There are tools to measure the quality of personal relationships which examine aspects such as strength and closeness. But none that have been developed specifically to look at relationships in systems.
Yet in our work as systems practitioners we talk all the time about the importance of relationships in systems leadership.
“This is relational work,” we say. We don’t always clarify what we mean by relationships, or how we might know whether a relationship is good. Do all relationships count? Here are three ways of thinking about system relationships and what improvement might imply.
WEAK TIES
Granovetter’s work on weak and strong ties offers a starting-point.
His theory suggests,
“… weak ties allow distant clusters of people to access novel information that can lead to new opportunities, innovation, and increased productivity” (Granovetter, 1973)
It has obvious relevance in whole systems work. When we talk about building relationships in systems we’re not necessarily proposing becoming best friends for life with colleagues in other parts of the system. It might be more about connecting with people you don’t know very well, who you may never get to know closely, but who connect to other people, and they connect to others and so on. Connecting is the point. Not what that connection might be able to do for you or you for them in the future. How can you possibly know?
So one measure of relationship improvement in systems is increasing your weak ties over a week or a month.
Going to conferences, workshops, events can generate weak ties. So can travelling to work – the person you sit next to on the bus (not the Underground – nobody talks to people they don’t know on the Underground unless they’re in Glasgow), the person you see at Parkrun, the colleague ahead of you in the queue for coffee.
Skills in developing weak ties – asking questions, being curious, listening, connecting – are measurable assets in systems leadership.
This of course strikes terror into the hearts of many would-be systems leaders.
“I don’t want to talk to people on buses. I want to put my earbuds in and listen to a podcast.”
Fair enough.
BROKERING CONNECTIONS
Weak ties aren’t the only kind of relationships that matter in systems. The weak/strong ties dichotomy is anyway a bit polarised for systems which are by nature complex and unpredictable. Weak ties can morph into stronger ones, for instance, as contexts change.
Another way of thinking about relationships might be to consider the locus, the domain in our lives in which the relationship is situated. A brief spider map of my social relationships identifies family, work, football, antiques, writing, politics, my neighbourhood as places where I connect to different people. The boundaries between these spheres ought to be permeable but only if I work at it. That’s less about me connecting to more people, it’s really about how I build bridges across the spheres to connect people to other people.
Or, as Myron Rogers put it, rather more succinctly:
“Connect the system to more of itself”.
Someone at work is looking for a speaker on sustainable energy. My Uber driver last month was an expert in renewables, might I connect them?
Or in my writing class someone mentions they lived in Peru for a while; my colleague is going hiking in South America so I broker the connection.
As humans, as social animals, we can make these sorts of connections without great effort, almost serendipitously. We may never know what difference we made.
NETWORKING
The fact that I’m getting older is not, as my daughter rudely points out, the reason I know a lot of people. It probably helps, but I am, for example, in touch with friends from business school who I last saw 25 years ago one of whom recently provided me with a contact in their business who helped me develop my knowledge of AI (ChatGPT was not used to write this article, although arguably it could have been even better if I had tried it).
Building relationships through networking is connecting with a purpose. It takes time – responding to alumni invitations, joining LinkedIn, (or remember Friends Reunited?), sending out emails to people you heard speak, or met at a conference – and it can feel manipulative if you’re on the receiving end.
So the focus has to be on the other person. What do I have to offer them, as opposed to ‘how can they be useful to me?’
Is networking anything more than building patronage and exclusion? I think so. But we have to pay attention to difference. No point building relationships with people whose experience of the world is the same as yours: not if we want system change (and I think we do). Relationship-building through networking has to involve actively seeking out different and marginalised views, listening to people who disagree with us, connecting with an open mind.
MEASURING IMPROVEMENT
The measure of your skill in building relationships in systems could be:
- How many weak ties you’ve created in a given time period
- Who you’ve brokered a connection between
- How has a relationship changed my perspective or added to my understanding?
I asked my husband what he thought the secret of lasting relationships might be. We’ve been living together for 43 years.
“Low expectations,” he said, “And a sense of humour”. The latter is always important.
Systems Leadership, Lessons & Learning 