From blame cycles to contextual care
The relational paradigm is gaining momentum across social sciences, intercultural communication, management, leadership, and complexity thinking. It represents a profound shift: from viewing individuals, groups, cultures, or organizations as fixed, self-contained entities toward seeing them as dynamic patterns of interaction, mutual influence, and emergence.
“Nothing […] exists in isolation. Everything comes into being through and within its relationships” (Baumann Montecinos et al., 2025, Interculture Journal special issue (Ausgabe 41, 2025)).
This view challenges both rigid individualism and abstract collectivism, inviting us to focus on the ongoing processes through which meaning, action, identity, and belonging are continuously shaped.
Recent contributions show relationality is practical, not just theory. Jürgen Bolten calls for a holistic view of culture based on reciprocity, relationality, and multivalence (“as much structure as needed, as much process as possible”). Helen Spencer-Oatey offers the TRIPS framework to analyse alignment and misalignment in real interactions. Dialogues such as those by Kenneth Gergen and Bayo Akomolafe explore how relational thinking can transform education and leadership. Together, these works provide a clear, usable lens for handling cultural complexity, ambiguity, and interdependence
Drawing from anthropological foundations like Lambros Malafouris’s Material Engagement Theory (2013), where cognition and agency are distributed through embodied interactions with the material world, I want to bring forward four concepts that have become central to my own practice and reflection: the relational field, relational awareness, relational metacognition, and relational intelligence.
These are not abstract additions. They are tools I use daily to make sense of what I see going wrong in teams, education, organizations, and even in how we integrate technology like AI. In simple terms, these concepts help me know what people are being blamed for that is actually produced by the context they’re working in.
In simple terms, these concepts help me know what people are being blamed for that is actually produced by the context they’re working in.
The relational field: A living, more-than-human web
The relational field is the dynamic, ever-moving medium where meaning, positioning, commitments, agency, and patterns arise between people, and crucially, between people and non-human elements (tools, spaces, infrastructures, technologies, ecological conditions). It is not a neutral backdrop but a generative web with its own causal power. It shapes us as much as we shape it.
This resonates deeply with Malafouris (2013), who shows how material engagements co-constitute cognition and agency. To use the Interculture Journal editorial’s vivid metaphor:
“the web of relational dynamics brings these entities, and thus this very moment, into being.”
In my own writing and practice, I keep returning to this more-than-human dimension because I see how often we ignore it. In “Relational Balance: The Art of Context-Specific Care” (Verschroeven, 2025a), I argue that relational fields are never only human. They are shaped by rooms, technologies, histories, infrastructures, weather, digital platforms, and ecological conditions. Ignoring this leads to misattribution: we blame individuals for disengagement when the substrate (e.g., a rigid platform or time pressure) is starving the field of breathing room.
Put plainly: when the relational field is undernourished, people start carrying problems that don’t belong to them.
I see this misstep constantly: teams become “non-places” (Augé-inspired hollow spaces of transition) drained of depth by metrics and speed. I reflect on how AI and digital interfaces can amplify transactional defaults, turning potential meaning-making spaces into functional passages without reciprocity or history. This is where the field feels starved, not because people are flawed, but because the context rewards quick exchanges over slow, frictional attunement.
This is where the field feels starved, not because people are flawed, but because the context rewards quick exchanges over slow, frictional attunement.
Relational awareness: Noticing the “between”
Relational awareness is the foundational capacity to notice that something is happening between us: unspoken expectations, positioning shifts, mutual influences, emerging patterns, or the subtle effects of non-human elements. It is pre-reflective perception: sensing the field’s texture without immediately analyzing or fixing it.
This echoes Bolten’s (2025) zooming metaphor: zoom out for patterns, zoom in for context and empathy. Meta-awareness of perspective-shifting prevents judgment. In over-structured contexts, awareness reveals where transactional defaults crowd out space for friction or emergence.
I see this misdirection often. Structural issues (exclusion, burnout) get reframed as individual failings, leading to blame cycles instead of substrate intervention. When we let compliance categories become the primary lens, “the relational damage is already done”: positioning people as exceptions rather than co-creators in a living field.
Structural issues (exclusion, burnout) get reframed as individual failings, leading to blame cycles instead of substrate intervention.
Relational metacognition: Reflecting with and about the field
Relational metacognition takes awareness further: it is deliberate thinking with and about relations as they shape perception, action, and collective patterns. It asks: What kind of relation is active here? Is reciprocity clear or simulated? Does the balance fit the context? What is this field producing — goods (trust, growth) or evils (mistrust, exclusion)?
This is often the moment when teams realize: nothing is “wrong” with the people, but something is off in how the space, roles, technologies, or expectations are set up.
This extends general metacognition to interdependencies, aligning with relational sociology (Donati & Archer, 2015) and intercultural calls for relational epistemology.
In my practice (BOBIP — Bringing Out the Best in People), relational metacognition means noticing how positioning and commitments, including non-human factors, co-create what is happening. AI’s artificial metacognition serves as a mirror: it shows how much we have outsourced our own reflection, trading the slow, frictional “in-between”, where real mutual becoming occurs, for mere speed.
The deepest metacognitive act is still ours: to pause, notice, and quietly tend the spaces we have quietly stopped nourishing. It means noticing how positioning and commitments co-produce what is happening, including non-human factors.
The deepest metacognitive act is still ours: to pause, notice, and quietly tend the spaces we have quietly stopped nourishing.
Relational intelligence: Adaptive capacity in practice
Relational intelligence integrates awareness, metacognition, empathy, reciprocity, and contextual judgment into the ability to navigate, cultivate, and leverage relational dynamics in complex, intercultural, or tech-entangled settings. It discerns when transactional clarity is essential (e.g., urgent decisions) and when affective depth is needed (e.g., long-term collaboration), while holding friction productively.
In transcultural or transdisciplinary contexts (Gergen & Akomolafe; Baumann Montecinos et al.), it emphasizes commonalities and co-creation. Personally, this matters because I see relational intelligence eroded by transactional drift: performative empathy, simulated care, or over-categorization. When seen as a pharmakon (remedy/poison), AI can reflect our habits and denials, prompting us to reclaim intimacy as relational metabolism rather than commodified exchange.
These concepts are not academic exercises for me. They emerge from years of working with teams, communities, educators, leaders, and organizations where relational fields are quietly being starved.
What I keep encountering is this pattern: structural conditions get translated into personal shortcomings. People become “difficult,” “unmotivated,” or “resistant,” while the relational field they are embedded in remains untouched. Over time, this erodes trust, energy, and responsibility, not because people don’t care, but because the space no longer supports caring well.
This is why I’ve moved away from models that promise control or predictable outcomes. I think in terms of tending rather than fixing: noticing the field, reflecting on what it is producing, and making small, context-sensitive adjustments that restore reciprocity and breathing room.
I think in terms of tending rather than fixing: noticing the field, reflecting on what it is producing, and making small, context-sensitive adjustments that restore reciprocity and breathing room.
The relational paradigm invites exactly this shift. Not toward “deeper” relationships as an ideal, but toward clearer, more balanced, and more livable ones, which fit the context they are in.
If you pause for a moment and look at your own working relationships:
- Where are people carrying tensions that belong to the system?
- Where is speed or structure crowding out relational sense-making?
- And what small shift in the field (not in the people ) might already make a difference?
References
- Baumann Montecinos, J., Grünfelder, T., & Nazarkiewicz, K. (Eds.). (2025). “Exploring a Relational Paradigm to Navigate Cultural Complexity, 1/2.” *Interculture Journal*, 41.
- Bolten, J. (2025). “Reciprocity, Relationality and Multivalence” (transl.). *Interculture Journal*, 41.
- Malafouris, L. (2013). *How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement*. MIT Press.
- Spencer-Oatey, H. (2025). “Rapport in Intercultural Interaction: Analysing Relational Alignment/Misalignment via the TRIPS Framework.” *Interculture Journal*, 41.
- Verschroeven, E. (2025a). “Relational Balance: The Art of Context-Specific Care.” Medium.
- Verschroeven, E. (2025c). “From Seeds and Soil to Tidepools: Why I’m Done with the Spiritual Farming Novel for Now.” Medium.
- Verschroeven, E. (2025f). “From Non-Places to Relational Depth: AI as a Mirror for Reflection.” Medium.
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