[On LinkedIn, Nick Kimber asked:
Hello. Can anybody point me to a decent accessible history of relational practice/thinking/ leadership (ideally short form)? I’m writing something on test and learn and have a good sense of the background to the emergence of ‘digital’ approaches, but relationalisms history over the last 30/40 years is a bit fuzzier to me. Paging those who know a lot more about this subject than me: Becca Dove Jessica Studdert Simon Parker Anna Randle James Plunkett Dan Honig Osian Jones
There are loads of good responses from people I deeply admire in this space. And as I say below, I was utterly nerdsniped and did a long response – reproduced below.]
I was utterly nerdsiped by this – a seemingly impossible question which seems to bring together everything I’m interested in. So this is a LONG answer to a short question, mostly for my own processing, but it might be of some use to some others….
I love that you want an accesible history and you got a Friday night nerd pile-on. There’s no neat history here because – appropriately – it’s not a ‘thing’, its a weaving of relationships. So this thread’s a live attempt by public service people to reconstruct an intellectual and practical tradition that we’ve all been using, defending, and in some cases selling for 30–70 years – but which, unlike ‘digital’, never wrote itself down in one place. Digital had its origin myths written for it: agile manifesto, lean startup, user-centred design, GDS, service standards, multidisciplinary teams, test-and-learn. There’s a canon and a creation story.
Relational practice never got a canon. It has practitioners, and it’s more about the constellations of individual practitioners than the multivarious origins and developments.
You might get good answers from the folks at Murmurations Journal of Systemic Practice – I think this is really their field.
Others I don’t see tagged include Nairy McMahon – ORSC should be more referenced here – a great bunch of techniques.
Nora Bateson who has things to say about the ‘use’ of this label in this space, her own work, and her heritage.
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations as a core of this work.
June Holley‘ Network Weaving
Obviously deep threads in asset-based community development Cormac Russell
And I’ll tag Anne Bennett Jon Harvey Munira Thobani Stephen Moss Penny Shapland-Chew Lynne Wardle Ed Straw Emma Harewood Roger Duck Jane Searles Nour Sidawi Centre for Relational Care Jane Graham Ray Ison Gerald Midgley Francis Heylighen who all may have things to say. I am missing so many others too!
There’s also relational OD and a whole line of work from Berne’s Transactional Analysis
Not to mention Co-ordinated Management of Meaning which Christine Oliver might say something about (and the ‘conversational’ and design strands of cybernetics, from Pask and Maturana etc – Paul Pangaro)
Constellations work which Ty Francis PhD and Penny might speak on,
And as Pierre E. NEIS points out, in Germany it’s often considered a requirement to be a manager to have training in systemic coaching, roughly from the Bateson/family therapy school.
Dialogic Organization Development Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak
Techno-social systems – Merrelyn Emery, Barry Oshry and human system dynamics (cc John Watters and Jeff Boudro) – both based on observation of familiar disempowering patterns of relationship, and potentially better alternatives.
Bioss and the whole post-Jacques Requisite Organisation and Systems Leadership Theory – an attempted to put hierarchies in service of good relationship.
And the Future Search Network lineage – Sandra Janoff and Michael Donnelly – bringing the whole system into the room to make the relationships central to development.
And then, of course, there’s ethnography which Robin Pharoah has done deep work in and with, which Prof Donna Hall, CBE advocates as centrally important to the Wigan Deal.
Michael Garfield is diving deep into this in a big picture way with his Humans On The Loop project.
So I think that’s why you don’t get one neat PDF, you get 73 comments, 6 reposts, and 40 people tagging each other across social work, care, Cabinet Office, community development, systems convening, complexity leadership, First Nations practice, restorative justice, asset-based community development, trauma-informed work, neighbourhood health, and digital ethics. Which is basically the point: relational practice is sort of lingua franca across public service reform, but its lineage is braided, oral, embodied, and contested.
To declare ‘the history’ would be dishonest, western, and slightly colonial, as Becca Dove correctly points out. But here’s my attempt at a workable map – where, believe it or not, I’ve tried to keep the scope focused 🙂
>> First, what’re we even talking about?
Relational thinking says that what matters is what happens between people, not just what sits inside them or what’s done to them. Problems are not primarily individual pathologies or system failures; they’re patterns of relationship. If you want a change in outcomes, you change the relationships in which those outcomes are produced.
Relational practice is doing work on that basis. It means working with, not doing to. It means recognising that relationships are not just the delivery mechanism for outcomes, they are themselves the outcome – Toby Lowe has been banging that drum effectively for years. You haven’t ‘delivered’ a service because you processed a transaction. You’ve delivered something when trust, capability, safety, agency and connection increased in the actual lives of the people involved.
Relational leadership says leadership is not a heroic individual property, it’s a quality of connection in a system. Mary Uhl-Bien‘s work on relational leadership makes this very explicit: leadership lives in the social glue, not in the org chart. The leader is the person (or team, or network) able to hold the space where people can make sense together and act together across boundaries.
Where did it all come from?
I think you can tell this story in at least three different ways, and the thread surfaces all three at once:
(1) indigenous and restorative traditions that pre-date the bureaucratic state
(2) professional practice inside the welfare state, especially social work and health, and
(3) organisational learning / systems / complexity work on how humans collaborate, especially under pressure.
They overlap, but they’re not the same root.
And, by the way, they’re deeply bound up in many forms of radicalism – communitarianism, socialism, Marxim-Leninism, Maoism, anarchism, Methodism, Ludditism, Trade Unionism/syndicalism, Cooperativism, the whole Human Potential Movement (National Teaching Laboratories, Tavistock and Brunel), post-war therapy and social reconstruction, Shambala, Club of Rome, Esalen, Findhorn, Saul Alinsky, I could go on… forms Judaism, Christianity, I assume very much Islam and the other major religions too.. in any case, the radicalism is what holds so much potential – can also become a barrier to success – and is the flip side of instrumentalised quietism which the ‘tamer’ forms offer (Personally I think both sides of The Big Society – and the work Danny Kruger did on the Civil Society Strategy compared to Covenant and current political positioning (along with his actual work in life) show some of the range and the risk).
And most of the things I link here have what I consider good and bad sides – and are probably *weakest* when they’re acting as a reaction *against* something, even thought that’s the go-to positioning and strongest marketing position!
>>1 The deep root: relationality existed before the state
Multiple people in the thread point out that ‘relational practice’ is not a shiny 2010s innovation. It goes back to First Nations and indigenous practices of community care, repair, accountability and decision making. Restorative practice – now seen in schools, probation, youth justice, even some prisons – comes straight from those traditions. The core moves there are: build and sustain relationship, address harm in the relationship, and repair relationship, with equality of voice and fairness of process. Lesley Parkinson describes this as a workplace philosophy now, but it’s of course older than ‘workplace’ language.
This is important politically. It stops us making the classic arrogant move of pretending white post-war public administration invented “relational”. It didn’t. In fact, you could argue (and several do) that one thing the bureaucratic welfare state did was sever relationships and replace them with transactions; and relational practice is, in part, a later attempt to heal that damage.
>>2 The professional/practice root inside welfare institutions (1950s onwards)
If you look inside health, social work, and community practice, you start to see a more documented strand.
General practice in the NHS used to be deeply relational: cradle-to-grave continuity, actual knowledge of family context, long-term trust. That’s what Anne Marie Cunningham calls out. The shift to ‘access’, often digitally mediated, is experienced by many as a loss of that continuity. The stakes, by the way, are not fluffy. Continuity of care correlates with lower mortality.
Social work (children’s and adults) formalised relationship-based practice early. People like Felix Biestek, Carl Rogers, Gregory Bateson, later Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto on ethics of care – this is 1950s through 1980s – all centring the dignity of the person in context, not the compliance of the case to procedure.
Becca Dove gives a sketch timeline here: Bateson, Rogers and Biestek in the 50s/60s; Miller’s relational-cultural theory and Gilligan/Tronto’s ethics of care in the 70s/80s; then Mary Uhl-Bien on relational leadership in the 2000s; then Geoff Mulgan and Marc Stears’ work in the 2010s on the ‘relational state’. That already looks pretty chronological.
By the 1980s/90s you also get systemic family therapy and social constructionism coming into practice (Shotter, McNamee). The shift here is radical: stop treating ‘the problem’ as located in the individual. See it as a property of interaction in the family, the team, the service environment. That gives you ideas like ‘relational responsibility’ – we are responsible for how we coordinate meaning together, not just for our private intentions.
From there, social work, youth offending teams, trauma-informed work, strengths-based practice, Early Help, Think Family, and asset-based community development (ABCD) all grow as variations. The language differs, the funding streams differ, and the logos on the slide decks differ, but the underlying claim is the same: you get better, fairer, cheaper outcomes when you stay with people in context, build on strengths, and grow capability in relationship instead of passing people between services like radioactive parcels.
There’s also a live line from David Robinson and the Relationships Project through to contemporary relationship-centred practice. This keeps the focus ruthlessly practical: how do you design services so that relationship, not throughput, is the first design principle?
You can see this strand starting to get codified around public sector reform in the UK in the 2000s and 2010s: Hilary Cottam and Charles Leadbeater (flagged by Simon Parker), the work at Demos and Participle, then the ‘relational state’ work at IPPR that Thea Snow points to. That IPPR piece is basically saying: the state should explicitly see meaningful human relationships as both the route to outcomes and an outcome in themselves. That’s not far off Toby Lowe’s current articulation in Human Learning Systems, and Dawn Plimmer is explicit about this in the thread: you need relationships, you need learning, and you need systems. All three.
So by the 2010s, in UK public services, ‘relational’ is no longer only a social work ethic. It’s also an efficiency argument and a governance argument. The claim is: transactional systems generate terrible outcomes at great cost because they are blind to relationship. A relational state would reverse that.
>>3 The organisational / leadership / systems root (1960s onwards)
Alongside that practice lineage, there’s an organisational lineage. This is where OD (organisational development), systems thinking, complexity, and later network leadership live.
In the 1950s–70s you get the first cracks in the way Taylorism (scientific management) and Fordism (assembly-line bureaucracy) were being applied – (both of them, in fact, had another side which we should acknowledge). People like Kurt Lewin, Douglas McGregor (Theory X and Theory Y), Rensis Likert, Edgar Schein, Chris Argyris are all saying, in slightly different ways: you cannot run human systems as if they are machines and expect health. You need participation, psychological safety, inquiry, trust, and the ability to reflect on how we’re working together. Louise Patmore lays this out very clearly in her multi-decade timeline in the thread. All this draws from post-war therapeutic work and the human potential movement as a whole (along with cybernetics, systems, complexity).
By the 1970s–90s you start to get explicit systems and ecological thinking applied to organisations: Miller and Rice on the primary task of the organisation, Bronfenbrenner on ecological systems, Argyris on organisational learning and defensive routines. This is where practice shifts from diagnosis (‘I will fix you’) to dialogue (‘we will learn together what matters’). The move from diagnostic OD to dialogic OD is not cosmetic. It’s a civilisational pivot: from control to conversation.
Then in the 1990s and 2000s complexity science lands in management. Margaret Wheatley, Karl Weick, Patricia Shaw, Mary Uhl-Bien and others start saying publicly what practitioners have muttered privately for decades: organisations are living systems in turbulent environments, not controllable machines. You can’t centrally design the right answer and roll it out. You have to create the conditions for learning, adaptation, and connection across silos. Leadership becomes less ‘I set the vision and cascade it,’ and more ‘I convene the people, hold the tensions, and help the system notice itself.’ That’s where systems convening comes in – Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Etienne Wenger-Trayner et al. – and why people now talk about ‘network weavers’, ‘adaptive space’ (Michael Arena), ‘relational coordination’ (Jody Hoffer Gittell), and so on.
In parallel, self-managed organisations, TEAL, liberated structures, appreciative inquiry, human learning systems, communities of practice, ABCD, and neighbourhood teams are all doing the same basic move in different dialects: stop treating people as units in a programme and start treating them as nodes in a living network.
By the 2010s and 2020s, this strand meets the public service strand. That fusion has names now: Human Learning Systems (Toby Lowe, Dawn Plimmer in this thread, obviously many others), systems convening, adaptive space, collaborative leadership, neighbourhood health models, multiple complex needs teams, serious youth violence collaborations, etc. Gian Durán, PhD is right: the pattern that’s emerging is that the most durable reform work is relational, reflective, and trust-based, not just data-driven.
>>Digital, test-and-learn, and the convergence problem
Now fold in digital.
Test-and-learn in the digital world (alpha/beta, iterate, improve the service, measure the user journey, ship again) gave government permission to experiment in public. That is not nothing. But digital’s ‘user-centred’ move was mostly about the interface between the individual user and the service. (Worthy of note how much of socio-technical systems was about ‘human-computer interfaces’ – originally a BIG picture item, less so later). It optimised the transaction. It smoothed the journey. It made the thing usable.
Relational practice is more ambitious and more unsettling. It says the main unit of change is not the transaction at all. The main unit of change is the relationship between people, in context, over time. Between practitioner and resident. Between resident and their own network. Between frontline workers across organisational borders. Between teams across systems that don’t naturally talk.
That’s why digital alone can’t do this job. You cannot ‘portal’ your way to trust. You need continuity, presence, ethical commitment, emotional labour, mutual accountability, a willingness to sit with someone when they’re chaotic or frightened or angry or ashamed, and a mandate to act across organisational boundaries in response to what emerges in that relationship.
And this is where Human Learning Systems explicitly welds together the relational with the systemic with the experimental. The argument there is: if you want adaptive public services that can face complexity, you need three things working together.
- You need relationships (because that’s where value is created).
- You need learning (because reality is changing faster than your plan).
- You need systems thinking (because what matters crosses organisational boundaries and nobody ‘owns’ it).
So rather than pretending we can design the perfect service model and roll it out, you cultivate places and teams that can notice, learn, adapt, and act together in context. That’s ‘test and learn’, but for whole systems, not just for digital products.
>> Why this matters now
There’s a reason this conversation is catching fire across Cabinet Office, local government, health, social care, community development, evaluation, complexity science, and neighbourhood practice all at once. We’re in a legitimacy crisis. The late 20th century model of public service – cut to the bone, command, control, transact, budget, audit – is visibly failing under the weight of complexity, trauma, inequality, environmental stress, and financial collapse. and “Brexit” and war in Europe and Covid, of course.
We can’t fund, scale, or spreadsheet our way out. We have to regrow civic capacity in place, in relationship, with people, across institutional boundaries. That’s the work on co-production, multiple complex needs, neighbourhood health, Team Around the Child, violence reduction, restorative schools, strengths-based adult social care, place-based partnerships, systems convening. It all smells the same because it all is the same move – that doesn’t mean it all works or is consistent…
>> So, a working summary
Relational practice is not a technique. It’s the rediscovery that the core currency of public value is relationship, not transaction.
Relational thinking says outcomes are generated by networks of relationship, not delivered by programmes acting on individuals.
Relational leadership says leadership is an emergent property of trust, shared purpose, and mutual commitment, not a job title.
Historically, you can trace it (at least in UK public service terms) through:
- Indigenous and restorative traditions of care, repair and accountability.
- 1950s–80s social work (not to mention Community Librarians (John Vincent) etc etc), therapeutic practice, ethics of care, and community health.
- 1980s–2000s attempts inside services to resist and outlive New Public Management and transactional bureaucracy, from Camden to Lambeth to the GLC to Demos to Participle.
- 1990s–2020s organisational learning, systems thinking and complexity leadership, which reframed leadership as convening, holding adaptive space, and enabling distributed intelligence.
- 2010s–2020s fusion work: relational welfare, relationship-centred practice, neighbourhood health, Human Learning Systems, systems convening, adaptive space, relational coordination, trauma-informed and strengths-based practice, and all the place-based stuff people are doing in reality while the paperwork still pretends services are linear.
There’s clearly no single authoritative ‘history of relationalism’. The closest we have in public policy language is probably the IPPR’s ‘relational state’, Hilary Cottam’s Radical Help and earlier Demos/Participle work, plus the social work chronologies people like Becca are pointing to. In organisational practice you get Patricia Shaw’s Changing Conversations in Organizations, Argyris and Schön on organisational learning, Uhl-Bien on relational leadership, Wenger-Trayner on systems convening, and so on. In health you get Mol’s The Logic of Care, the continuity-of-care evidence base, relational coordination, and the relationships-first practice led by people like Robinson.
The fact that no one body ‘owns’ this is not a weakness. It’s the signature. Relational practice spreads the way culture spreads, not the way policy spreads. People learn it, live it, and defend it, often in defiance of the system they nominally work for. BUT the absence of boundaries and controls naturally also means it can veer into unproductive radicalism or be harnessed to dominant interests, it can be charlatanised for control and power or simplified for convenience, it can be done badly.
Which is why, to steal a line from the thread, the real history might now be the thread itself. The system is self-aware enough to say out loud that the work is relational. The next step is whether we’re brave enough to act as if we believe it – and *argue* through what it actually should mean in practice. That would mean – in my opinion – working through what we count as extremes and why they are problematic, defining the ‘golden mean’, identifying the bear pits. The popularity of this thread sort of seems to underline that there isn’t actually enough relationality amongst the people trying to bring this to fruition… it needs and deserves real work at this overview level.
And I now realise I haven’t actually mentioned ‘systems change’, ‘systems leadership’, *actual* systems approaches, Power to Change, A Better Way, Community Catalysts CIC, and so on and so on.
Original thread
Systems Community of Inquiry 