“What is the pattern that connects? What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you? What is the pattern that connects all living creatures?“ Gregory Bateson anthropologist and philosopher asked in his book Mind and Nature.

Central message was that relationships are the essence of the living world, and that we need a language of relationships to understand and describe it. One of the best ways to do so, by telling stories. “Stories are the royal road to the study of relationships”, he would say. What is important in a story, what is true in it, is not the plot, the things, or the people in a story, but the relationships between them. 

When we are talking about change we are thinking in terms of relationships, connections, patterns, and context. We are looking for patterns connecting different phenomena and for processes beneath structures.