Learning in relationship

We kicked off our Constellating Change series in October 2024 with contributors John Nkum and Jen Sandler. Our first session explored the interconnections between relationships and learning, two core dimensions of how we might organise for change. John joined us from Ghana as a Gestalt organisational development and change practitioner, working across organisations and government, and Jen, as a participant and engaged researcher, partnering with community organisers and power-shifters from Massachusetts. 

Together we acknowledged how entangled and mutually reinforcing relationships and learning are. They are the critical yeast we must knead in the everydayness of organising. Healthy relationships can build trust: encouraging people to listen openly and share difference. Learning together can expand our sphere of awareness and understanding of one another. Relational learning is therefore an interactive evolving cycle that creates healthy conditions and dynamics for us to work with the complexity of organising for change.

John reminded us that the relational side of learning has been with humans as long as we’ve told stories. Its roots are in a reciprocal, circular community process where roles are fluid: a teacher learns through teaching, a learner teaches as they learn. 

This way of being together preexists and evades the dominant modern model where - at some point - those roles became more binary and fixed - the teacher began to stand while the learner took a seat on the ground. The power between who shared and who listened became one-directional. Knowledge became a commodity that is stored and traded selectively.

For Jen, there’s a parallel with how museum collections are built. A few, privileged actors have the power to curate knowledge from here and there, which is then frozen and stored. With static and defined sources of knowledge, the creation of learning loses its nuanced multiplicity of process and form. Questions come to be seen as problems that require engineered solutions, determined by those who decide which artefacts are worthy to collect and display. 

How might we resist the acclaimed title of being a ‘learning organisation’, while perpetuating society’s dominant ways of creating and sharing? How might we invite in a qualitative, relational exchange where the roles of teacher and learner are fluid once more?

Our conversation brought forth many modes of resistance and reconnection, like what if we re-remembered the power of sitting in circle? 

A circle can be a space where exchanges of experience and perspectives flow in a spiraling process of deepening and expanding. This takes time. Sitting with this process invites us into surprise. Circles can give voice to quieter, more understated experiences, which in turn can give way to different ways of learning, sharing, knowing and experiencing, in all their plurality of forms and temporalities. 

Opening up the information we use to make meaning helps our sensemaking and decision-making to become less like an artefact in a museum collection and more like a tapestry we are weaving and discovering between us, here and now. This is emergence. We may feel impatient, but this is a form of relational learning with the potential to make us wise, not just knowledgeable. 

Learning in relationship might not be easy in many of our contexts, where real-world challenges cry for urgent response. But its understated value is to build our awareness of our tolerance for ambiguity,  our relationship with the roles we play, and the time we take together.

We also explored how - in systems change work and organisations - learning and doing are often held in opposition, rather than as two modes that can be simultaneous and symbiotic.

Rather than seeing learning as an artificial pause at the end of a project, John asked, how can we see learning as the project? How can the process of doing something, experiencing it, making sense of it and then deciding what the next step might be - acting differently or not - be woven into our organising and change work?

Bridging the perceived learning and doing gap requires feedback cycles of healthy communication to enable this spiralling process. As Jen shared, learning is happening between people all the time, in all of our work. The question then is less about if we are learning but rather how we are learning together. It’s important to cultivate an honest awareness of how learning happens within ourselves and between us, so that we can observe and inquire into whether these dynamics are enabling or inhibiting us. 

Practicing this awareness has the potential to disrupt the perpetual - often heart-breaking - reality in organising for change: the rift between our intentions and what is actually being embodied, enacted and experienced between us. Rather than seeing learning as a discrete tool of problem-solving - often enmeshed in reductionist, linear worldviews - this attention treats learning in relationship as a resolution in and of itself: an entry point to creating healthy conditions for our work in the world.

For Jen, this process of being with our experience and moving at the pace of relationality is not an interlude, it is everything - a chance to transform the tyranny of action by acting relationally. For it to become possible, we need to build flex into our social systems. Learning in relationship means that we have to embrace mistakes, failures, forgiveness, and grace. Here we see adapting as a signal and progressive marker of change - as well as a being in the questions together.

We closed the session with words from Rainer Maria Rilke and Tyson Yunkaporta who remind us of the perpetual and joyful nature of what living to learn might mean for us:

If you're interested in bringing this learning into your organisation or network, get in touch with Sean, our Learning and Practice Partner Lead. To keep inquiring with us as we explore our themes for 2025, subscribe to the School newsletter for reflections, articles and resources.