The Relational Advantage

by Anil Kurian Thomas | NLP Trainer & Gestalt Practitioner

How we see each other shapes everything we build together

Most of us are battling labels, tags and structures, compartments and fragments that we have been trained to see. We have been trained to give them language, trained to recognise them as separate, and eventually trained to experience them as though they exist independently of us and even define us. Moving away from this, after years of conditioning, is hard. It is just plain hard. I say 'hard' because it's given to us even before we could make any choice, that early. Well, I say hard, not impossible. This conditioning exists in almost every role we occupy. We are given a point of view along with a responsibility. A designation comes with a way of seeing. A profession gives us its own language, methods, concerns and, often, its own chart of what is good and what is not. We learn to look at the world from where we have been placed. This is true across domains, relationships, roles and institutions. The categories themselves are not necessarily the problem. We need distinctions. We need disciplines, methods and areas of study. The problem begins when the categories through which we study the world become the limits of the world we are able to see. James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, examined how complex realities are often reduced into categories that can be counted, managed and controlled. In order to make something legible, distinctions are standardised and complexity is reduced. What is useful for administration, however, may not always reflect the complexity of lived reality. Over time, categories can become so deeply embedded within institutions that they begin to organise how people understand themselves and each other. And sadly, we reduce people and behaviour to numbers and empiricals, all in the name of better outputs and more effective protocols. People are not resources; they are resourceful, resourceful! And not just for profits. For institutions, systems, political agendas and ideologies too. Once a human being becomes something to be measured, managed and made useful, we begin to lose sight of everything else they are.

The understanding can be used to filter our lives through all concepts. What happens when we remain inside the boundaries of one profession, one ideology, one institution, one political position or one inherited way of knowing. A more diverse ecology of ideas and professions may allow us to notice relational linkages and interactions that remain invisible when we are looking through only one lens. This requires a different skill: the ability to zoom in and zoom out. To study the detail without losing the context. To see the micro and the macro, and to move laterally across fields, relationships and systems. This is beyond just thinking, it is a practice, calibration and feedback. Without which, we may remain inside a world already organised for us to see, a world whose categories have been shaped, among other forces, by capitalism, politics and organised religion. And after a while, the structures we inherited can begin to look like reality itself.

Relational knowing 

A single step is not the dance. Even that one step, when broken down, is not one thing. The hand may be moving while the neck remains still. One foot carries the weight while the other prepares to move. Different parts of the body are doing different things at the same time. To understand the step, we may study each of these details. But none of them, by themselves, is the dance. These movements are, in a sense, fragmented from the whole dance. They had been temporarily decontextualised so that we could study them. But there was an important difference. We know in our head that this is dance. We know that these isolated pieces belonged somewhere. That there was a larger context into which they would eventually fit. We would later see how one movement related to another, how the individual parts came together, and how the whole gave meaning to what we had been practising in isolation. The whole, the individual and their parts are therefore not interchangeable. Each holds the usefulness of something that will be or something that was. And there is a great deal that cannot be understood either in isolation or through generalisation.

This becomes important when we try to make sense of human behaviour. Why did he do that? Why did she say this? What does this behaviour mean? A behaviour does stand alone, it has a history. It occurs at a particular point in time, in relation to what was happening before it, what was present around it, who else was involved and what relationships already existed. The same words can mean different things at different times. The same action can carry a different meaning within a different relationship. From a Batesonian lens you can see that information lies in relationships and differences, rather than simply in isolated things. The question, then, is not only what happened? but also what was this happening in relation to? The fish is part of the ocean. When we say we love fish after eating a slice, that slice was never the fish. It stopped being the fish, in the sense that matters here, the moment it was taken out of the ocean. This is the difficulty, we often study the minor details (zooming in) of one piece and hope that, somehow, the pieces will reveal the whole. This is where systems thinking becomes important. When we extend this learning beyond one particular domain, and are ready to look at everything, climate, phones, divorces or even food as an industry, culture or even politics, and the way we describe and relate to it, our allergies and addictions, our relationships, a family, an illness in the body, or even a curriculum in education, all become part of the same syllabus we are discussing. The contexts may be different, but the question remains the same: what happens when we begin to understand something through its relationships rather than as an isolated thing? And when we are already working with relationships in coaching and leadership, how far can this be taken? Not only towards bringing different forms of knowing together, but towards understanding the information that emerges from relationships themselves. That is what we are looking at, the relational world we live in, how we interact within it, and how we come to know what we think we know.

Wolf ! 

I once came across a story about a wolf pack moving through deep snow. The story described a very deliberate arrangement. The old and the sick were at the front, setting a pace at which no one would be left behind. Behind them came the young and the strong, positioned where they could respond when needed. At the centre were the mothers and the young, the future of the pack, surrounded and protected. At the very back, slightly separated from the others, was the alpha. Watching, seeing and keeping a tap of the whole picture. Close enough to act and far enough to see everything. Ready to move wherever the pack needed when the situation changed. The story is not an established account of wolf behaviour. What if a collective could organise itself around what each member could do, rather than around a fixed hierarchy of who was strongest, most important or most visible? The old would not become irrelevant because they could no longer run fastest. The young would not simply be used for their strength. The future would not be treated as an afterthought. And leadership would not have to mean carrying the entire collective on one's shoulders.

The person at the back would need to be close enough to act and far enough to see. And that position would not have to remain fixed. This is where we zoom out. A wolf pack metaphor can be used to study the structure of a team or a family. Zoom out further, and collections of teams and families become organisations and societies. Zoom out again, and eventually, we have a nation. The structure changes, and the scale too. But the questions may remain surprisingly similar: How do we organise ourselves? Who needs protection? Who carries experience? Who responds when there is a threat? Who is watching the larger picture? And how do we hold the collective together when each member brings different strengths, limitations and needs? 

Then we move laterally. The question is no longer about wolves. It is about how we organise ourselves when we do not have the ideal team. Families do not choose every member. Organisations inherit people, histories and limitations. Nations certainly do not begin with a handpicked group of citizens.So the question cannot always be, ‘How do we win?’ It may be: How do we build a team that aligns with the collective? How does an organisation work towards winning while remaining responsible for the safety and sense of belonging of its people? The oldest members were once the ones who carried the collective. The pack exists, in part, because of what they contributed when they were younger. What does it mean to make space for them when they can no longer contribute in the same way?And what about the young? How do we create enough safety and belonging for them to feel, I belong here. This is also mine. I have a responsibility towards it. Because belonging changes the nature of participation. A person who feels that they are merely part of a system may do what is required. A person who experiences themselves as belonging to the collective may begin to take ownership of it. So, the question may have to be, How do we work with a team and help it remain a team? How do people begin to take ownership of the collective? This is where leadership becomes conscious. It is not simply about producing results or assembling the strongest individuals. It is about understanding people in relation to one another and to the collective they are part of. It is leading with empathy, purpose and connection, while recognising that what happens to one member affects the whole. Because when these conditions arise, a team can win. The task is not to create a winning team; it is to create a team that wants to win, that wants to carry the torch forward. Winning is no longer the leader’s goal alone. The vision begins to belong to the collective. This is vision alignment and inclusion. It is about creating safety, recognition and a genuine sense of belonging. It is about collaboration rather than competition. When people feel that they belong, they begin to take ownership. They are no longer simply working towards someone else’s vision; they begin to carry it as their own. And then the team does not have to be constantly pushed to win. It wants to contribute.

Complex systems 

The metaphor of the wolf pack and the concepts we have explored so far are, for me, an undercurrent. They are more than the vocabulary we use to describe our world. There is sameness in different things, and differences within the same things. Very Batesonian, of course, and deeply systemic. That is how we learn, participate and belong in this world, through our many relationships and by becoming witnesses to patterns. Otherwise, we may simply continue playing out our programming and conditioning, of hate, separation, labels, structures, compartments and fragments that we have been trained to see, trained to give language to, and trained to experience as separate. Moving away from this takes a rich perspective, and that brings us to the question of subjectivity. It does not matter who you are or what your context is: how do you describe your life, your roles and your behaviours, and those of the people with whom you are in a relationship? How do you communicate difficult ideas, desires and goals while holding space for another person to share theirs? Above all, how do you remain in a relationship and hold human spaces when their decisions make it difficult for you to continue? How do we make breakups, attrition, grief and loss part of everyday life, knowing that life comes in waves and that there are spaces that cannot be won? Because it is not always about winning. Sometimes, it is about living and holding through what cannot be won. Of course, there is always room for manipulation. You can win a ten-year war that nobody could have won, enter with a Trojan horse and manipulate an entire system, only to realise later that the consequences have followed you home. Odysseus won Troy, but lost all his men and took twenty years to return home. At some point, the question becomes, I won, but did my people win? Or did I lose people while winning? This is where the stakes become higher. How do we describe a living system while incorporating its complexity, its difficulties, its expectations, and the inner narratives of guilt, shame and fear? Subjectivity in complex systems brings us closer to these questions, What is it like to be you in this system? What do you see, feel and make sense of from where you stand? And what happens when I try to understand you without making space for that? If we remove subjectivity, what remains of the way we know ourselves, each other and the relationships we live in?

I think this gives us a good place to begin and to ask ourselves a question, how do we think about living things? We live in a world full of tools that help us organise what we see. We measure, define, label, categorise and diagnose. We build theories, research programmes and explanations. These tools are useful, of course, but they also shape what we are able to see. So what happens when we try to understand a living person only through the tools we have created to describe them? How do we think about communication and relationships without reducing them too quickly? Can we set ourselves free from the lenses through which we have been taught to see? Maybe not completely. But we can become aware of them. And that awareness gives us something important: a little distance between what we see and the way we have been taught to see it. In that distance, we may begin to notice something we had missed, not only about another person, but about ourselves. Our assumptions, our fears, our histories and the stories we bring into every relationship. And that may give us deeper access to our own subjectivity.