Exploring Relationality

We partnered with some of Arising Quo’s Accountability Circle for this work. It was designed and led by Panthea Lee with input from Jayne Engle and Gemma Mortensen.

Exploring Relationality began with an observation: that organisations playing different roles in the work of social transformation are so often pitted against one another, even when they share the same values and dreams. The world needs those doing "oppositional" work — fighting and hospicing systems that are unjust or broken — as much as it needs those doing "propositional" work — reimagining the world and building proofs of what's possible. Yet these spheres are rarely in relationship.

So we became curious about what might happen if we simply made space for that relationship, with no fixed agenda and no project to deliver. Three questions seeded the work: What happens when organisations with common visions but very different ways of getting there have the space to just be with each other? What might a deeper understanding of one another's dreams and journeys lead to? What can emerge from time poured into a relationship, rather than into a project?

We didn't carry Exploring Relationality into a further round. Like much of Arising Quo's work, it was designed to illuminate a possibility rather than to arrive at a finished model — to point at something promising and ask whether it might be worth others taking further. Its clearest lesson, seen a few years on, is that this was preconditions work: the relational groundwork that any ecosystemic funding quietly depends on — resourcing people who share enough context to simply be in relationship, before a field can begin to act together. That insight, and the search for richer language than "oppositional" and "propositional" to name the many roles people play, are the threads we took into Sensing the Third Horizon.

The pairings are shared below and a fuller account of the initiative's design, process, and what we learned is available here.