Introducing Relational Dynamics
Imagine asking not “what is this thing?” but instead, “what has to be happening for this to keep going?” That shift in perspective is the heart of relational dynamics: a way of paying attention that treats everything as held together by relations.
Think of any ordinary situation: a conversation, a school club, even a stone sitting on a desk. None of these things persist on their own. A conversation continues only if turns keep being taken and understood. A club continues only if meetings are called, rooms are opened, members show up. Even the stone continues only because gravity, friction, and a surface hold it there. What exists, exists through relating.
Once you see that, another step becomes possible: relating to relation. At the base, something holds only if everyone agrees on what counts as “the same”.
Whether that means recognizing a friend, or recognizing the homework group as still “the group.”
From there, units connect: people talk, objects touch, exchanges happen. With repetition, these connections become routines, habits, cycles. Boundaries then appear: what belongs inside, what does not. Reflexivity follows: the ability to shift those boundaries when circumstances demand. With more complexity, overlaps and conflicts emerge, and eventually whole fields form: a web of relations, boundaries, and shared standards that allow the situation to cohere.
Relational dynamics describes this way of looking at the world. Grounded in Lakota epistemologies and developed by emsenn, relational dynamics gives us a grammar for describing things can remain coherent under pressure.
Why does this matter? Because the hardest problems, whether in schools, communities, or organizations, are not about the brilliance of ideas but about how to keep things together under strain. Relational dynamics helps us see the immanent work of coherence, so that we can understand those phenomenon better.
Relational dynamics is, at its heart, a way of looking: into how realities are held alive, how they bend without breaking, and how they can be shared across boundaries.