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 fifth 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 are often encouraged to focus on potential.
We see it in people, businesses, ideas, land and emerging technologies. Someone has extraordinary talent. A venture has enormous promise. A piece of land could become more productive. A new solution has the capacity to transform an industry.
Potential is compelling because it invites us to imagine what could be.
Yet potential does not express itself in isolation.
An extraordinary seed placed in depleted soil will respond differently from the same seed planted into conditions that support its growth. A highly capable person can expand within one environment and gradually contract within another. An innovation with genuine potential may flourish in one market while struggling to gain traction somewhere else.
The potential may still be present.
The conditions surrounding it influence what becomes possible.
The Conditions We Rarely Question
When something is underperforming, our attention naturally turns toward the thing itself.
We question the person, the strategy, the project or the solution. We look for weaknesses and seek ways to improve performance. Sometimes this leads us exactly where we need to go.
At other times, our attention is focused on only one part of the picture.
Ponder for a moment: where in your own life or work have you assumed something lacked potential when the conditions may simply have prevented that potential from being fully expressed?
Perhaps someone appeared to lack confidence in one role and became remarkably capable in another. A project that continually struggled for support found momentum after entering a different environment. An idea you abandoned years ago suddenly became viable because technology, resources, or circumstances had changed.
The capacity may have existed all along.
Something around it changed.
Potential and Expression Are Different Things
This distinction between what something inherently carries and what it is currently able to express is subtle, yet enormously important.
Consider a team member who is performing below expectations. Their current output gives us useful information, but it cannot tell us everything about their capability. Their role, leadership, workload, relationships, resources, and sense of psychological safety are all participating in what we currently see.
Change the conditions and a different expression may emerge.
The same applies beyond people.
A business model may be commercially viable yet constrained by regulation or infrastructure. A piece of agricultural land may possess considerable productive capacity while access to suitable water limits what can currently be grown. A technology may solve a genuine problem but depend upon supporting systems that have yet to mature.
Current expression is real. It deserves to be observed accurately.
It simply does not tell us everything about inherent capacity.
Conditions Are Always in Motion
One reason this matters is that conditions are rarely fixed.
Markets change. Leadership changes. Climate changes. Technology advances. People develop new capabilities. Communities evolve. Resources become available or disappear. Relationships strengthen, weaken, and reorganize.
What could not flourish five years ago may become entirely viable today.
The reverse is equally true. Something that worked exceptionally well under one set of conditions may begin to struggle as the environment around it changes. Continuing to repeat the same approach simply because it succeeded in the past can gradually create its own form of blindness.
Living systems continually respond to changing conditions.
Perhaps our decisions need to do the same.
This asks us to pay attention to the present rather than assuming that yesterday’s conditions still apply. It also encourages us to become curious when outcomes begin to change, because the change itself may be revealing that something within the wider system has shifted.
The Difference Between Constraint and Absence
There is a profound distinction between something being absent and something being constrained.
If capacity is absent, our choices may be limited.
If capacity exists but its expression is constrained, an entirely different field of possibility opens.
Imagine a regional community experiencing water scarcity. The immediate conclusion might be that the land can no longer support meaningful agricultural expansion. Yet perhaps the deeper question concerns the conditions through which water, land, infrastructure, technology and local knowledge currently relate.
A different water source, treatment technology, crop choice or distribution model could alter those conditions considerably.
The land itself has not become something else.
What it is able to support has changed because the conditions through which it participates have changed.
We see similar patterns within organizations. A team may appear resistant to innovation until the reason for the resistance becomes visible. Perhaps people are already operating beyond capacity. Perhaps previous initiatives damaged trust. Perhaps the proposed change conflicts with existing systems in ways that have never been acknowledged.
Once the constraint is understood, different choices become possible.
We Also Create Conditions
It is easy to think of conditions as circumstances happening around us.
Yet many of the conditions influencing an outcome are also being created through our own participation.
The way a leader communicates creates conditions. The structure of an investment creates conditions. How a technology is introduced creates conditions. The pace of implementation, allocation of resources, and sequence of decisions all influence what the wider system is being asked to carry.
This gives us considerable agency, although never complete control.
We cannot determine every condition surrounding an outcome. Weather changes. Markets move. Other people make choices. Unexpected events alter trajectories. Living systems contain countless influences beyond the reach of any individual decision-maker.
What we can do is become more conscious of the conditions in which we are participating.
That awareness changes the question from, How do I make this happen? to something wider:
What conditions would give this the greatest opportunity to flourish?
The difference may seem small.
Its implications are considerable.
Creating the Conditions for Coherence
Within Relational Coherence, conditions matter because they influence how fully something can express its inherent nature and capacity.
This does not mean creating perfect circumstances. Perfect conditions rarely exist, and living systems would have little opportunity to adapt if they did.
It means recognizing what is present.
Some conditions will support what wants to emerge. Others will constrain it. Certain constraints can be changed, while others must be understood and worked with. Occasionally, what we discover will tell us that the opportunity we imagined simply cannot be supported here, at least for now.
That too is valuable clarity.
We spend considerable energy trying to improve people, optimize systems and perfect solutions.
Sometimes the more powerful intervention is to look around them.
Because when the conditions change, what was there all along may finally have the opportunity to reveal itself.
More from the Relational Coherence Series:
Previous article: What Happens in the Space Between?
Next article: What If Relationship Is More Fundamental Than We Think?
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.
