Relational Systems
Reading Carlo Rovelli's relational interpretation of physics led me into an unexpected rabbit hole through psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior. The result was a reflection on how human traits, performance, and professional growth may be far more relational than we usually assume.
I’m currently reading Sull’eguaglianza di tutte le cose by Carlo Rovelli. In the first chapter, Rovelli introduces the idea of relationality. Already in classical mechanics, something apparently intuitive like velocity is not an absolute property of a body: it exists only with respect to a frame of reference. In the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, this intuition is pushed even further. Physical properties do not seem to belong to objects in an absolute and independent way, but rather emerge from interactions between systems.
At some point, I found myself thinking about people. We usually describe human beings as if they possessed stable and intrinsic characteristics: introverted, creative, disciplined, leader, and so on. Yet, in my experience, a person can appear brilliant in one environment and almost invisible in another; expansive in one group and silent in another; lucid, ironic, or aggressive depending on the social configuration in which they are immersed. The same individual produces different behaviors depending on the social and relational system in which they operate.
From there, I started going down a small rabbit hole. First the person-situation debate in psychology, then interactionism, then Erving Goffman and the idea that part of identity emerges through social interactions rather than existing as a completely context-independent core. It is interesting when very distant disciplines begin converging toward similar conceptual structures. Not in the superficial sense that “physics explains psychology,” but in the narrower and perhaps more interesting sense that certain intuitions seem to reappear across different scales and contexts.
Perhaps the same applies to organizations. Many companies talk about talent as if it were an absolute property of individuals, something a person either possesses or does not possess independently of context. Yet increasingly I have the impression that capability, motivation, and performance are deeply relational phenomena. Change the system, and what an individual is able to express changes radically.
Perhaps some organizations fail to recognize talent without realizing it. Not because they hire incapable people, but because they build relational systems unable to make certain properties emerge. We often think about development and professional growth as individual processes: accumulating skills, experience, knowledge. Necessary conditions, certainly, but many of the deepest transformations happen through people who expand the way we think, environments that make certain versions of ourselves possible, and conversations that change how we observe the world.