Relationships are the Wire
In the last several years I’ve come to find relationships are central to everything. This sounds so obvious as to be a cliche, but I think there’s a level of depth to this that we don’t always acknowledge and far-reaching implications that we don’t consider.
I recently coauthored a piece on building cultures of learning. It’s the latest result of an ongoing multi-year conversation and series of experiments that Lena and I have been conducting together since 2018. In the piece we talk about how a culture of learning begins with what we call “learning relationships” that are made up of individuals with an appetite for learning who have built trust with each other. In a way, we wrote a mirror in which we reflect on the way we’ve collaborated over the years, learning as we go, building what I would consider a “learning relationship.”
This seems to be something of a theme.
It started with a knowledge management project I worked on early in my career. We were trying to help a large team migrate their knowledge base off of Lotus notes and, in the process, address some important challenges they were facing due to changes in how they worked. One day I’ll write the case study on that project, but why I mention it now was a single thread: “sneaker net.” It started like all threads that lead to profound insights, as an offhand comment in a discovery interview.
Everyone on the project (and using the system) knew that discoverability was the core issue. No one could find what they were looking for unless they already knew where it was, and with new talent joining the team this was becoming a huge roadblock to growth. This was something we poked at during our discovery conversations with a question: “how do you get information on a topic related to your work that you’re unfamiliar with?”
Most people said the usual: search a bit and then give up, ask my manager, go to Google. But one senior leader said “I go to my sneaker net.”
The “sneaker net” turned out to be a way of describing the robust network of colleagues that he’d come to rely on over many years with the team. He would walk from desk to desk based on the conceptual map he had, each person being a go-to expert for different broadly defined topic areas, and if even if he didn’t know exactly who was the expert on something, he could find them in a couple of hops at most. Just by walking the office. The sneaker net was people, and more importantly, it was relationships.
This became a key theme for the project: replicate the sneaker net, help people build their own sneaker nets, put people at the center and move information out to the edges.
This was the first encounter I had with “learning relationships” and informed much of my approach since, always seeking to center people as the connectors in complex, large, or messy systems, building scaffolding that promotes the growth of relationships, whether long-running professional collaborations or ephemeral interactions between a front line service provider and a customer. We help each other make sense of things in ways we cannot on our own.
This expanded into something of a broader critique of individualism, through readings like Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Thinking in Systems, and From Rationality to Relationality: Ubuntu as an Ethical & Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance, among many (many, many) others.
I like how that last paper frames individualism as
in its broadest terms [...] a family of concepts, of which some connote “a dynamic capitalist economic rationality—utilitarian, competitive, and profit maximizing—inimical to the supposed torpor of feudal and tribal mentality alike.”
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From Rationality to Relationality, citing Meer, Zubin. Individualism: the Cultural Logic of Modernity. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011.
The paper goes on to talk about individualism’s place in colonialism and capitalism, (I’ll probably come back to that in another piece)
This connected to another reading: The Real World of Technology, probably my very first introduction to a social critique of technology which showed that technological development was not inherently liberating, but could in fact be a method of increased control and disempowerment, especially when designed and implemented at the individual level.
The other thing that stood out when reading From Rationality to Relationality was this framing of individual and community as interdependent and possibly even co-constructive.
The individual and the community act in harmony and are connected throughout time and space. This self-similarity is reflected in ubuntu’s commonly cited aphorisms “I am because you are,” and “a person is a person through other persons.”
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From Rationality to Relationality, citing Mbiti, J. African Religions and Philosophy. 1969; Tutu, 2000.
A recent revisit of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed sharpens this even further: without engaging in mutual, interdependent, relational (dialogical) learning in service of deepening our understanding together, we cannot fully realize our humanity. The learning relationship is, for me, a synthesis and distillation of all these ideas (and probably more).
Importantly, this type of learning cannot happen through rote information transfer. It must come from praxis, application and reflection as the path to developing knowledge, as knowledge itself cannot really be transferred. Only recently (as in last week) did I run across a paper that outlines much of this in a framework for Building a Culture of Learning at Scale (McKenzie, 2021). Mindsets and relationships are two of the three layers described. It’s very much worth a read.
Praxis requires material action. I find Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next) to be relevant here. Rather than learning, both focus on material actions for transforming material conditions. Both also speak to the importance of reflection. This feels to me much like a design research approach: learn, design an intervention, observe the results, reflect, and iterate. However in this context, we’re not performing any intervention, but interventions on our own behalf conducted with others who we are in community, or relationship, with. After all a relationship doesn’t have to be a friendship or romantic relationship, consider also professional relationships, our neighbors, and other members of many the communities and sub-communities with which we act.
Care Work asks “what makes it possible to give and receive care?” and, while Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha also poses the question “what happens when we can’t live interdependently all the time?” — an important question to consider — this doesn’t negate the role relationships play in being a site of care work. Even the act of providing care work creates a relationship, and ideally (I think) one grounded in compassion and love rather than transaction (which will only take us back to harsh individuality).
During a panel on responsible power, one thing that stood out to me was that “responsible” often comes down to groundedness and accountability. A self-awareness of potential harms isn’t enough, you need to be in community with the people you are acting with. Solidarity is a radical posture and it requires you enter the situation of those who you are expressing solidarity with. I keep thinking about this. Relationships are the site of the foundational work of caring for each other, of reflection and understanding, of learning, and accountability.
In other words: relationships are the wire on which we live and grow.
In this metaphor we're grapes.