Because relationship is the pivot on which all else turns in community building, it is important for us to be aware of the many and different relationships that are possible and of the many ways to engage in them. Who-we-are makes a great deal of difference to what we do, but who-we-are-in-relationship is the process through which the work gets done.
Tony Kelly and Sandra Sewell1
Challenge: How might we go deeper into the transformation to enrich the process?
Cluster: Enriching Practice Patterns
Type: Essential Practice Pattern nested within the Design Cycles Pattern
Purpose
The Enabling Pattern supports practitioners and participants to augment actions taken under the Design Cycles Pattern.
Pattern Description
The Enabling Pattern is nested within the Design Cycles Pattern. The Enabling Pattern brings together the enabling actions that can be applied to any combination of Design Cycles Pattern Elements regardless of their scale or priority.
The Enabling Pattern represents how practitioners can modify, influence and support the Design Cycles Pattern actions leading to further feedback, connecting, re-ordering and sensemaking processes in the service of the transformation.
Most of the specific Enabling Patterns guide how people relate and work with each other. The Elements of Self-organising, Amplifying, Dampening, Scaling and Leveraging are concerned with what people do in relation to the broader Design Cycles Pattern Elements – that is, they need an Enabling Pattern to activate them.
Actions in the Design Cycles Pattern, can be modified, supported or augmented by Enabling Pattern Elements: for example, the Streaming Element means that practitioners can work as many Design Cycles actions concurrently as the system can manage.
Elemental Patterns
Interacting: Organisations inherently involve the interaction of people, yet the extent and quality of those interactions will have significant influence on the practice of the Design Cycle Pattern elements. Practitioners should design the process to maximise interactions between all participants. This will open processes to greater understanding through the stories and anecdotes shared by participants and will reduce the influence of silos and competing interests. Also, participants across the organisation may have deep and extensive knowledge about the nature of any challenges, so interactions should be facilitated to draw out that knowledge.
Connecting: Connecting goes beyond Interacting by bringing empathy into the interaction and appreciation of others’ perspectives on the challenges under consideration. Connecting across the organisation also helps participants learn about the knowledge, skills and capability of other participants, which will then have more chance of bringing greater depth to the transformation. This is particularly important if organisations have devolved into a siloed structure with minimal communication and engagement across silos.
Combining: In Living Systems Practice, practitioners are free to apply any commonly-used change tools or methods, provided they don’t drive the process and lock-in thinking too early. Such change tools should remain at the service of a Pattern approach by applying them in imaginative and innovative ways in different combinations within and across the Design Cycles Pattern Elements.
Re-ordering: While the Design Cycles Pattern is framed loosely and has some time-based sequencing, the order of doing things is flexible and can be changed after a transformation is under way and at any point in time in the transformation. This is where the Sensemaking comes into play: participants can make judgements about what is important to do next regardless of the notional placement within the Design Cycles Pattern.
Streaming: Another way of working with the Design Cycles Pattern is to work through multiple Elements in a continuous stream: that is, each Element may only need a coarse-grained response to initiate action in another Element, creating depth and detail through multiple iterations and revisiting earlier contingent decisions. Participants can then hold multiple elements in different stages of application at the same time.
Negotiating: Transactional behaviour will always be present in any change process, even if it is at odds with the uncertainty of complexity. Linear thinkers seek specific solutions to complex problems. Such specifics are fine if the negotiation happens within ordered space, preferably in the clear/obvious system domain, but can be roadblocks to progress when the challenges sit in complex space. Practitioners skilled in complex negotiations may be needed to help participants move forward.
Mediating: Transformation is not always based on cosmic goodwill! Change can be contentious, and bring to the surface strongly held views and unresolved disagreements. There are times when mediating processes are needed for design activities to continue – these can be carried out in-house or by an external expert mediator.
Learning: Feedback will be presented by the process either through new patterns of behaviour or by explicit statements from participants. Feedback is not a process that only applies at Prototyping – it should be Streaming – every action, session or workshop should be accompanied by a “learning-as-feedback” ethos.
Self-organising: In a whole-system transformation process, self-organisation will inevitably occur. So, it is up to the practitioners to approach this appropriately, as these may be new patterns worth incorporating or they may represent weak signals flagging threats. These new patterns should be treated as new hypotheses about the organisation, and played with as part of the Experimenting Element.
Pulsing: Stimulating social networks can create some discomfort for participants because it disturbs local systems in order to free them from stagnant stabilities and fixed patterns. Stagnant stabilities may no longer serve the purposes of the organisation and in any change process they should not be kept in place for their own sake. Stimulation, then, fosters the creation of new patterns of behaviour, new themes and local narratives and a deeper understanding of critical issues. It can also open new pathways for knowledge flow and co-operative behaviour. Stimulating social networks can also serve group learning, generate feedback and help in framing emerging challenges. In some cases, Pulsing may need to be disruptive to break up entrenched patterns, but this should be approached with caution due to the multiple adaptations that will self-initiate amongst people in response.
Amplifying: In the act of practice, some of the Design Cycles Pattern Elements may demonstrate greater significance, and can be amplified: through duplication; prioritisation; connecting self-similarities for synergies; further research; further experimentation, or by greater access to supports and resources. This also applies to Self-organising effects: emerging patterns aligned with transformation goals or with positive potential.
Dampening: As with amplifying, activities through the Elements may begin as high priority or have bigger negative impacts than projected, so the activity needs to be dampened. Further, as work proceeds emergent patterns may indicate dynamics at play that could have effects that are adverse for system health, and a dampening action may be needed, including elimination from the process.
Scaling: Scaling can happen by fostering repetition of an effective pattern of system behaviour through multiple contexts within the organisation boundary. Another way is repetition of a pattern identified at a small scale of the organisation but repeated in multiple other small-scale environments outside the organisation boundary, particularly with significant stakeholder networks. Of course, small-scale activity can be scaled-up with more people, resources and financial support.
Leveraging: Leveraging is a key complexity activity as it recognises that some points in the system are more connected or more influential than others. Knowing where the leverage points are enables efficient use of human energy; however, leverage points are not always obvious, and need to be uncovered. The Mapping, Scanning, Surfacing and Experimenting Elements of the Design Cycle Pattern help to bring the leverage points into view, which then enable system shifting more effectively.
Atlas Navigation
Go to the Elemental Patterns within the Enabling Pattern:
Interacting Connecting Combining Re-ordering Streaming Negotiating Mediating Learning Self-organising Pulsing Amplifying Dampening Scaling Leveraging
Go to the Guiding Pattern within the Enriching Patterns Cluster
Go to the Conviviality Pattern within the Enriching Patterns Cluster
Version
Version 1.0 - 2 Jun 2024
Version 1.1 - 23 May 2025
Version 1.2 - 15 July 2025
Kelly, A., & Sewell, S. (1998). With Head, Heart and Hand: Dimensions of Community Building. Brisbane: Boolarong Press.