Serializations

Editor’s note: This is the 4th chapter in Meridian Magazine’s Serialization of Jim Ferrell’s book, You and We: A Relational Rethinking of Work, Life and Leadership. To read the first chapter, CLICK HERE. To read the second chapter, CLICK HERE. To read the third chapter, CLICK HERE.

Chapter 4: The Only Thing We See

I want to introduce you to someone,” Dot said, motioning to the back of the room. “I’d like you to meet my good friend and colleague Ricardo Bloom. Ricardo is a physicist at MIT. And,” she added, “no doubt the smartest person in the room.”

“No, no, no, I reject that out of hand!” Ricardo protested. “Honestly, I’m feeling intimidated just being here with all of you.”

“As I said,” Dot interjected, “the most naturally gifted politician in the room!”

Everyone laughed at that.

Everyone except Zane. He hadn’t recognized the now bearded and spectacled Ricardo Bloom. Ricardo had been one of Zane’s early targets for Bellweather’s board of scientific advisors. Two years earlier, after a few conversations, he had even traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to woo and offer him the post. Although their meeting had been genial, Ricardo declined every offer. When Zane asked what it would take to attract him to Bellweather, Ricardo had simply said, “Something you aren’t prepared to give.”

“Try me,” Zane had responded, expecting a request for equity.

“I already did,” was Ricardo’s cryptic response.

There was no budging him. Nothing Zane said seemed to matter. For reasons opaque to him, Ricardo wasn’t interested in Bellweather.

So, I’m here with someone I ousted and another who ghosted me. Wonderful! Zane’s thoughts turned again to Mikél who, he guessed, must also have known about Ricardo’s involvement.

“Well, then,” Ricardo began. “Let’s continue with the discussion Dot just introduced.” He raised his own card, which he himself had filled out. “If the words that describe you in each of your relationships are different, it raises an interesting question. Namely: Which person are you? Are you the person you described in your good relationship or the person you described in your difficult one?”

Texas congresswoman Eliza Schuler, the Republican Majority Whip in the House, whose name was just one letter shy of matching the name of Alexander Hamilton’s famous spouse, spoke up. “I suppose I’m both,” she said.

“Great, thank you,” Ricardo said. “And since we haven’t met before, can I ask if it would be okay if I call you Eliza?”

“Been called a lot worse!” she replied. “No, but seriously, I’d prefer it. We don’t do formal in Texas.”

“How about for all you non-Texans?” Ricardo asked the rest of the group. “Would it be okay if we all call each other by our first names? It just feels more real that way.”

Everyone nodded.

“Okay, excellent. So, then, Eliza, you said you’re both of those people.”

“That’s right.”

“So, what does that mean?”

“Well, in Texas, it means you shouldn’t mess with me.”

Everyone laughed again, breaking the ice still more.

!e truth was, Eliza Schuler had a reputation as a sweet-talking pit bull, so the idea of two entirely different descriptive lists for her made perfect sense. One of the Republican Party’s most recognizable national faces and voices, who had flirted with running for president during the last cycle, she was a frequent guest on national news shows, where she charmed viewers and hosts alike. On the flip side, she was House Whip because of her willingness and ability to apply pressure wherever and whenever it was needed. She was one of the most powerful people on Capitol Hill.

“I’m going to introduce you to what is perhaps the central development in science over the last century—a relational understanding of reality,” Ricardo said. “It has profound implications for human beings, both individually and collectively. But don’t worry, I’m not going to blow you out with the science. If you want a more strictly scientific explanation of what I’m going to give you, I’ll point you to where you can get it.6 But the approach I will take with you today is to introduce that science through four analogies. Each analogy will yield one law of relation, and I think the four of them together will help us cut through much of the mistaken conceptual air that we breathe that is holding us back in the way we engage the world around us. When we understand all four laws of relation, we’ll be ready to apply a relational understanding to people and organizations and will dive into real-life applications, which is what we’ll spend most our time doing together.

“For our first analogy, I need a volunteer.”

“For our first analogy, I need a volunteer.”

“Very good, Eliza. Could you join me up here for a second?”

“You promised—no science, right?” she probed with a smile.

“No worries,” Ricardo answered with a chuckle. “I just want to play a little tic-tac-toe with you.”

“Let’s go, cowboy.” She joined him at the front of the room.

Ricardo drew the familiar grid on a flip chart. “Okay, then I’ll go first,” he said.

“Surprise, surprise,” she replied.

Ricardo placed an X in the upper left corner. Eliza thought about it and drew an O in the middle. Ricardo then placed an X in the bottom right corner, to which Eliza responded by drawing an O in the bottom left. “Ahh, thank you,” Ricardo said. He placed an X in the upper right, trapping her. He would either get three across the top or three down the right side. Eliza could block only one direction.

“Okay, again!” she said. “That was a warm-up.”

“Fair enough.” Ricardo drew a second grid. He again started with an X in the upper left corner. This time Eliza placed an O in the side space directly beneath Ricardo’s X. He then placed a second X in the upper right corner. Eliza blocked him by drawing an O in the center top between his two X’s. Then Ricardo placed his third X in the bottom right corner.

“Ah, shit,” Eliza said, laughing. She was trapped again. Ricardo could beat her either diagonally or down the right side. “If the speaker saw this, I’d be out of a job!”

Ricardo busted out laughing. “I very much doubt that!” he said. “It’s just a meaningless game, after all. However, win or lose, it does illustrate something of fundamental importance—of scientific importance, actually. Think about it this way: In our first game, your first move was in the middle. Why did you go there?”

Well, I thought it was a good move after you first went corner.”

“Smart,” Ricardo said. “In fact, middle is the only safe countermove to a corner-first start. So, you put your O in the center because I put my X in the corner.”

“Exactly.”

“The same was true for my next move,” Ricardo continued. “I chose bottom-right corner because I thought it was my best remaining move after you went middle.”

“Okay,” Eliza said. “So?”

“Every move in the game is relational,” Ricardo replied. “No move stands on its own. You placed your O’s where you did in response to where I placed my X’s, and I placed my X’s in response to your O’s. Even the first moves I made were in anticipation of what I thought you might do in response. So, every move in the game is in response to other moves. You are in my moves, and I am in yours. Everything that is happening in the game is relational. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“Then you are ready for the First Law of Relation: Everything you see is relation.”

“Could you explain what you mean by relation?” Zane asked.

“Hey, Zane. Good to see you again,” Ricardo replied.

That’s the second time I’ve been lied to today with the exact same words, Zane thought to himself.

“And great question. The meaning of relation is what we’re just beginning to explore. For now, I’ll say this much: Everything being in relation means that nothing stands on its own. Everything depends on something else. We think we’re seeing things, when what we’re actually seeing are intersecting activities or relations.”

Eliza squinted. “I’m not sure I understand what that means.”

“Go ahead and sit down, and we’ll talk about it.”

Eliza took her seat.

“Okay, everyone, let’s think about this. Look around the room for a moment. You think you are seeing things and people—that window, for example, the screen up here, the chairs we’re sitting on, and, most significantly, each other. But, in fact, all you are really seeing is relation. And I want to demonstrate that by having all of us look at Zane for a moment.”

“Great!” Zane said in mock protest.

Ricardo laughed. “Just for a moment! When you’re looking at Zane, what are you seeing?” Ricardo asked.

“Is it appropriate to say that out loud?” Eliza joked.

Everyone cracked up. “Please, keep it to yourself,” Zane played along.

“Do you want us to describe Zane?” Rita asked.

“No, I just want you to tell me what you are seeing when looking at him.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Rita said. “I’m seeing Zane!”

“On the contrary,” Ricardo said. “You think you are, but you’re actually not.”

“Is this some kind of weird puzzle or something?” Cree asked.

Ricardo smiled. “Not at all, Cree. When I look at a person—at Zane in this case—I think I am seeing Zane. But what I am missing is the fact that I am seeing Zane. And since I am the person who is seeing, I’m not seeing a world that is separate from me but am rather seeing my own interaction with the world. So, what I’m seeing is not Zane per se, but rather my relational intersection with him. In fact, relationality goes even further than that. It’s not just that I am seeing Zane; it’s also that I’m seeing a Zane who is in response to me.

“Of all the lessons in science over the last century, this is the most important one, and I would suggest that it’s the most important leadership lesson as well: When we observe and measure the world, we’re not observing and measuring a world separate from ourselves; we’re observing and measuring our own interaction or relation with the world and the world’s interaction with us. As the great physicist Werner Heisenberg said, ‘What we observe is not Nature itself, but Nature exposed to our method of questioning.’⁷ Everything we see is relation—that’s the First Law.

Ricardo looked around at everyone. “Does that make sense?”

People nodded. “Yeah, that’s actually pretty interesting,” Judy said. “So, just to make sure I have this right, this means that I’m never actually experiencing you. Rather, I’m experiencing myself with you. So, in that respect, all I can ever see is relation—not things in themselves, but intersections.”

“Exactly,” Ricardo said. “So, the question that gets to the heart of things between people is not Who am I? for example, or Who are you? which are thing-based questions, but rather, Who are you and I together? And what are we creating together? These are relational questions.

For a moment, Zane began to consider: Who are Judy and I together? What are we creating? Then, in a flash, the question migrated across the landscape of his life. Who are Ricardo and I together? Who are Dot and I together? Who are Laney and I together? 

“But relationality will take us even deeper than this,” Ricardo continued. “In order to introduce the Second Law of Relation, we’re going to consider a second analogy—this one contained in a painting.

“The museum just so happens to have on loan one of the epic paintings of the scientifically inclined Georges Seurat—a masterpiece called A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.⁸ It’s hanging in the next room, directly behind us. This painting is particularly famous because it marked a new approach called ‘pointillism,’ which inspired van Gogh, Picasso, and many other modern masters. The word pointillism references the unique way the painting was constructed by using only small dots. Seurat didn’t mix colors or use brushstrokes to produce the overall colors or to construct the scene. Instead, over a two-year period, he painted it by applying hundreds of thousands of distinct marks on the canvas—dots that, together, create the world of the painting.

“We’re going to take 30 minutes for this. I invite you to spend some time with Seurat’s masterpiece. As you take the painting in, consider what we have been discussing about relation. Does the painting confirm that all we see is relation, or does it counter it?

“With our midmorning start today, we are getting toward lunchtime as well. So, we also have food set up for you in the hall. Enjoy the food and the painting!

“See you back here in 30 minutes.”

(c) 2025 James Ferrell