherence offers a different way of seeing the relationships and conditions shaping our lives, businesses, and wider systems. To explore Josephine Sorciere’s work and the thinking behind Relational Coherence, visit her expert profile on She Owns Success.
