Editor’s note: This is the 6th 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. To read the fourth chapter, CLICK HERE. To read the fifth chapter, CLICK HERE. To purchase You and We, CLICK HERE.

Chapter 6: Intersecting into Being

One of the most famous experiments in science,” Ricardo continued, “is the so-called double-slit experiment designed to detect the nature of light—namely whether light is a particle or a wave.

“If you’re interested in the details of the experiment, catch me on a break and I’ll connect you to a good recap.¹⁰ But for our purposes today, I will just share the results. Does anyone here know what they were?”

Cree raised his hand. “The experiment shows that light is both a particle and a wave.”

“Yes,” Ricardo said. “And depending on what?”

“Depending on how we interact with it,” Cree replied.

“Exactly,” Ricardo said. “What light is depends on how we interact with it. If we interact with it in one way, it manifests as a wave. If we interact with it in another way, it manifests as a particle. Which means that we can’t say anything about light alone; we can only speak about how light is with us.”

“That’s not very satisfying,” Zane objected.

“Why do you say that, Zane?”

“Because I’d like to know how light really is, and how the universe really is, not just how it is with us.”

“You’re in good company, Zane.”

“How so?”

“Even though Einstein was the father of these discoveries, like you, he fought against the notion that there is nothing solid and unchanging beneath experience. He kept looking for the independent reality beneath everything. He kept looking, if you will, for the person you really are, independent of your relationships, and not just who you are in relationship. Which is to say that he kept looking for the primacy of things rather than relationships.”

“And?”

“He couldn’t find any such reality. In fact, no one has been able to. When you get down to the foundation of everything, at the subatomic level, things and entities disappear entirely. What all the developments in science suggest is that there is no nonrelational space. Relation is all there is. Everything in the universe manifests through intersection, interaction, and relation. Including us. That is what it means to exist. ‘Nothing exists in itself,’ one of my colleagues, Carlo Rovelli, has said. ‘Everything exists only through dependence on something else. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.’¹¹

“So, what does that mean? I think this will start to make intuitive sense to you if you think about it in terms of the two personal relationships we each were thinking about earlier. In terms of your potentiality, you possess what physicists might call a wave of possibilities representing the countless ways you could show up in any given interaction or relationship. But you then show up in a particular way as you intersect with the world. At that point—at the point of intersection or relation—the possible becomes actual. Reality—who you are in the world—is birthed through relation.

“A leading humanities professor friend of mine put it this way: ‘Humans always and only exist as relations. The relations don’t bloom between previously pristine individuals; rather, like the particles our measurements detect, the individuals spring forth from the relations themselves.’¹² As our own little experiment around how we show up differently in our two relationships implies, we are who we show up to be in our interactions. Our interactions with others and the world are the dots that paint us.

“Which brings us to the Third Law of Relation: How we interact is who we are.

“But following up on what Zane was asking about earlier,” Sam said, “there’s a ‘me’ between interactions or relationships, isn’t there?”

“That is the challenging thing for us to see,” Ricardo responded. “The reason it’s challenging is that relationships are to us like water is to fish. Is there any moment that I haven’t had a mother, for example? Or others around me? Or memories of them? Or a world with which to interact? Since I am so continuously in relation, I experience a self that is static and continuous, but that is an illusion. The story of my ‘self’ is a story I tell myself that weaves together all the different ways that I intersect with and show up in the world. But that’s just a story. What’s real about me in the world is how I show up in these intersections with the world. I am who I am in relation, which is another way of saying that there is no me—no anything, really—independent of those relations.”

“I still don’t like it,” Zane said.

“It’s ironic, then, that you are running a company whose transformational technology is driven by this very understanding.”

“How so?”

“Quantum computing is based on quantum theory, which is inherently relational, and not on classical models that standard computers use, which are thing-based.¹³ It turns out that powering computers with a relational reality rather than a thing-based one unlocks massively more computational power. The question for each of us is whether we will utilize that same relational understanding to also transform our leadership and empower our organizations or, on the other hand, if we will insist on staying put in the limited world of separate, independent things.”

Eliza spoke up. “Shouldn’t it make us nervous that Mr. Quantum Computing here doesn’t seem to understand what’s powering his work?”

Although meant as a good-natured ribbing, Zane received it as an attack. “Oh, we have the science down, Eliza, you can be assured of that.” Turning back to Ricardo, he added, “But with all due respect, I’m not sure your status as a scientist makes you an authority on leadership.”

The words came out far sharper than he had intended, and Eliza let out a whistle. He cursed himself for making that mistake again and tried to walk his comment back. “I just mean that this is all a bit disconnected from what I deal with day to day, and I’m not sure that scientific knowledge alone makes much difference to leadership. That’s all.”

“Points well taken, Zane. You certainly have way more leadership experience in organizations than I do. And an understanding of science alone doesn’t begin to close that gap. I couldn’t agree more. However, I would submit to you that an understanding of reality—not science, but reality—is vital for good leadership. Having said that, in a couple of minutes, Dot will take the reins and help us push on what all this might mean when applied to leadership and business. She’ll help us to understand what it means to manage relations rather than individuals and how powerful that approach is as a leadership paradigm.

“But before we go further in that direction, we have one more analogy and law to learn. We need to learn what kinds of relational intersections promote growth and transformation, both individually and collectively. And to consider that, I’d like to invite you to think about water.”