Relational Dynamics™ · ECC Model · Excellence = ∫ Capacity(t) · Coherence(t) dt, under constraint.

A conversation with my friend John Granholm today reminded me to write a quick note about what I mean by the excellence formulation, which is something I intend to expand on properly at some point.

For now, just an AJS coordinate.📍

September has always felt like a threshold month to me. Perhaps that comes from having spent so much of my life moving through education as both student and teacher: one cohort leaves, another arrives; one cycle closes as another begins.

A small phase transition.

And phase transitions are rather good moments to revisit what remains stable while configurations change.

One cross-domain modelling device I use within Relational Dynamics™ is the “ECC Model” for thinking about system trajectories.

One working frame is simple:

Excellence is capacity held in coherence under constraint over time.

One shorthand is:

Excellence = ∫ Capacity(t) · Coherence(t) dt, under constraint

Now imagine a university, company, institution — or any other human system — with 10,000 extraordinarily talented people.

Great.

That is enormous capacity!

But what if coherence is weak?

Or, over a relevant interval, effectively zero?

In the simplest limiting illustration:

10,000 × 0 = 0

The talent has not disappeared.

The capacity is still there.

But capacity alone is insufficient to generate system-level excellence.

If coherence remains effectively absent across the relevant interval, that capacity contributes little — and, in the limiting case, nothing — to system-level excellence over that interval.

This is why talent is important, but insufficient for system-level excellence.

A temporary loss of coherence does not necessarily imply system failure; it may also mark reconfiguration. The trajectory over time is what matters.

Coherence matters.

Under constraint.

Over time.

The domains vary. The dynamics repeat.

I’d be curious to know whether you recognise this pattern elsewhere.

And this becomes particularly interesting in the age of AI — or AIR, as I frame it.

See: From AI to AIR: A Three-Layered Framework for the Emerging AI Paradigm.

AI can increase capacity enormously and extraordinarily quickly.

Great.

But what happens to coherence? 🤔

What happens when technological capacity accelerates faster than our social contracts, institutional arrangements, cultural memories, labour structures, collective narratives, infrastructural readiness, or our understanding of human judgement, value and agency can reorganise around it?

📈 Capacity can go up, up, up.

📉 Coherence can go down, down, down.

⚠️ System-level excellence does not necessarily follow capacity upward.

When capacity rises while coherence falls, system stability may be at risk.

So the next time you hear:

“We’re getting bigger, higher and stronger.”

Maybe.

Think again.

Methodological note:

ECC is a conceptual model for thinking, not a hard predictive formula.

System boundaries, timescales and constraints matter.

📍Link to my original post from 17 January 2026, also my first LinkedIn post of the year on Relational Dynamics™.

📅 Eight months later, and at another small threshold, this feels like a good moment to return to where the year began.

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time.

Clarity under complexity.

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Healthcare is not simply a clinical system.

It is a social infrastructure embedded in economic, political, technological, and relational conditions.

When those conditions change, the trajectories of care change with them.

When conditions of life change, the systems built to care for life must change with them.

What becomes visible at the clinical interface is not necessarily where a problem began.

Visibility is not origin.

Pressure appearing in a hospital, a waiting list, a consultation, or an exhausted professional may be the downstream expression of conditions formed much further upstream.

Part of why I keep returning to this question is personal.

My family stretches across countries, languages, generations, and healthcare systems. Over time, I have encountered care from multiple positions: as a family member and caregiver; as a mother navigating paediatric healthcare; as a daughter navigating parental illness; as a person seeking support and therefore a service user; and as a researcher and systems thinker trying to understand what becomes visible from these different positions.

My work as a field interviewer on the Scottish Health Survey at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) gave me yet another position from which to look. I encountered hundreds of households and heard how health and care were actually lived behind the categories through which they are usually represented.

Different positions make different parts of a system visible.

Across those positions, one thing has become increasingly clear to me: the need for care has not disappeared, but the relational architecture through which care is delivered has changed.

Family structures change. Care roles change. Technologies and information environments change. The distribution of knowledge, attention, responsibility, and labour changes with them.

AI is now entering this architecture too. Not simply as another tool used within healthcare, but as part of the changing informational and relational conditions through which care is accessed, interpreted, coordinated, and delivered.

Sometimes what looks like an individual, clinical, or institutional problem is also a lag between changing social reality and the infrastructure built to care for it.

If we only intervene where pressure finally becomes visible, we may already be intervening very late in the trajectory.

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

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Sometimes, in the greatness of sorrow, you shed no tears.

In the greatness of misfortune, you burst into laughter.

I had probably seen this phenomenon in films or encountered it in books when I was younger — too young, too naive.

Then life happened.

I learnt it in critical care, in the middle of moving boxes, a collapsed ceiling, and a flooded house. I had held my tongue for years. I had developed an effective form of built-in self-censorship. I spent years researching the visible — silence.

As it turns out, visibility is not the same as incidence.

As I wrote in No Interface, No Entry: Not visible is not the same as absence. Visibility depends on conditions. Legibility depends on formation. Entry depends on interface.

Some of the deepest forms of suffering are not the loudest. Sometimes, when pain exceeds the forms through which we ordinarily recognise it, when absurdity exceeds our capacity to comprehend, the signal changes — or disappears altogether.

No tears does not mean no sorrow.
Laughter does not mean no pain.
Silence does not mean no harm.

Pain does not owe us a legible interface.

The quietest signal is not always the weakest one.

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

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Field moving. Kernel stable. Trajectory open.

时移世易，万物流转。☯️

大浪淘沙，谁主沉浮。🌊

格物致知，函宇古今。🌌

关系动力，金箍乾坤。⚓️

— 《定海》｜Holding the Field by Alice Jing Shan

In an age of information floods, acceleration, and competing currents, the question is not how to stop movement, but what allows capacity to be held in coherence under constraint over time. 🗼

That is a system trajectory question.

Not everything stable is static. Some things hold precisely by staying in relation with what moves around them.

Field awareness over treadmill performance.

If you are on the boat, where are you going? 🚢

And if you think you are standing safely on shore, perhaps the shore itself is only a temporary stabilisation. 🌊

Then again, drifting can be a temporary stabilisation too.

Excellence in Relational Dynamics™ is not maximum movement. It is not even necessarily forward movement.

Excellence＝∫ Capacity(t) · Coherence(t) dt, under constraint

As an individual, an organisation, a civilisation: it is worth asking — what trajectory are we on? 🌍

P.S. Just in case… bring life jackets. 🦺🛟🔦

Reflections is a space for personal, lived, and process notes from the field by Alice Jing Shan. These are moments between essays, frameworks, and stories, where the system is still forming.

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Image caption: Built in the spirit of interlocking blocks. No toy company was consulted in the construction of this intellectual infrastructure. 🧱🚧

AJS Library Under Construction 👷‍♀️📢⚠️

Ontology stable. ✅
Structure emerging. 🏗️🧱📋🏛️🏘️
Curator lost somewhere between Collections and Series. 👩🏻‍💻📓✍🏻💡📗📘📙📚🫠
Wayfinding, wayshaping, and getting lost are all part of the daily operation. 🧭🗺️🚗📍🥾⛰️⛺️🔦
Routes emerge through use. 🛤️👣🌱🌿🌼🌸🍀🌷🌴🎋
Potholes are filled along the way. 🕳️🚧👷‍♀️🪏😂

Ontology of Relational Dynamics stable. Applied Systems Philosopher: biological system temporarily less so. 🧠🫨⚙️😂
Mental capacity check: deadpan humour remains operational. ✅😉 Passion level: HIGH. ✅🤩🔥
Reminder to self: Consumptive Virtue is temporary. Rest is part of carbon-based system regulation. 🪫➡️🔋🛌💤

Traceability: still operational. 🔗✅

Relational Dynamics™ Human System Self-Diagnostic 🩺

Timestamp: 01:58, 24 August 2026. 🌙🕐

Capacity: depleted but operational. 🪫
Coherence: holding. 🧩✅
Constraints: children sleeping, laundry folded, dishwasher just stopped. Household quiet. Constraints still active and non-negotiable. 🚧
Time: insufficient, as usual. ⏳
Interface: curator temporarily caught inside her own abstraction. 🌀📚🫠
Trajectory: non-collapsing, mildly wandering, currently readjusting. 🛤️🧭
Theoretical gravity: functioning. 🍎⬇️
Groundedness: carbon-based unit advised to return to bed. 🛌
Consumptive Virtue: detected. ⚠️ Temporary use authorised only.
Elegant Wall-Hitting: risk elevated. 🧱👀
Premature Rescue: not required. ✋

System status: ONTOLOGY STABLE. HUMAN REQUIRES CHARGING. ✅🔌😂

Silicon-based system suggestion: One more thing… 🤖☝️
Human judgement: Overruled. ✋😐
See you tomorrow. 👋🌙💤

Reflections is a space for personal, lived, and process notes from the field by Alice Jing Shan. These are moments between essays, frameworks, and stories, where the system is still forming.

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From Silicon Valley to silicone dolls. Every present comes with a price tag.

I am starting to suspect that Absurd Realism might be a recurring theme in my writing.

Or, at the very least, absurd must be one of the highest-frequency words in my own AJS corpus.

But hey. 2026. We are where we are.

Today’s observation began with my recent obsession with watching videos about social issues: healthcare systems, changing family structures, dating markets, romantic expectations, the loneliness epidemic…and of course, AI.

Then, surprisingly and yet somewhat understandably, YouTube’s algorithm appeared to make a deduction about my user profile: a human interested in love, dating, loneliness and artificial intelligence, with just enough of an academic disposition to require further research.

It sensibly recommended a video titled:

“A Must-Watch for Beginners! The Internet’s Most Comprehensive Guide to Buying a Silicone Doll”

—..—|||

I have to admit, this was not something I would ever have actively searched for.

But since it showed up…

Hello~ :)

And oh man, I was not disappointed by the amount of research behind that video.

In the middle of being genuinely impressed — and increasingly curious — by the detailed explanations of different designs, shapes, sizes, weight, outer materials, inner fillings, heating mechanism, maintenance instructions, and price ranges; how a price tag translates into the user experience, from the feel of the hair and skin to the flexibility of individual fingers and the rest of the body; how different internal structures affect positioning and durability; even what happens when the material deteriorates or internal liquid begins to leak through the skin. I honestly do not want to get into all the details. One clip caught me completely off guard.

Someone had found what looked like a discarded body inside a cardboard box.

They opened it, looked for a second, and said something along the lines of:

“Not a real woman! It’s a doll.”

I had to pause the video.

My heart was pounding.

For a few seconds, the problem was not how to dispose of a doll. The problem was whether a woman had been disposed of.

It left me with a question: How much of a body is in the material, and how much of it is in the relations through which we recognise it?

I’ve long been a big fan of science fiction like Westworld (I watched the Nolan/Joy television version; the original Westworld was the 1973 film), although I increasingly suspect we may be closer to some of those questions than we think. Having a husband working in bioengineering probably doesn’t help either; somehow it makes me contemplate these things even more.

Every now and then, I’d ask him:

Are we there yet?

The thing is, in a way, I wasn’t hugely surprised by the video or the dolls.

One’s tolerance for weirdness can probably be built up, I suppose, rather like a zone of proximal development (ZPD), and this is also consistent with what I’ve developed as the Relational Dynamics™ Field Model of system development.

Over the years, we have become accustomed to never-ending ranges of makeup in every imaginable colour and shade; accessories in endless shapes and materials; wigs and weaves of every length and curl; clothing ranging from genuinely stylish to completely beyond human comprehension; and fashion as an enormous industry in its own right. We are used to the hype around models, celebrities and superstars; to Barbie dolls, of course, which I grew up with and which came roaring back into popular culture with the 2023 film; to increasingly sophisticated robotic beings; and, I suspected, to a rather more sophisticated adult industry than I had ever bothered to investigate.

None of these elements is particularly unfamiliar on its own.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before all of these already-familiar components entered into a reasonably creative structured coupling.

And voilà.

A highly customisable, human-sized silicone woman.

From Silicon Valley to Silicone Woman?

That would make a catchy headline.

I could probably keep going, but this is where theoretical gravity needs to do its job.

Last month, I saw a video on LinkedIn of what was called a “Robot Fighting League,” and it broke my heart.

Two robots were fighting in a ring like human boxers. The only difference was that they could keep going even after one robot’s head was detached from its neck. It was still twitching, turning, reorienting itself, and trying to get back up.

People cheered. The commentators narrated with enormous enthusiasm. Phones were out. Videos were being made. Dozens of likes. I am sure the research teams behind them were exceptionally good at what they did, and that every round of ass-kicking and neck-breaking produced plenty of useful new data.

I was speechless. I had to watch the video on mute. Everything about it felt unbearably loud.

The Flesh Fair scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence came immediately to mind, and my vision started to blur.

If you have never watched the film, brace yourself for the Flesh Fair scene.

Actually, just brace yourself for the whole film.

The last time I watched it was many years ago. I was not a mother yet. I was not married to a bioengineering scientist. I had never experienced being told that my own child was in almost impossible danger, or crying beside him hoping he would wake up, recover, and have the chance to grow up. And back then, we were nowhere near as close to what we now casually call AI.

The film has not changed.

My relationship with it has.

One question raised near the beginning of the film was never directly answered, but twenty-five years later, it sounded louder than ever:

A female colleague asks Professor Hobby:

“You know, it occurs to me… with all this animus existing against Mechas today, it isn’t simply a question of creating a robot who can love. But isn’t the real conundrum, can you get a human to love them back?”

I am still digesting that question, and the film.

Over the years, the question never really went away. Black Mirror returned to a version of it in “Be Right Back” (S02E01), through grief, attachment and an artificial reconstruction of someone loved. Westworld built an entire world around another version of that discomfort: human-like beings made to be desired, used, hurt, killed, repaired and returned to the game.

Different stories, different technologies and interfaces, but the question keeps resurfacing.

I had explored a related question myself in an earlier Relational Dynamics™ thought experiment, “The Player AJ Problem”: imagine an NBA team where one player is replaced by an AI robot: physically perfect, never tired, never emotional, no family drama, always fearless, always calculating, and occasionally, of course, hallucinating. What changes for the team, the league, the fans and the rules? What happens next? 🏀

Sometimes the fastest way to understand a new technology is to place it inside a familiar system.

Back to the cardboard box. 📦

What do you do with a human-shaped object when you no longer want it?

The closer an object has been designed to resemble a human body, the more socially complicated it becomes to dispose of it as an object.

What was inside that cardboard box in that video was not a woman’s body. It would not decompose like one either.

It reminded me of the Robot Graveyard in Spielberg’s A.I. world: a dumping ground for broken and discarded Mechas (artificial beings), where the damaged Mechas scavenge among other discarded robotic bodies for replacement parts.

The discarded exploiting the discarded in order to remain functional. A science-fictional scene, a cautionary tale, or a tale as old as time?

David, the child at the centre of the film, has probably earned more human tears than many human characters ever will.

He came in a box too.

There were many, many boxes.

There are now many, many more.

• A note on Absurd Realism:
  The term already has a history across literature and the arts. I am not claiming it as my invention. I am simply beginning to notice how often my own observations seem to end up there — in realities that require remarkably little exaggeration to become absurd.

• Reference: The “Robot Fighting League” video mentioned in this piece.

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time.

Clarity under complexity.

If you’d like to follow this work as it unfolds, subscribe below. New piece arrive quietly in your inbox.

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AJS library under construction.👷‍♀️ Ontology stable. Dots of ideas connecting. Please bear with us. 📝

The Treadmills of Content Creation

I keep seeing people complain that this platform is dying, that platform is no longer worth it, newsletters are saturated, social media is exhausting, everybody is producing too much, AI slop is multiplying, and nobody is really reading or thinking anymore. Such complaints naturally extend to Substack.

When content creators, knowledge workers and public intellectuals start collectively complaining about the platforms they use, I find that interesting in itself. It also makes me think about my own little scholarly ecosystem, because the same platform can be serving very different purposes for different people.

If your main relationship with a platform is the feed, then of course you notice the clicks, likes, comments, subscriptions, growth, and departures. You produce more because visibility seems to require more, then discover that producing more makes the whole thing feel increasingly pointless. So you run faster on the content treadmill while complaining about the treadmill.

Which, to be fair, is more or less how the treadmill works.

I don’t like treadmills. I don’t like running. And I like paying money to run on the spot even less. But that is, of course, a personal preference.

So I think I will stay with Substack. If anything, my treadmill is reserved for thought. Although even that may look more like quantum jumps to some people than running in a straight line. Substack seems like a good interface into my work.

Disclaimer: I solemnly swear that Substack is not paying me a commission for this. I am defending my library, not the landlord.

Substack, if you use this piece in an advert, please have the courtesy to quote me accurately and attribute it correctly.

I Am Defending My Library

My Substack is called AJS.

Those are my initials, Alice Jing Shan, but I also use them to mean A Justified Source.

To me, this place is closer to a slightly eccentric library or archive than a feed. Here I write field notes, concepts, essays, framework papers and canon texts on Relational Dynamics™: Theory of System Trajectories. The writing itself is part of the method: a way of examining, taking apart and reassembling the world through the lens of Relational Dynamics™, tracing how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt and sometimes collapse under constraint over time.

I write fiction here too. I leave notes on my own growth and reflections that I am comfortable sharing publicly. Sometimes I create illustrations. Sometimes I coin terms, leave quotes behind and build an AJS corpus. More often than not, I write long pieces that almost nobody reads. Sometimes I get a little too abstract even for myself. Things published elsewhere eventually find their way back here, with links and notes explaining where they came from and what they belong with.

I have to admit: I rather enjoy it. And I am not going to burn down the library because the reading room happens to be quiet today.

Maybe this is the sentimental side of me. Or maybe, being Chinese, I have a slightly ingrained habit of thinking on unnecessarily long historical timescales. We do seem rather fond of casually saying things like “for thousands of years.”

Give me a conversation about whether Substack is dying, and somehow my mind ends up with bamboo slips and oracle bones.

When Old Fragments Find New Relations

I am a big fan of documentaries, especially those that explore the unknown and cultural mysteries. One of the things I find fascinating about AI is what it is beginning to do to fragments. Archaeologists, historians, scholars and enthusiastic amateurs can compare quantities of partial material that would once have been extraordinarily difficult for any one person to hold together: broken manuscripts, scattered inscriptions, fragments of bamboo slips, oracle bones, pieces of pottery carrying a few characters, and objects that ended up in different museums and archives.

Some of these things have been sitting there for hundreds or thousands of years. Nobody preserved them because they knew exactly what somebody with AI might eventually do with them. They just survived.

No, scratch “just”. They survived.

And now, sometimes, fragments that once looked isolated can be placed beside one another and analysed across modalities, languages and cultures, even across the limits of time and space, becoming meaningful in ways they were not before. I find that truly amazing.

Of course, AI does not magically tell us what the past meant. Reconstruction can still be wrong. A machine can connect the wrong dots just as enthusiastically as a human can, and hallucination is hardly unique to machines. But our capacity to connect fragments is changing, and that makes me think differently about what it means for something to be unread, neglected, overlooked, or simply waiting to be rediscovered under different conditions.

Something can be unread now and still be worth leaving behind. A fragment can sit in silence for years before another fragment makes it intelligible. A piece of writing can acquire a different meaning when something happens much later, or when something written much later suddenly connects back to it. The same is true of ideas. Sometimes a piece only becomes useful when the board has changed.

Some things endure not because their meaning stays intact, but because new conditions make new relations possible.

There is a Chinese saying, 无心插柳柳成荫: you plant a willow without much intention, and one day it has grown into shade.

I like it because “unintentional” does not mean inactive. You still planted the willow. You just did not decide in advance what role it would eventually play.

Also, on a related but entirely irrelevant note, and at the risk of sounding like a Hangzhou tourism ambassador, my hometown has a lot of willow trees. Perhaps that is why this particular saying has always felt strangely close to home. It takes me straight back to 柳浪闻莺 (liǔ làng wén yīng) , Orioles Singing in the Willows, by West Lake, and to the many willow-lined paths I have walked more times than I could count..

So you see, the willow was never entirely metaphorical to me.

The point is: some dots are placed deliberately. Their eventual relations are not.

Perhaps that is part of the long game too: place the piece, leave it alive, and let time connect some of the dots. You can know where a piece begins without knowing where its relations will eventually take it.

In time, the piece itself may not have changed at all. What changed were the conditions around its relevance.

Traceability Is Part of the Method

I am aware that I may be one of the relatively few people with the peculiar habit of publishing my writing in versions. I have written elsewhere that traceability is part of the method. The framework may evolve, but its evolution should remain visible.

Some people joke that a PhD stands for Permanent Head Damage. In my case, perhaps it is Permanent Hating Disorganisation. Although that is probably unfair to PhDs. My husband has one too and is nowhere near my level of organisational obsession, so this may still be a very personal problem.

Retrospectively, though, that journey did have a profound impact on me.

Of course, academically, traceability is part of the discipline itself. A good PhD thesis requires claims to be traceable to evidence, and I held my empirical research to a high standard in that respect.

What was more demanding, in my particular case, was the level of attention paid to the writing itself. My supervisory team came from English language teaching backgrounds, so the thesis was not only expected to make sense in terms of content. Every sentence had to work. Every word choice mattered. So did the signposting, the paragraphs, the sections, and the movement from one part of the argument to another.

That was probably one of the more invisible forms of difficulty in the PhD, at least for me. At the time, it could feel painfully meticulous. In retrospect, it was enormously useful. This was, of course, situated in the pre-generative-AI era, when every sentence still had to be wrestled into place the old-fashioned way. Every citation had to be entered manually and double-checked against my mental template of APA 7th edition, usually with the official examples open somewhere nearby.

To be precise, there were tools available. The “smart” tools I had were supposed to be better than nothing, although they were also perfectly capable of creating new problems, inconsistencies and the usual forms of hallucination. There were days when doing it manually felt considerably smarter. Long story.

In my case, all of that built a kind of structural brain muscle, perhaps even a small mind palace, for holding an argument together across a very large piece of work. It was only a few years ago, but compared with the generative capacity available now, the writing process can already feel almost typewriter-era.

Seven years also meant returning to references and contexts I had written about years earlier and asking whether they were still relevant, whether the surrounding conditions had shifted, and whether the thing I had originally been trying to describe still existed in quite the same form. What changed for me was the growing awareness that the context around the evidence had a trajectory too.

I wrote about one rather absurd example in “When Stability Becomes a Moving Target.” Because Sino-UK collaboration formed part of the context of my research, I once mentioned political leadership in the opening section of my thesis. The UK context changed often enough that I eventually deleted the line altogether. Also, when I began the PhD, the UK was still in the European Union. By the middle of it, it was not anymore. The global pandemic then changed the conditions of university life, social norms, communication and study so quickly that what had looked like background context could become historically specific within just a few years.

Somewhere along the way, I became used to accumulating fragments and tolerating not knowing whether they mattered at the time. Some would later become irrelevant. Others would acquire significance only because the surrounding conditions had changed.

Perhaps this is simply what trajectories do.

They leave residue.

Cultural memory, personal experience and years of uncertainty settle somewhere in the body before they become a method. I have written before that the body knows first. Cognition follows. Language catches up later. Perhaps learning, and the methods that eventually grow from it, follow a similar trajectory too.

My PhD experience may be one reason I do not take stability for granted. Something that looks static is still only a state in time.

Reality is relational dynamics under constraint over time.

Part of my job is to leave enough of the pathway visible that we can see how one state became another.

What Seven Years of One Question Does to a Person

A PhD is a rather peculiar combination of closed and open loops.

The finished work has to close its loops. Research questions need bounded answers. Claims need evidence. Arguments need to be traceable. In my own field, that did not necessarily mean establishing simple causal chains. Much of what I was studying involved relationships, power dynamics, evolving contexts, rich narrative data, co-construction, interpretation, ongoing observation and patterns of association. But the reasoning still had to hold together. If I moved from one claim to another, the reader needed to be able to see how I got there.

My own study made this particularly visible. It was an ethnographic case study — and, since I have just made such a fuss about traceability, see Section 3.2.2 of my doctoral thesis (Shan, 2023, p. 80) — so I was never really studying an isolated object. Essentially, I was studying a social field as a system embedded within other systems, all of them in motion under constraint over time. The students, the university, patterns of communication, language, mobility, policy, Sino-UK relations, technology and the wider social environment did not politely hold still while I completed the research.

Social systems are embedded within a wider ecology of interacting systems.

That creates a peculiar methodological problem. The thesis itself eventually has to become a coherent and bounded artefact. The argument has to close sufficiently for the reader to follow it. But the reality being studied does not close simply because the thesis has to.

Neither, for much of the process, did the thinking.

For years, I kept returning to one problem. The problem was broken down into three research questions. Those questions became observations, interviews, focus groups, literature, seminars, chapters, arguments, revisions, and more questions. I wrote, rethought, and rewrote. Something I thought I understood three years earlier suddenly needed qualification. New literature appeared. Old evidence looked different. Sometimes the question itself needed to be asked differently.

The thesis title alone changed seventeen times. I still have the evidence. 😂

Figure: Seventeen versions of one PhD thesis title. Traceability means there is evidence.

—

And somewhere along the way, I became quite comfortable with the uncomfortable fact that I was probably not going to “solve” the original problem.

I was going to make a bounded contribution to understanding it.

I should add a disclaimer here. This is not an account of what every PhD is like, nor is my own trajectory a prescription for how doctoral study should be done. Doctoral paths differ enormously by discipline, methodology, institution, funding, supervision, personal circumstances and choice.

I have had an unusually good vantage point from which to see that variation. During the same period, I was not only tracing the trajectories of doctoral students as research subjects; I was also helping to build and run the Doctorate Association, which grew from just a few people into a global platform for academic exchange, career development and innovation among doctoral researchers, scholars and senior professionals. I have served as Vice-President since 2018.

Over the years, I have met and worked with doctoral researchers from very different fields and at very different points in their lives. Some published extensively. Some moved into industry. Some built academic careers. Some took long interruptions. Some wanted the doctorate at the centre of their professional identity; others very deliberately did not.

My own choices were my own. I was never particularly invested in publishing constantly in academic journals, for example. That was a deliberate personal choice made under constraint over time, not a statement about what doctoral researchers in general should do.

The irony was that, for most of those seven years, I also knew perfectly well that the enormous piece of work I was producing was unlikely to be read by many people. After years of thinking, researching, observing, interviewing, writing and rewriting, the thesis would probably end up sitting quietly in a university repository, archived alongside countless other theses and academic works that somebody cared about deeply enough to spend years producing, and that very few people would ever read deliberately from beginning to end.

In a nutshell, it was difficult, costly, and more than likely to be forgotten. And I did it with passion anyway, as if it mattered a great deal.

There is something almost against human nature about this as a form of training. We like closure. We like finishing things. We generally also like somebody to notice that we have finished them. A PhD can ask you to spend years producing a rigorous, closed artefact while tolerating open loops, uncertain relevance and, quite possibly, a very quiet afterlife.

In my case, the thinking did not particularly respect working hours either. I thought while eating, driving, walking, showering, trying to sleep, and definitely in my sleep too. Later, I remember feeding babies at night while catching up on literature I had missed, or pacing around with a child in my arms trying to get them to sleep while listening through my AirPods to my MacBook’s built-in text-to-speech function reading new papers and my own drafts back to me in its unmistakably robotic voice.

Sometimes I was singing a lullaby at the same time. Speaking of multitasking.

I would update the literature review, reopen sections I had previously considered finished, and keep going. There were substantial pauses in calendar time, but the thinking never quite switched off. Apparently, the idea of “finished” was also a moving target. A section was often only a temporarily stabilised field.

Do that for long enough and something changes.

At some point, you are no longer simply thinking about the problem. The pathways you repeatedly travel in order to think about it begin to become path-dependent themselves. Ways of asking questions, testing claims, noticing relationships, holding uncertainty and moving between scales become increasingly habitual. What began as research practice gradually becomes part of the lens through which you see.

That, to me, may be one of the less visible outcomes of sustained doctoral inquiry. The thesis is the closed artefact that eventually comes out of the process. The less visible outcome is what years of repeated thinking have done to the person who produced it.

When the Path Becomes the Lens

In my case, there was another layer. The field I was studying was in motion. So were the wider fields in which it was embedded. And over seven years, the researcher was moving too.

I began the PhD expecting a four-year project and finished seven years later as a mother of two. In between came Brexit, a global pandemic, starting two businesses, several house moves in and around Edinburgh, and the ordeal of my son’s hospitalisation. The research kept encountering a world that would not stay still, while the researcher did not stay still either. Reflexivity was real.

The PhD did not give me Relational Dynamics™. I would not impose that kind of neat retrospective causality on my own trajectory. But years of studying moving fields while living inside other moving fields undoubtedly left residue in how I learned to see. Over time, that helped me articulate, in more explicit theoretical language, an ontological stance already embedded in the life I had lived:

Reality is relational dynamics under constraint over time.

And, downstream, its applied formulation:

Excellence is capacity held in coherence under constraint over time.

Or, in a simplified shorthand:

Excellence = ∫ Capacity(t) · Coherence(t) dt, under constraint.

And perhaps that was part of the training too. Some forms of learning remain latent for years. You do not always know what they have changed until the right conditions make the residue visible. By then, the pathway may already have settled into the nervous system.

Long periods of rigorous thinking do not simply produce answers. They produce pathways. As I wrote at the beginning of my Dao: The Art of the Long Game series: “A path, repeated over time, becomes pattern.” Rather unexpectedly, that poem later found its way into Dave Snowden’s The Way Is Not a Map.

The point is that, whether physical or metaphorical, paths repeated over time acquire history. They become patterns, and those patterns begin to shape what we notice, which distinctions matter to us, which questions we instinctively ask, and how long we are willing to remain with something before forcing it into premature closure.

Eventually, the path becomes part of the lens.

And the lens has a trajectory too.

A Justified Source

This brings me back to the name AJS: A Justified Source. The name has become more literal over time.

At this stage in my life, I am less interested in writing a book in the traditional sense than in building a library, or perhaps an intellectual archive. A book tends to ask for closure, or at least to be presented that way. For now, I am still more interested in leaving the doors open.

What I want to preserve is not simply a collection of finished texts, but the judgement trajectory behind them: a traceable body of knowledge, a conceptual network formed over time, and an intellectual history that cannot be reproduced all at once after the fact. I also want to preserve the freedom to move between upstream philosophical depth and downstream application, to connect across domains, and to think deeply while still being playful, serious and mindful. I want to let it grow, follow where the relations lead, and, when appropriate, simply go with the flow.

Having taught research methods myself, I am also trained to pay attention to provenance: the difference between primary and secondary sources, the weight different forms of evidence can carry, and what can reasonably be inferred from each. The first semester of the postgraduate Research Methods course I taught — and had previously taken myself during my MSc — was literally called The Sources of Knowledge: Understanding and Analysing Research Literature, and I remain grateful for that experience.

That training had a deeper influence on me than I probably understood at the time. It shaped how I think about ontology, epistemology, axiology, methodology and methods. More broadly, it shaped how I think about participation, systems of knowledge generation, and what becomes visible or invisible within human systems.

With Relational Dynamics™, encounters may vary, but the ontology remains stable. The domains vary. The dynamics repeat.

For the kind of work I do now as an applied systems philosopher, I am sure the finished theory is not enough. A finished argument can hide the trajectory that made it possible. Some things become difficult to explain once all the scaffolding has been removed.

A framework has a history, and so does a judgement. There are earlier versions, wrong turns, observations, conversations, field notes, pieces written for completely different audiences, and sometimes fiction or illustrations that catch something before I have worked out how to say it otherwise.

I want some of that formation to remain visible. A DOI, a Digital Object Identifier, is useful for giving a finished piece a stable place to land. But I also have another kind of DOI in mind: Dots of Ideas. As the work continues to unfold, some of those dots will find clearer places within the larger structure, and some relations may only become visible later.

Not every thought needs to become theory. God forbid. But if, years later, somebody wants to know why a particular idea appeared, changed direction, disappeared, or returned in another form, I would quite like there to be somewhere to look. In that sense, AJS is not only a collection of my writing. It is a traceable space for an intellectual trajectory still unfolding.

A Library Under Construction

The blueprint was drawn long ago, and the excellence formulation was already there. Even the mortise-and-tenon principle is now in place. But the construction crew, i.e. a one-woman band (yours truly, waving from behind the scaffold), is in no rush. So perhaps it is a slightly unusual kind of library: one you can watch being built while you are already inside it, and perhaps, in some small way, help shape with the curator as it grows. And I rather like the idea that the shape does not have to be finished yet.

These days, AI can reproduce a style remarkably quickly. It is much harder to retroactively acquire the history through which a way of judging was formed.

Maybe, somewhere along the way, I am also cultivating a little AJS culture of my own. After all, from a Relational Dynamics™ perspective, culture might sometimes be shorthand for “cultivating a structure.” In this case, that means an intellectual archive with enough coordinates and coherence for the pieces to find each other again.

This is also why I care less about accumulating “content” than about strengthening structure. Disconnected posts are one thing. A hundred pieces that begin to point back to one another are something else. Over time, some of that structure may become infrastructure.

One is storage. The other begins to have geography.

I am not particularly bothered by the growing use of AI-detection or screening mechanisms on platforms either. Learning takes time, and filtering is part of the method of this particular library too. Not everything has to be immediately legible to everyone.

The right readers will find their way in and decide whether to stay.

As an original and generative thinker not confined to a specific domain or discipline, I have often felt lonely, and I do try not to sound like a broken record, even when certain compressed expressions and ideas need to recur. I am aware that repetition, whether read by humans or machines, can start to look more like personal branding than intellectual continuity.

There was a time when the whole effort felt a little like folding paper planes and throwing them into the dark of a very large universe. In fact, that was the image I used in my very first Substack reflection, Paper Planes: Reflection · 01 · A Note to the Future.

But half a year into the construction, I am glad to see that at least some humans, as well as machines, have begun to recognise what I have been building. That is also why I am increasingly less interested in over-explaining everything on this particular platform.

This AJS Substack is a public intellectual archive, an interface and an intellectual field. It is not where I do ScholarLand’s client work or offer customised consultancy. There are other contexts in which ideas need to be unpacked, frameworks and models designed, intentions translated, mechanisms audited, and applications worked through in much greater detail. And I can be very thorough when needed.

Here, especially when AI is already extraordinarily good at fluent output, I see my job somewhat differently: to make sure that the compressions and coordinates I leave along the path carry clear enough codes to be decompressed later.

After all, not every interface requires the same degree of decompression.

Coherence in the Form of 知行合一

There is a Chinese philosophical idea I am rather fond of: 知行合一 (zhī xíng hé yī), often translated as “the unity of knowing and doing.” I tend to see it as a form of coherence. Perhaps the way I keep this little archive is simply another expression of my own Dao: The Art of the Long Game, and one way of putting my formulation of excellence into practice.

If you believe in the long game, not every piece has to prove its value immediately.

I’d like to think that, in this library, not every piece unread is lost. And not every piece unused is useless.

So don’t burn the library just because nobody came in today.

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time.

Clarity under complexity.

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The Great AI Involution: Everything, Everyone, Everywhere in Rolling Mode

Last night, I was sitting with my children watching the same nursery rhymes for probably the hundredth time, only this time with a different animation.

Naturally, my mind wandered off.

At first, I was admiring the tiny details in the cartoon figures, rocking along with the kids as the familiar tune played:

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream…

And somewhere between the boat, the stream, and all the AI-related social questions that had been floating around my head that afternoon: jobs, social anxiety, insecurity, complaints, confusion, financial bubbles, tech leaders talking about the future… my hidden identity as an amateur bilingual music enthusiast, with absolutely no professional music qualifications whatsoever, was suddenly kidnapped by corporate vocabulary and produced this.

🎤 With genuine apologies to generations of children:

Roll, roll, roll your bot,

gently down the stream.

Merrily, bubbly, efficiency, productivity,

life is but a dream.

And there it was: a dark little folk song for the age of AI.

It came out almost effortlessly, which was mildly concerning. The more I thought about it, the more annoyingly accurate it became.

We used to row, by hand. Rowing takes effort, and repetition creates muscle memory. Growing up in China as a millennial, I was already well trained in rolling. The Gaokao (高考, gāo kǎo), China’s national college entrance examination, was often described as 千军万马过独木桥—thousands upon thousands of people trying to cross one narrow bridge. Somewhere along the way, I also learned the word “内卷” (nèi juǎn, aka neijuan), or “involution”: literally, rolling inward. More effort, more competition, more intensity, without necessarily creating more space. I was rolling too.

Then came another kind of rolling: rolling out software, platforms, updates, products, models, pilots and deployments. And now, in 2026, we roll out bots. We deploy them, scale them, give them tasks, give them agents, and sometimes give the agents other agents. At some point, the direction of force becomes less obvious.

Are we rolling the bots, or are the bots rolling us? Are we stuck inside some enormous feedback loop?

My internal censorship mechanism has advised me not to develop the bilingual possibilities of bot rolling any further. Chinese-speaking readers are welcome to say it aloud a few times and make their own responsible interpretations.

But the bilingual inside joke points to something less funny. Some people are simply rolled out of the system. Some parts of customer service, routine administration, manufacturing, basic content production, translation, graphic design, voice acting, and even film and television production are already being reshaped by automation. Apparently, no village department is entirely safe from automation. When a bot or automated system can do enough of the task, a human may become collateral damage. Others remain very much inside the system, for now, except that one person may increasingly be expected to do what five people used to do because the bot has made it “possible”. The jobs survive, the job descriptions drift, the workloads mutate, and people burn out. Who, exactly, is rolling whom?

The old form of involution was human against human, family against family, worker against worker. The AI version is stranger. Humans deploy machines to keep pace with other humans deploying machines, and the environment recalibrates around whatever new capacity becomes available. If one worker saves ten hours, that sounds like freedom. If everyone saves ten hours, the system may simply discover ten more hours of expected output. Elsewhere, I have framed this broader shift as “From AI to AIR.”

From AI to AIR: a three-layered framework for understanding the emerging AI paradigm

—

Somewhere along the way, we were promised a dream in which AI would save us time. Nobody quite explained what would happen once everyone had saved it.

This is also why gently down the stream starts to creep up on me. From a Relational Dynamics™ perspective, downstream consequences rarely appear from nowhere; they emerge along trajectories. By the time job losses, burnout, financial bubbles, institutional confusion or new forms of dependency become obvious, some of the conditions that produced them may already have been forming upstream for quite some time. I have written about that in my recent Risk Society mini-series, so I will leave the theory alone today.

Mostly.

I must also confess that, because I have recently become interested in what AI is doing to film, television and cultural production, I have watched a slightly embarrassing number of AI-generated short dramas.

Purely for research purposes. If I am not being entirely honest. That probably deserves another article.

But this slightly guilty pleasure of a research method has certainly shown me something deeply concerning. Perhaps we are already rolling in the deep…

Okay, I will pause here before I start humming Adele!

Today, I only wanted to contribute a small dark folk song to the age:

Roll, roll, roll your bot,

gently down the stream.

Merrily, bubbly, efficiency, productivity,

life is but a dream.

What kind of dream, of course, is another question.

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time.

Clarity under complexity.

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Continuity can look like stability. In reality, it may simply be compensation succeeding for one more day.

Trajectory Starts Before Explicit Interpretation

Fight or flight. When crisis strikes, what do you do?

Sometimes, neither is available.

You fight, but some forces cannot be overcome. You flee, but there are parts of life you cannot leave behind.

So you stay. You absorb the pressure. You hold together what you can under constraint and over time. A very British mug might tell you: keep calm and carry on. But no one tells you what “carry on” actually asks of the body.

In the first part of this two-part reflection, I wrote about illness, luck, care, and the structures that carry us—or not. Dave Snowden’s health announcement gave me a point of entry into experiences involving my mother, my son, and the medical systems our family had moved through.

I also wrote:

The body knows first.

Cognition follows.

And language only catches up later.

Perhaps it is worth clarifying what I mean by that.

I am making a point about generative precedence, not ontological separation. From the perspective of Relational Dynamics™, coupling does not abolish sequence. Interaction does not imply equal footing. Reciprocity does not erase precedence. The body, cognition, and language are deeply integrated. Precisely because they are integrated, their generative order can become difficult to see.

During the Cynefin Exploratory in Dublin, I had the pleasure of speaking with a pilot trainer. Dave also mentioned how trained professionals may register a change on an instrument panel almost immediately, before reflective cognition has fully made sense of what has changed or articulated what the situation means.

Sometimes it is as ordinary as noticing the smell of something burning in a restaurant. Before you know what has happened, your nervous system has already registered that something may be wrong. Your attention shifts. You look around. You try to locate the source. An interpretation begins to form: Is there a fire, or has something simply burned in the kitchen?

The body is not an infallible truth detector. What has been registered still has to be interpreted in context. Nor am I suggesting a linear pipeline. These processes overlap, loop back, interrupt, accelerate, and alter one another. My narrower point is simply that a trajectory of response may already have begun before explicit interpretation becomes available.

The literature contains several traditions of sense-making, sensemaking and sense making, and I do not intend to collapse those distinctions here. Nor am I treating any of these terms as another name for embodied registration. My question sits further upstream: what may already have entered the trajectory before a situation becomes explicitly interpretable?

The body may already have registered a change. Attention may already have shifted. A response may already be underway. These are not necessarily sense-making in themselves. They are part of the conditions from which later interpretation, articulation, judgement, and action become possible. Whatever terminology or tradition we adopt, explicit interpretation does not begin from nowhere.

Others may ask how we make sense of what is happening. Relational Dynamics™ is interested in what has already happened by the time we can.

Language may arrive later still, trying to name what has already been encountered. Writing or speaking requires more than linguistic capacity alone; it also depends on physical capacity, attentional availability, prior experience, and situated awareness. I explored some of this complexity much earlier in my Iceberg Model of Oral Participation.

The context of these two essays is healthcare, and I want to remain within that field. But there is another part of the story: what prolonged fear, uncertainty, misrecognition, care, and recovery leave inside the person who has lived through them.

The body does not organise experience into neat chronological folders. An event may end, but the conditions under which the body had to survive do not necessarily disappear with it. A word, a sound, an image, a tone of voice, a hospital corridor, an unexpected phone call, or news of another person’s diagnosis can bring an earlier reality back into the present with remarkable force.

That is what happened when Dave told me about the cancer.

My reaction belonged to that moment. But it also carried what my family had already lived through, what my mother was still recovering from, and what remained in me from my son’s early hospitalisation.

My mum happened to walk into the kitchen and caught me. Over time, I have also learned ways of staying with a wave of overwhelming emotion without allowing it to carry me entirely away.

People often speak about trauma as though it belongs safely to the past once the immediate danger has passed. This is not a medical paper, nor an attempt to diagnose what recovery should look like for anyone else. It is an honest reflection on how the body may continue to carry the residue of trauma.

Sometimes that residue hides inside the ordinary sentence: I am fine.

The event may be over, while the body continues to remember the conditions under which it had to remain alert, interpret signals, anticipate danger, and survive.

This does not mean that recovery is impossible. It means that recovery cannot be understood as erasure, or as somehow becoming “good as new”.

We are not machines with an easy factory reset. What happens to us leaves traces—sometimes visible, sometimes not—in the body, the mind, and the ways we encounter the world. Those traces do not necessarily determine what happens next, but neither can they simply be assumed away. They become part of the conditions from which the next part of the trajectory unfolds.

What later becomes thought, language, judgement, or action may therefore have a history before we become consciously aware of it. The body may already be registering the field before we know what to call what is happening.

Event Ends. Trajectories Continue.

My son turns four this week.

At the very beginning of his life, we were given a diagnosis that, had it been correct, meant this birthday might never happen.

The fact that he survived did not erase the world briefly created by that diagnosis: the sudden rearrangement of reality, the chaotic future it forced us to imagine, or the absurdity of the narrative lock-in that followed.

It was wrong. It was delivered prematurely. It was later ruled out by genetic testing. And after the later medical incident, it was invoked again as an explanation.

I spent months, perhaps longer, contemplating the sheer absurdity of it: somehow, a newborn was being made to carry explanatory responsibility for a genetic disorder he did not have. I kept wondering what purpose that explanation was serving, and how many other lives go through similar ordeals.

Again, as I wrote in the previous piece: “I do not hold a grudge against any individual involved, although there may be one or two exceptions.” There is no elegant academic language for what I think about that diagnosis or the way it was delivered to us.

The irony is that microvillus inclusion disease (MVID) is itself, in a sense, a structural disorder of the body: a condition in which the body cannot sustain normal absorption and growth. An incorrect structural diagnosis ended up revealing a different structural problem altogether—the inability of the system to register weak but meaningful early signals and revise its own explanatory frame when the evidence changed.

Part of what made it so difficult was trust. As I have written in When a Medical System Is Sick, Who Is the Doctor?:

“We are told that trust is earned, but that is only partly true. Some roles arrive with trust already attached. Doctor. Nurse. Teacher. Police. Judge. Scientist. Society has already placed a layer of trust around them. That is why betrayal inside care systems hits so hard.”

The same news carries very different weight depending on who delivers it: a layperson, a nurse, a medical student, a junior doctor, or a consultant with a professorial title.

The fact that my son is thriving does not retrospectively make the fear we lived with unreasonable. A good outcome does not turn a catastrophic experience into a harmless misunderstanding. Survival does not erase the residue of having once been told that survival might not be possible.

For a long time, my mind kept returning to the same counterfactuals.

What if I had accepted the option of a phone-only check with the midwife that day? What if we had lived far away from the children’s hospital? What if no one else had been there to look after my daughter? What if we had simply accepted the system’s explanation after it had failed to register the earlier signals? What if we had been less educated, less resilient, more occupied, more trusting, more gullible, or less able to question what we were being told?

Were we simply expected to absorb a serious medical incident without a satisfactory explanation, file it away as bad luck, and move on?

You may be told, “He is all right now.” But you do not get back a baby who has been cut open and stitched back together and simply return to the reality you occupied before.

During our hospital stay, I was even told a few times, “Don’t worry. Babies don’t feel much pain.”

I was left speechless.

I mean… had the babies been consulted? My silence, I suspect, was interpreted as no objection.

A life is saved.
Yet everything has changed.

The same is true, in a different way, of my mother’s cancer. It has been less than a year since her diagnosis. She is recovering steadily, and I am so proud of her. But recovery does not mean returning to the person she was before.

Her body has changed. Her mindset has changed. Her relationship with time, routine, food and drink, clothes, rest, mobility, travel, exercise, finances, family, and friends—almost everything has changed. It is almost as though she has to learn how to inhabit again a world she had known for six decades. A “biographical disruption”, as Dave noted in The Idiot’s Guide to an Early Diagnosis. Of course, the family around her has changed too.

We are often too eager to draw a line between illness and recovery, trauma and healing, crisis and normality. But lived experience does not always respect those boundaries. Just as there is rarely one precise moment at which a body becomes “ill”, there is not necessarily a single moment at which it becomes “recovered”.

A person may recover clinically while still feeling fear before opening another medical report or test result. A family may resume ordinary routines while remaining unusually alert to certain words or situations. A child may grow and thrive while the parents still carry the memory of a room in which the future seemed to disappear. A parent may keep calm and carry on while blaming themselves a thousand times for something that was never theirs to carry. A patient may have to explain, again and again, why they remain vulnerable when the injuries they carry are not visible to the naked eye.

Recovery is not a reversal.

It is a re-formation.

It is the gradual construction of a life that has absorbed what happened without allowing it to become the only thing that is happening.

The Excellence Formulation and the Art of Not Collapsing

“How are you?” “I’m fine.”

It is one of those default exchanges that my language-first, literal brain has never fully understood. We say it when things are genuinely fine, but also when life is far too complicated to explain.

For a period of time, when “I’m fine” felt almost like self-betrayal, I stopped saying it. Instead, I just smiled and went with:

Still alive.

Partly dark humour, partly the most accurate answer I could offer.

One central working formulation in Relational Dynamics™ is:

Excellence is capacity held in coherence under constraint over time.

As a relational shorthand, I sometimes compress the same formulation as:

Excellence = ∫ Capacity(t) · Coherence(t) dt, under constraint.

This was never intended as a conventional account of success. It brings capacity, coherence, constraint, and time into one relational frame.

I had been noticing versions of the same relation across very different domains for years—in education, organisations, communication, business, relationships, politics, research, and history. Systems could fail in almost endlessly different ways, but certain relational patterns kept repeating: capacity could be present while coherence failed; constraint could suppress, redirect, or release what a system was capable of; and time could expose dynamics that a snapshot concealed.

I later came to recognise this as a form of cross-domain isomorphism.

The domains vary. The dynamics repeat.

From an embodied perspective, I had also lived through periods in which capacity felt compressed almost to breaking point. Constraints were heavy and demanding. Responsibilities were piling up. Resources were scarce. Physical energy drained. Intellectual capacity narrowed. Joy was sucked away. Confidence, direction, and the ability to imagine a future narrowed with them. Much of what might otherwise have been available as capacity was absorbed by fear, care, instability, and the work of maintaining enough coherence to continue. Time became strangely contradictory. There never seemed to be enough time, so everything felt unfinished, yet the days themselves could feel unbearably long. I wanted time not to run out, and at the same time desperately wanted that period of life to pass.

Later, as time went on, the constraints changed. Life was no longer dominated by crisis. This biological system I call myself began working differently again. I was no longer living in survival mode, and capacity that had been diverted, suppressed, or simply unavailable began to return. I could feel the difference in my own body, and I could see it in my child and the world around us.

That experience did not create the excellence formulation. It made it personally legible. And it passed life’s stress test.

Capacity is not a fixed measure of what a system “is capable of”. What becomes available depends on the constraints under which it operates, the coherence it can maintain, and the period over which that relation has to hold. A person, organisation, institution, or society can possess considerable capacity and still fail to sustain it coherently.

When the default unit of analysis is trajectory rather than snapshot, excellence stops being a label for what a system is “good at”. It becomes a question of what capacity can be held coherently, under what constraint, and for how long.

This is why “still alive” has never felt like a trivial threshold to me.

Sometimes survival is simply the condition from which anything else remains possible. Before growth, transformation, improvement, or flourishing can occur, enough coherence has to remain to carry what comes next.

That is not a celebration of endless resilience. Quite the opposite. The fact that a system has not yet collapsed tells us very little about what it is costing to keep it going.

In Nothing Collapses in One Move, I wrote:

“Nothing collapses in one move. The path narrows first. By the time failure becomes visible, much of the trajectory has already been laid down. That is true in Go. It is also true across systems.”

Systems rarely collapse in one dramatic moment. Pressure accumulates. Coordination becomes harder. People compensate. Compensation itself begins to consume capacity. A system may even appear to stabilise around a new path dependency until it forgets to ask why that dependency became necessary in the first place.

Some human systems can look functional for a surprisingly long time.

We work. We care. We reply. We organise. We explain. We compensate. We carry on.

From the outside, continuity can look like stability. In reality, it may simply be compensation succeeding for one more day.

That is where The Art of Not Collapsing comes from for me. I later used the Chinese title 《别塌就好》—roughly, “please don’t collapse”—for my public writing, and the English title for a LinkedIn group, which, I have to admit, is still at a very early stage of system formation.

Not collapsing does not mean remaining unchanged.

Sometimes coherence requires continuing. Sometimes it requires stopping, redistributing work, changing the configuration, or allowing another part of the system to carry what one part no longer can.

Coherence is not rigidity.

I explored this from another angle in From Dao to Not-Dao: The Structure That Holds, through my Mortise and Tenon Model of system stability. A structure holds not because nothing moves, but because its relations can absorb, distribute, and accommodate movement without losing the form required to remain viable.

A system that cannot alter its form under pressure may preserve its appearance while losing the very capacity that keeps it viable.

The art lies in maintaining enough coherence, capacity, relation, and movement for a trajectory to remain viable.

Some People Drink. I Write.

Somewhere along the way, I developed a way of regulating fear and uncertainty, calming the storm in my head, and navigating emotions that might otherwise become overwhelming.

Some people drink.

I write.

Writing does not remove uncertainty, invalidate fear, or force experience into a reassuring conclusion. It gives the energy somewhere to go.

It allows what first arrives as bodily sensation to become thought, one thought to connect with another, and thoughts eventually to become language. Run it a few times, adjust the conditions, test a different interpretation—almost like a form of mental programming. Once something enters language, I can look at it, move around it, question it, and sometimes begin to understand which part belongs to the present and which part is residue from somewhere else.

Writing has never been my escape from reality. If anything, it is one of the ways I enter it more deliberately without being consumed by it.

There is a difference between explaining an experience and metabolising it. Explanation can remain external. It can organise events without necessarily changing the relationship one has with them.

Writing, for me, is slower, but it works at a different depth.

It allows experience to move from the body into language without pretending that fluent output can fully contain it. It creates enough distance for reflection, but not so much that the embodied reality disappears.

Perhaps this is also why I write across theory, observation, thought experiments, fiction, and fragments. Not every experience arrives in a form suitable for argument. Some have to be approached sideways first. Some need rhythm, image, humour, or characters scattered across an imagined universe. Some need a liminal space that may look, from the outside, almost like silence before they become available to thought.

What we experience does not simply become “the past”. It continues to participate in how experience itself is formed—how we encounter the present and imagine the future.

Writing is not recovery itself, but it has become one of the ways I recover enough distance, meaning, and movement to continue.

The Journey Back?

Recovery is often described as a journey back—to health, to work, to normality, or to oneself.

I understand the appeal of that narrative, but I no longer think it is accurate. In fact, I know it is not.

Maybe there is no original state waiting intact for us to return to. But maybe that is not a problem either.

Spending months in a children’s hospital changed my understanding of what we casually call “life as we know it”. I saw children whose entry points into life were profoundly different from what is usually treated as the norm. Some came through prolonged hospitalisation, repeated procedures, feeding tubes, machines, medication schedules, and forms of dependence that reorganised everyday life very early on.

For them and their families, illness was not always something that interrupted life and was later neatly left behind. It had already reorganised everyday reality in ways that could not simply be reversed.

I still get literal chills remembering a father taking a deep breath, lifting his chin, and bracing himself before walking through the doors of the oncology ward.

Illness can do something similar later in life. It changes what counts as ordinary, safe, routine, urgent, possible, and worth planning for. Things that previously required almost no thought—food, travel, rest, appointments, physical movement, a phone call—can suddenly acquire different meanings, demands, and different costs.

During my work with the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), one of the projects I worked on was the Scottish Health Survey (SHeS). Interviewing hundreds of residents across Scotland about some of the most intimate details of their health made this even clearer to me. For many people, illness was not a discrete episode sitting neatly inside an otherwise unchanged life. It reorganised routines, relationships, mobility, work, finances, confidence, opportunities, and the horizon of what still felt possible. Some lives were lived in long negotiation with pain, limitation, loss, treatment, uncertainty, and care.

That fieldwork deepened my sense that healthcare is never only about healthcare. It is also about the life that has to reorganise around what has happened to a body. Beyond hospitals and clinics, these are not exceptional lives at the edge of society. They are part of what society is made of.

As the rest of the world began emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic and gradually lowering its guard, our family seemed to move in the opposite direction. We built a tighter perimeter around a child whose body had taught us how quickly an apparently ordinary situation could become dangerous. Food, surfaces, symptoms, appointments, procedures, and every supposedly routine reassurance entered a much stricter field of attention.

What could be eaten, touched, reached, trusted, or treated as ordinary had changed. So had our capacity and our constraints. And when capacity and constraint change, reality is encountered differently. The scale on which time is lived can change too. Sometimes the future narrows to the next hour, the next feed, the next result, or simply the next night survived.

But “back to oneself” is perhaps the part of recovery language that I keep returning to, especially after my mother’s operation last year—for her, and for myself.

I have heard versions of it for years, particularly around motherhood. Bodies change. Routines disappear. Time stops feeling like your own. People talk about losing themselves after having children, and I understand exactly what they mean.

My first child was born in December 2019, the very month COVID-19 began rearranging everybody else’s reality too. Looking back at the years between 2019 and 2023, bizarre may still be the best word I have. I entered motherhood twice during a period when much of the world was also having its assumptions about work, study, movement, safety, family, relationships, health, and time rewritten.

There were certainly moments when I wanted to “get myself back”. But which self?

The person before life in the UK? Before marriage? Before children? Before the PhD? Before the pandemic? Before illness entered the family? Before particular responsibilities, decisions, and encounters?

We are very good at romanticising paths we did not take. We are also surprisingly good at romanticising paths we already travelled. Familiarity acquires a glow simply because we know how to inhabit it. The previous self can begin to look wonderfully coherent from the uncertainty of the present.

Perhaps what we miss is not always the person we were. Sometimes we miss knowing how to be that person.

The unfamiliar self can be frightening precisely because we have not yet learned its routines, temperament, capacities, limits, pleasures, or possibilities. And yet, the person who comes through may not be worse.

For me, she may carry more baggage. She may have scars, habits of vigilance, responsibilities she never imagined, and memories she would rather not have acquired. But she may also have unlocked identities she could not previously inhabit, entered territories she could not previously reach, found language she could not previously speak, learned what she can carry and what she should refuse to carry, and become capable of movements that would once have seemed impossible.

That is not because suffering automatically improves us, and I do not want to glorify suffering.

Not every trauma makes us stronger. Not every illness contains a lesson. Not every loss needs to become a gift. Sometimes scars are simply scars.

But sometimes, over time, they also become markers of where we have been—souvenirs from levels of the game we would never voluntarily replay, but which nevertheless became part of the life we actually lived.

Recovery, then, cannot always mean returning to “life as we knew it”. Sometimes there was never a stable version of that life waiting in the background. Sometimes it existed, but neither the world nor the person returning to it is quite the same.

From a Relational Dynamics™ perspective, recovery is not just healing, nor simply the restoration of a prior self. Reality is relational dynamics under constraint over time. When capacity, coherence, constraint, and relation change, the way we inhabit reality changes with them. Recovery becomes relational reorganisation after reality has changed.

Words that once sounded neutral may no longer land that way. A test result may trigger the body to prepare for terrible news. Clothes hanging in the wardrobe, saved for “later”, may never fit again. An exercise you once did every day may suddenly feel impossible to attempt.

Recovery therefore involves more than rebuilding trust in the body or returning to daily life. It may involve learning how to inhabit reality again without treating every uncertainty as an approaching catastrophe, while knowing that the fear did not come from nowhere.

Recovery asks something more difficult than return. It asks us to discover how to live from where we now are. That may involve grieving what cannot be restored, recognising what remains, rebuilding trust, accepting altered capacity, and becoming acquainted with a self we did not plan to become.

Sometimes meaning lies not in justifying what happened, but in becoming more accurate about what it changed, what it revealed, and what kind of care is now required.

A recovered life is not an untouched life. It is a life that continues from where the trajectory has brought it.

Perhaps we are all, in one way or another, moving from one recovery into another: illness, grief, trauma, exhaustion, failure, lost certainty, a former identity, or a version of life that no longer exists.

We do not all recover from the same thing, in the same way, or towards the same life. And perhaps that is part of what life asks of us.

Recovery may not be a journey back at all.

It may be learning how to recognise, inhabit, and continue the life and the self that exist now.

The Mountain Remains

My son is turning four this week. A few months ago, he finally started saying “mama”.

My mother is recovering. She has picked up a table-tennis bat again, this time with her left hand.

I, too, have moved into a new chapter of my own trajectory.

After years of accumulation, contemplation, private writing across different topics and narrative forms, and developing Relational Dynamics™: Theory of System Trajectories, I spent a long time waiting for the right place and the right time. Eventually, life presented a window, and I gathered the courage to enter public writing with Dao: The Art of the Long Game.

I am not looking back.

Life has no Plan B. There is only Plan A, and every divergence remains part of it. We don’t begin another life when the trajectory changes. We continue this one from wherever it has brought us.

There is a saying in Chinese:

留得青山在，不怕没柴烧。

Literally: As long as the mountain remains, there will still be firewood to burn.

Metaphorically, in the language I have been using here: as long as enough remains to carry what comes next, the trajectory is still open.

Hope, in this sense, is simply this: The trajectory remains open.

“Still alive” is not the conclusion. It is the place from which the next part can begin.

This two-part reflection on illness, care, and system trajectories began with Dave Snowden’s recent announcement of his cancer diagnosis, which opened the floodgates to thoughts I had been carrying for a long time. As he prepares for surgery this week, I join many others in wishing him all the very best and a steady recovery ahead.

For me, apparently, another question is already beginning to form.

If recovery extends beyond formal healthcare, where does care actually happen, who performs it, and what travels through the networks that carry it?

As care moves through families, communities, digital platforms, and increasingly AI-mediated spaces, I find myself wondering what exactly is being redistributed.

Perhaps that is where I will go next.

The game is not over yet.

And, apparently, neither is the thinking.

Previous piece:

When the Body Knows First: Reflections on Luck, Illness, and the Structures That Carry Us
Structural Essays · 28 · Part I of a Two-Part Reflection on Illness, Care, and System Trajectories

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time.

Clarity under complexity.

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Care is carried through structures we rarely see — until one connection fails.

The Announcement

The first thing I read online today was Dave Snowden’s post, The Idiot’s Guide to an Early Diagnosis. For a split second, my pre-coffee brain misread the title and gave it an unintended twist: The Guide to an Early Diagnosis of an Idiot. What?

The silly morning joke lasted barely a moment. A few lines into the post, I realised this was something much more serious, and it opened up something I have not quite dared to speak about myself. I wanted to leave a comment, only to find myself with far too many thoughts and no obvious place to begin.

I had known for a little while before Dave’s public announcement today, from a brief private exchange after Dublin. Having followed his blog posts closely over the past few months, I already knew before the Cynefin Exploratory in Dublin that he had been unwell, and I carried a quiet, unspoken anxiety both before and after the event, although I could not have known what was coming. That night, when I saw the C word appear in a message from Dave, the tears came before thought did.

I often say, “The body knows first. Cognition follows. And language only catches up later.” It was a nervous-system response, immediate and embodied, triggered partly by what my own family had already lived through, and partly by fear in the face of everything that remained unknown.

My mum happened to walk into the kitchen and found me sobbing. She gave me a proper hug. She has been recovering from cancer herself. There are moments when words are unnecessary because the body already recognises what has entered the room.

Dave’s reflections on luck, early diagnosis, medical systems, and the C word resonated with me at a deeply personal level. My mother’s cancer was discovered last year during a routine health check she had almost decided not to attend. My son’s hospitalisation confronted me with the other side of the same question: what happens when the system does not recognise the signal in time?

There is profound gratitude in recognising those moments as luck. I feel that gratitude every single day.

At the same time, there is something deeply unsettling about it, something that still keeps me alert at all times and awake at night.

The Trouble with Luck

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and is now recovering. Her cancer was found during an annual health check she had almost decided to skip: one appointment, one decision, one day that could very easily have gone another way. That is partly why I resonated so strongly with Dave’s account of luck. I understand what it means to look back and see the small points at which a life might have turned in another direction.

I wish I could say the same about my son’s hospitalisation in 2022. In that case, much of what held the trajectory together came not from timely recognition by the system, but from our own capacity to stay, watch, question, compensate, and continue when we were already depleted.

During that period, I also came to appreciate how lucky we were in ways that are easy to overlook when illness is discussed only in clinical terms. My husband Norbert and I were able to drop almost everything and coordinate the chaos. We were physically and financially robust enough to withstand prolonged pressure coming at us from all directions. We had enough knowledge to recognise when something did not make sense, and enough confidence to question it when necessary—even when professional confidence far exceeded the available evidence.

Norbert and I read so many medical papers while trying to understand our son’s case that I sometimes felt I was doing a medical degree alongside my PhD, with Norbert somehow becoming my study buddy while completing the same unofficial degree on top of his own doctorate.

While other mothers’ phones were probably filling up with tiny newborn smiles, sleepy faces, and first little moments, mine was full of stools. Yes, lots and lots of photographs of poo: different colours, shapes, smell, textures, consistencies, amounts, and timings. We studied them, recorded them, compared them, discussed them, and, for a while, that was quite literally what we talked about all day.

By then, I had become almost traumatised by the word gut. Even so, I could never quite resist a pun about gut feeling.

We were also fortunate in another, less visible way: our work did not chain us to a nine-to-five routine. My daughter was only two years old, but secure enough in our relationship not to experience my repeated disappearance into the hospital as abandonment. My mother-in-law came to help when we were at our most desperate, when we had nearly lost both hope and trust.

Luck is also vulnerable to survivor’s bias. The dead do not talk.

Those who survive can look back and identify the moments that held. Those who did not make it are no longer here to tell us where the trajectory broke. Our family spent a long time waiting for answers to two questions: Where did it go wrong? And who was responsible? After endless redirection, we reached a dead end. What eventually arrived was not an answer, but a few kilos of medical records in the post.

There is enormous gratitude in recognising the points at which a trajectory was held. But luck is also the part that troubles me most, because I have witnessed what happens when those conditions do not align. When I saw the Nottingham maternity inquiry report in June this year, I wrote When a Medical System Is Sick, Who Is the Doctor? The pain was too real. The pattern is too familiar. Still, the cure is in the air.

When luck saves someone we love, we call it a blessing. Yet if a person’s health depends too heavily upon being in the right place, meeting the right clinician, entering through the right door, being able to speak in the right way, or being noticed at precisely the right moment, luck begins to expose something structurally unsustainable.

A life may be saved by luck. A healthcare system cannot be sustained by it.

Health systems operate under conditions of high stress, high risk, limited time and resources, uneven information, critical dependencies, and often irreversible consequences. They are precisely the kinds of systems in which small failures of recognition, communication, access, or coordination can accumulate before anyone sees the whole picture.

By coincidence, my piece on risk transformation was also published today in Risk Society, following my earlier essay, Risk as Relational Emergence Under Constraint. In that piece, I argued that risk is not simply an event that suddenly appears, but something generated relationally as coherence shifts under constraint over time. I did not expect life to place that argument beside Dave’s post before I had even finished breakfast, but perhaps the dots were always connected.

The Structures That (Failed to) Carry Care

Dave writes about the people who caught him, and I stared at that line for a very long time as one image after another passed before my eyes.

I distinctly remember many of the faces that helped us along the way. I remember names too.

A nurse holding my hands on admission and talking me through what would happen next. A doctor kneeling on the emergency-room floor, trying to find a vein in my son’s tiny leg after severe dehydration had made access elsewhere almost impossible. A therapist who listened and warned me that the emotions might come flooding back. A cleaner hugging me tightly when she saw me return to a ward we had only just left. A surgeon looking me in the eye and reassuring me that my son’s bowel showed no underlying defect. A nurse who did not shame me as I wiped baby poo from the floor. A volunteer who sat with him for an hour so that I could close my eyes for a moment, wash, eat, and still feel human.

There were more.

I remember all of them.

For that, I am deeply, deeply grateful.

It is easy to picture the visible moment of being helped, but, as Dave’s account makes clear, no one is ever caught by one person alone. Catching has to be plural. The support network is part of the trajectory, and whether someone is caught depends on structures being there before the moment arrives.

Society is held together by these structural points, many of which remain almost invisible while they are working. We tend to notice the doctor because the doctor appears at the visible clinical interface, but care also depends on logistics, administration, staffing, time, money, transport, replacement, translation, domestic labour, and the ability of those close to the patient to suspend ordinary life without everything else collapsing around them.

When those structures are present and connected, we describe ourselves as fortunate. When they are missing, however, the burden does not disappear. It is transferred onto individuals, families, and frontline workers, who are then expected to compensate through extraordinary effort, sacrifice, goodwill, and endurance.

This is where virtue can become consumptive.

A system can praise compassion while exhausting compassionate people. It can celebrate resilience while repeatedly creating the conditions that require it. It can applaud carers, nurses, doctors, parents, and volunteers while quietly relying on them to absorb failures that should never have been theirs to carry.

Gratitude, recognition, and kindness matter enormously. But they can also mask the problem, offering a temporary emotional reward in place of sufficient staffing, clear coordination, and robust infrastructure. Clapping for the NHS every Thursday night made for good television. A selfie with a mermaid while the Titanic is going down might feel miraculous too. Neither stops the ship from sinking.

A healthcare system cannot be held together indefinitely by asking good people to keep compensating for structural absence.

Good people cannot keep becoming the missing structure.

I do not want to revisit the full details of my son’s experience here, but one part of it showed me how easily a system can erase the very signal it later has to spend enormous resources trying to recover.

He was born naturally, at full term, strong, and apparently healthy. I did not get to hold him immediately because I was rushed into the operating theatre shortly after the birth. From the first day, I noticed blood in his stool and raised the possibility of cow’s milk protein allergy. It was hardly an exotic hypothesis. By 2020, the clinical literature had already recognised food protein–induced allergic proctocolitis (FPIAP) as a condition in which otherwise healthy-looking infants may present with blood in their stools.

Whatever name we might now give the full complexity of what followed, the possibility I raised was neither obscure nor clinically implausible. The signal was there, but it was bypassed, dismissed, or simply never registered.

Perhaps we were not hysterical enough. Perhaps my son did not appear to demand immediate emergency attention. Perhaps being born apparently healthy, and therefore classified as low risk, became the very reason the early signal was treated as background noise.

By the time the system finally recognised the severity of his condition, he had deteriorated to the point that far more resources were required to respond to what had become an emergency. What followed over the coming days and months involved more observation, more measurement, more testing, more disturbance, and more intervention around a problem whose upstream signal had already been present.

What is missed early does not disappear. It returns later, often in a more serious form, consuming more time, more labour, more money, more of the patient’s body, and more of the family’s sanity. The system can then appear to be working extremely hard to solve a crisis that its own failure of recognition helped to produce.

I do not hold a grudge against any individual involved, although there may be one or two exceptions. I know that no single person created the entire trajectory, and no clinician could have seen every part of it. But I have not forgotten what happened, and I have little reason to believe the pattern was unique to us.

My sense is that it repeats more often than we would like to admit: a quiet signal is discounted because the situation does not yet look urgent enough; recognition comes only after deterioration; and the resulting emergency mobilises resources that might not have been necessary had the upstream concern been registered.

The Hospital Got Lucky

My son was strong and robust. He is lucky. He survived, he is thriving, and this month we will celebrate his fourth birthday.

He also survived a premature diagnosis of microvillus inclusion disease (MVID), a rare genetic disorder. It was presented before the results were available and sounded less like a working hypothesis than a death notice.

Once that diagnosis entered the system, it began to reorganise how everything that followed was interpreted, as though the diagnosis had become more real than the body in front of them.

My son, meanwhile, was a newborn. He could not argue, correct the record, explain what he was feeling, or tell anyone where it hurt.

He survived repeated blood tests, intended and unintended fasting, intravenous fluids, injections, antibiotics, examinations, and the relentless search for an explanation after the original signal had failed to register.

Some periods of fasting were medically required. Others were not. Feeding time came, but there was simply no one available to feed him. I could hear him screaming. The machine kept beeping. The feeding bag hung empty. I could see the replacement feed sitting in the kitchen, yet I had no access to it. To the system, these may have appeared as small, routine, non-critical delays. To a hungry and already unwell newborn, and to the parent watching helplessly beside him, they were not small at all.

Then came that day.

By then, he had improved considerably. He was on full feeds and expected to go home the following week. We had begun, cautiously, to believe that this part of the ordeal might finally be ending.

That morning, I carefully read and signed the consent forms for two procedures planned before his discharge: removal of his central line and an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy. I asked about their sequence and what each would involve, only to be told with confidence, “Very routine. Don’t worry.” The risk of intestinal perforation was not listed in the consent form, nor had it been explained to me beforehand.

“Routine,” they said. So Norbert went to work, and I waited alone in our room, happy at the thought that I might finally be able to hold my son without tubes attached to him.

I waited.

And waited.

Eventually, I realised it was taking too long.

Then two doctors knocked on the door and asked me to sit down.

What began as two procedures before discharge ended with a perforated bowel and another decision that had to be made immediately.

My brain could barely process what was happening. Norbert drove over, probably Fast and Furious style, and somehow managed to have the grown-up conversation while I sat on the verge of passing out at the thought of signing yet another consent form. I trusted him to understand what they were saying. He knew I was too exhausted and too frightened to take part in the decision.

The conversation took place in a playroom.

I remember very little of those hours.

I remember staring at the toys.

Then only more waiting.

More silence.

And more bad news.

After that came laparoscopic exploration to locate the source of the escaping air. When the perforation could not be found through keyhole surgery, an anaesthetist came to tell us that the operation would have to be converted to emergency open surgery. The hole in his jejunum was then identified and repaired.

As it turned out, the endoscopy had perforated my son’s jejunum, leaving a hole of approximately 4.5 millimetres. The surgical record noted that the tissues appeared healthy apart from bruising, that the perforation was believed to have resulted from air insufflation during the upper gastrointestinal endoscopy, and that no other defect of the small or large bowel was found on inspection.

By that evening, the word routine no longer meant what it had meant that morning.

That morning, my son had been wearing a little onesie patterned with tigers. He had been smiling. We were getting ready to go home.

The next time I saw him, he wore nothing but a nappy and fresh surgical scars across his abdomen, as though his tiny body had been pulled apart and stitched back together. He was connected to even more tubes, receiving morphine, antibiotics, and all the other things that had become necessary only because the procedure had injured him.

He was back in critical care, back on TPN, and once again unable to receive milk either orally or through his feeding tube.

There was no smile. There was only screaming. Endless screaming. The sound came out like why, why, why, over and over. Every cry seemed to push against the fresh stitches holding his tiny abdomen together.

I still see that image when I think of those days.

Then the doctor who had performed the endoscopy invoked MVID again, even though the genetic results had by then made that diagnosis highly unlikely. I never thought I would hear him utter the word again after he had first presented that premature diagnosis to us with the weight of an established fact.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. The first time had sounded like a death notice. The second time was nothing but an excuse. Perhaps this is what happens when a system keeps believing its own explanation after reality has already moved on.

As I said, it was one train wreck of suffering after another. I will spare readers the full catalogue of those months. Even now, some of it sounds too absurd to have happened.

It did.

The point here is that I saw a medical system surviving on luck with my own eyes. My son was lucky to survive. The hospital was lucky that he did.

It was shocking.

It is also true.

The Wider Ecology of Care

The more I reflect on these experiences, the less I think this is simply a healthcare conversation.

It is a conversation about care.

Healthcare is one subsystem within a much wider ecology of care. Illness does not remain inside a hospital. It moves through families, workplaces, childcare, schools, transport, airports, pharmacies, finances, housing, and every relationship connected to the person who becomes ill.

When my mother was diagnosed, my father became her primary caregiver. I received the news over the phone and was on the first available flight from Edinburgh to China. My mother-in-law came to the UK to help Norbert care for our two young children. I was able to leave work, travel, and be with my parents. Flights existed. Borders were open. My passport still had just enough validity left for my return trips. Work could be rearranged. Family members moved into different roles.

None of this happened inside a hospital.

Yet all of it was care.

After we returned home from the children’s hospital, a volunteer from a charity called Home-Start came to sit with me regularly and see how we were coping. The hospital stay had ended, but the trajectory of care continued beyond discharge.

It is easy to overlook this because it appears as love, duty, or simply what families do. But love still requires time, money, health, mobility, coordination, and someone with enough remaining capacity to carry what has suddenly been redistributed.

Not everyone can leave work at short notice. Not everyone can afford a flight at short notice. Not everyone has another adult who can take over childcare, accompany someone to appointments, interpret medical information, or stay awake through the night. When those forms of support are absent, the illness has not become less demanding. The burden has simply been concentrated onto fewer people.

We understandably centre the patient, but illness reorganises everyone connected to it. Caregivers lose sleep, working capacity, confidence, and sometimes their sense of who they are outside the role they have suddenly entered. They carry fear while trying not to transmit it. They translate information, make decisions, manage logistics, absorb uncertainty, and keep ordinary life functioning while their own ordinary life is being altered.

Caregivers, too, enter the trajectory.

Care has a trajectory of its own.

Illness Has a Trajectory

Cancer is often narrated as though it were a sequence of clearly bounded medical events: diagnosis, surgery, treatment, recovery, follow-up appointments, and perhaps further treatment. Each stage is given a date on a timeline, and the dates make the process look more orderly than it feels to the people living through it.

My mother’s experience taught me otherwise.

A diagnosis may happen on a particular day, and an operation may begin and end within a number of hours, but illness does not remain contained within those events. It unfolds into discomfort, confusion, waiting, decisions, test results, changed bodies, interrupted routines, recurring appointments, long-term treatment, sleeplessness, anxiety, fatigue, fear, dread at the sight of another medical letter or test result, withdrawal from the world, compulsively reading everything while being overwhelmed by too much of it, and the slow rebuilding of trust in one’s own body.

The operation may be an event. Illness is a trajectory.

Before my mother’s final treatment plan had been confirmed, we went to a shopping centre together and walked into a wig shop. It had been on her mind for a while, but she did not want to do this with my father. Not yet.

She was worried and slightly self-conscious, unsure whether she was entering too early, asking too much, or preparing for something she still hoped might not happen. The shop was empty, and the assistant was initially a little too enthusiastic for my taste. But he soon seemed to understand without needing us to explain very much.

He mentioned several wigs that were popular with other customers undergoing cancer treatment. He showed us, gently and without fuss, how the wigs should be fitted, washed, dried, and cared for. Suddenly, it no longer felt like a sales technique. It felt almost therapeutic.

It felt almost like any other shopping trip. We looked around, tried a few things, and bought nothing. Nothing dramatic happened on the surface. That is precisely why I remember it.

It was one of those small moments in which the future entered the present before either of us was ready to name it. We were not yet dealing with hair loss. We were preparing for the possibility of it, learning how to care for a body that had not yet changed but might soon be changed by treatment.

Healthcare is full of these thresholds. A diagnosis may be delivered in a consultation room, but its consequences move through kitchens, workplaces, airports, schools, pharmacies, bedrooms, shopping centres, and family conversations. The medical system may treat the tumour, but the wider care system carries the life around it.

Those who love the person begin to measure time differently too. We learn a language we never wanted to learn. We become familiar with clinical terms, appointment systems, treatment cycles, medication side effects, and the meaning of pauses in a doctor’s voice. Time becomes organised around the scan, the surgery, the treatment, the next result. A phone call can divide an ordinary day into a before and an after: BC and AD—before cancer and after diagnosis.

A person may receive treatment in hospital, but illness continues to unfold across a much wider field.

Between Caring and Being Cared For

I have been thinking about healthcare in recent weeks as I prepare to join a conversation on a healthcare podcast. The invitation has brought me back to questions I have carried for a long time: what care actually consists of, where the medical system ends and the wider care system begins, who becomes part of the infrastructure around illness, and what happens when those structures fail to hold.

Dave’s post did not create those questions for me. It brought them back differently: through the body, through memory, and through experiences I had not yet quite found a public way to speak about.

There is another part of this reflection that I have deliberately left outside this piece: what prolonged fear, care, trauma, and recovery do to the person who lives through them; how the body carries residue even as life moves forward; and how embodied experience later becomes thought.

That is the part I will write next.

But even before that, one thing feels increasingly difficult to ignore: care is not a concern that belongs only to patients, families in crisis, or those who work in healthcare. Nor is it confined to one country, one class, one institution, or one system.

Across a lifetime, we move repeatedly between caring and being cared for, sometimes returning to roles we thought we had left behind, and sometimes occupying both positions at once.

A daughter becomes her mother’s carer while still needing to be held herself. A parent keeps a child alive while carrying fear that requires care of its own. A doctor becomes a patient. A strong person becomes dependent. Someone who has spent years caring for others eventually needs others to reorganise their lives around them.

These are not exceptional reversals. They are just part of being human.

The roles shift, overlap, and return. The question is not whether we will enter the ecology of care, but when, through which relationship, and whether the structures around us will be able to hold.

None of us remains permanently on only one side of care.

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time.

Clarity under complexity.

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She used to get paper cuts easily.

Nothing serious. Just thin, pale lines along the sides of her fingers where folders brushed too fast, where cheap cardboard caught skin.

He noticed before she did.

“You’re at war with office supplies,” he once said, already reaching into his bag.

He always had a plaster. Folded small, sealed, practical.

He pressed it onto her finger with exaggerated seriousness, as if this were an injury worthy of attention.

She smiled.

It stung less when he did that.

Years later, he still carried one.

It had become automatic. Wallet, keys, phone, one plaster in the side pocket of his bag.

He did not remember when it stopped being about her.

He only knew that when a colleague sliced her hand on a stack of printer paper, he was already unwrapping it.

“Here,” he said.

The woman looked surprised. “You’re very prepared.”

He shrugged.

It was nothing.

Just something he had learned to carry.

That night, packing his bag for a business trip, he slipped a plaster into the side pocket.

Some habits are small.

They do not ask to be remembered.

They remain, ready.

Frozen Intimacy is part of the broader Relational Dynamics™ body of work by Alice Jing Shan, exploring how memory, attachment, time, and human systems leave traces long after events have ended.

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If not… perhaps common sense is not so common among humans after all. - AJS

I came across this BBC story and, perhaps like many people, my initial reaction for about 0.5 seconds was:

OMG. PILOT BORED. 😱😂

Of course, the underlying assumption was:

Boredom is a problem.

Then my thoughts kinda went like this:

In a high-risk, largely irreversible system like aviation, if the pilot is not bored during a two-hour test flight, I might be slightly more worried.

You don’t want a two-hour Mayday.

Sometimes, no news can be good news.

Then I wondered whether AI had written the headline.

Perhaps “bored pilot writes words in the sky” simply looked statistically more interesting. More unusual. More clickable.

If so, perhaps we could say AI lacked common sense.

If a human wrote it, however…

Well.

Perhaps common sense is not so common among humans after all.

No news can be good news.

Of course, this does not always make very good NEWS. 🙂

Relational Dynamics™ is a theory of system trajectories. It is a lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time. Clarity under complexity.

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Shan Tzu No. 2: An epistemology joke about knowing, not knowing, and the awkward moment when both arrive wearing the same fluent language.

An Epistemology Joke

子曰：
知之为知之，不知为不知，是知也。

Confucius:
When you know a thing, recognise that you know it;
and when you do not know a thing, recognise that you do not know it.
This is wisdom.

LLM:
I know! I know! I know!
I can write about what I know.
I can write about what I don’t know.
And you may not know that I don’t know.
Blah blah blah…

Shan Tzu:
Not wise. 🪭

The joke is epistemological. Not knowing is perfectly normal. The problem begins when not knowing becomes difficult to recognise at the interface.

The epistemological problem is old. The interface is new.

Fluency ≠ Registration

I have been saying for quite some time that fluency is not the same as registration.

Fluent and lengthy output produced with the help of large language models (LLMs) can be sleek as silk. It makes you go, “Wow.” It flows so easily that very little catches the attention or creates cognitive friction.

No cognitive friction, no cognitive development.

Or, at the very least, far less opportunity for it. Your zone of proximal development (ZPD) may simply remain locked in.

In an earlier piece, No Premature Rescue, I introduced the Survivable Risk Window (SRW) as an extension of the ZPD and developed the principle through a Relational Dynamics™ reading of human systems.

At scale, speed, and complexity, such fluency can create an illusion of competence even when nobody intended to deceive anyone.

Long before LLMs arrived, language teaching and educational research had already trained me to notice when someone could produce structurally competent language without fully registering what the language was doing, what it committed them to, or whether they themselves had actually understood it.

Before AI, the gaps were often easier to detect. Thought left traces in language. As a teacher, spotting them became almost a practised nervous-system reaction: ding ding ding, 404! Error! Almost second nature.

But error detected is not bad at all. Error is often where meaningful growth begins.

Now the traces can be polished away. Perhaps a different kind of literacy is warranted.

The thing is, you do not have to know it all. You are perfectly allowed not to know. You are allowed to be confused, inexperienced, and still forming a thought.

Curiosity is a gift. A gift we should hold onto dearly.

Perhaps that is why it is called a present. 🎁

What I find increasingly frustrating is watching people spend precious time excavating one sentence of meaning from a page of polished language that the person presenting it may not themselves fully understand.

The cognitive labour has not disappeared. It has simply been transferred to the reader.

That feels less like a lack of knowledge and more like a failure of intellectual courtesy.

What Is Formed Is Still Information

I have two small children. I would like them to be confident when they know something, and confidently know when they do not know.

I want them to know that it is perfectly okay to say: I don’t know. I’d like to learn.

Not “fake it until…” Well, you know the rest of the saying. I have never really believed in that stuff anyway, especially when the performance of knowing wastes an opportunity for genuine learning.

I have written elsewhere that what a system has never truly learned, it will eventually expose under pressure. This comes not only from professional observation; I recently watched it play out again in a small cross-AI experiment at home, which I wrote about in my Cynefin guest blog piece, When Letters Turned into Chicken Wings: Pinyin, Tone Marks, and Interface Failure, part of my Dao: The Art of the Long Game series.

In an earlier piece, I read Shannon’s information theory and the Dào Dé Jīng through the proposition that “What is Formed is Still in Formation”. And yes, I am Shan-non. These little jokes have a way of short-circuiting my sense of humour.

At some point, I would like to explore the distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom from a Relational Dynamics™ perspective. There seems to be increasing confusion, and certainly plenty of hype, around flattened and scattered points being called “data”.

Important, clearly. Useful, perhaps. Nevertheless, insufficient for knowledge, and certainly not the same as wisdom.

It is never simply AI or no AI. To know, or not to know.

The more interesting questions are: do you know that you know? Do you know that you do not know? And can we still recognise the possibility that we do not know what we do not know?

Perhaps, after all, it is about trajectories.

Trajectory of being.

Trajectory of knowing.

Trajectory of becoming.

Shan Tzu No. 1: No Interface, No Entry

Observational Cuts · 04 · A Relational Dynamics™ principle for complex systems

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A gathering after Knowledge Summit Dublin at the iconic Guinness Storehouse — with Dave Snowden, Alice Jing Shan, and a philosophical rainbow.

Dave and I had been talking about the observer, science, and how much reality depends on position over dinner at the Gravity Bar, inside the iconic Guinness Storehouse in the heart of Dublin.

Then suddenly, someone pointed out that a rainbow had appeared outside the window!

We both decided to capture the moment.

One moment.

Two observers.
Two generations.
Two reactions to the same rainbow.

One turned toward the glass window, phone lifted outward, capturing the rainbow as it appeared in the Dublin sky.

Very classic. Very natural.

The other turned her back to the glass window, bent her arm, flipped the camera inward, and folded the observers into the image.

Very millennial. Very meta.

The rainbow appeared outside the window, and then again through another interface. In the end, I was glad my photo caught both rainbows. :))

It reminded me of Bian Zhilin’s 卞之琳 short poem Fragment 《断章》:

你站在桥上看风景，
看风景的人在楼上看你。
明月装饰了你的窗子，
你装饰了别人的梦。

You stand on the bridge, looking at the view,
The viewer from above is looking at you.
The bright moon adorns your window,
And you adorn someone else’s dream.

Reality is not observed from nowhere.
The observer is already inside the relational field.

Dave Snowden, Alice Jing Shan and Dawn Ahukanna, getting ready for Cynefin Exploratory themed “Balancing human & AI reasoning in a complex world”, 1-2 July 2026 at Trinity College Dublin.

It was the first time Dave Snowden and I met in person. Until then, I had only encountered him through online exchanges. Sitting across the table from him and seeing the twinkle in his eyes, I suddenly realised: he was 3D! Technically, 4D, because from a Relational Dynamics™ perspective, time is the constitutive dimension of system trajectory.

Anyway, there was a moment when my inner system experienced a wee shock, followed by some recalibration. Dave was much taller than I had imagined. I only realised I had actually said that out loud while we were walking side by side when he replied that he used to be 6’2”, and that old people shrink.

I said nothing while my neck was being stretched as I tried to look him in the eyes, but from my 5’3”, his current 6’1” is still very much operationally tall. Just like my husband, who casually puts things on top of the fridge.

Not on the top shelf. On top of the fridge. As in, outside the fridge, above the frame, in a storage dimension I do not naturally inhabit.

It was also the first time I met Dawn Ahukanna, the other Eagle at the Cynefin Exploratory, in person. I am so glad my definition of “interface” and my intuitive reference to language, inter-system communication and power dynamics resonated with her right away. I swear I could see the moment in her eyes: “Wait a minute. That’s it!”

Hebb’s law says, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

I’d like to say: the body knows first. Cognition and language catch up later.

Later, on the way back to the accommodation, Dawn and I spoke about how the world appears from a small child’s eyes. Height is not just a measurement; it changes access, proportion, distance, threat, comfort, and possibility. A room is not the same room from every body. Perhaps we simply grow slowly and steadily enough to forget that we were once tiny, and that the world was once much bigger, higher, and farther away.

This is why I keep returning to “reality is relational dynamics under constraint over time.” Reality is not experienced from nowhere. It is lived from a position, through an interface, under conditions.

Dave Snowden, Alice Jing Shan and Dawn Ahukanna at the Guinness Storehouse during the Knowledge Summit Dublin evening gathering.

Many thanks to Barry Byrne, Founder and Chair of Knowledge Summit Dublin, for choosing such a memorable venue, raising a Guinness with us, and capturing this wonderful moment of our first meeting — a moment I sense may be the beginning of beautiful friendships.

Reflections is a space for personal, lived, and process notes from the field by Alice Jing Shan. These are moments between essays, frameworks, and stories, where the system is still forming.

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When care system fails. I know one hallway like that by heart.

We are told that trust is earned. In human systems, that is only partly true.

Some roles arrive with trust already attached.

Doctor. Nurse. Teacher. Police. Judge. Scientist.

We do not meet these roles from zero. Society has already placed a layer of trust around them, because we cannot personally verify every system we depend on before we enter it.

That is why betrayal inside care systems hits so hard.

When a hospital fails, people are not only harmed. Their paths collapse. Their hope shatters. Their dreams become nightmares. The place they were told to go for help becomes the place where harm happened, and there is nowhere further upstream to appeal. At the end of the hallway, there is only more darkness and the smell of cleaning products.

I know one hallway like that by heart.

For a long time, a broken system may survive by consuming people’s commitment, care, professionalism, sacrifice, or loyalty. But when structure keeps failing, virtue does not simply continue forever. It depletes. It distorts. It can become part of the harm.

This is where what I call consumptive virtue becomes dangerous, even deadly.

I study human systems, and I still believe in people. I believe many people who enter these roles want to help, heal, protect, nurture, and make a positive contribution to the world. I know many of them.

But people are not infinite sources of patching power.

They burn out. They absorb work they were never trained to carry. They are asked to compensate for missing structure. They are not the enemy. They are carbon-based living systems being consumed.

Their time, their energy, their salary, their virtue. Consumed.

And the system goes on.

Everyone is busy.
Everyone has a role.
Everyone is following process.
Everyone is waiting for a report.

Even harm has a file number.

That may be the golden rule of institutional detachment: give it a case number.

And still, a baby is harmed. A new life is changed forever.
A mother is dismissed and traumatised, physically and emotionally.
A father, well, no one asks how the father is doing. He has to stay strong.
And the grandparents? They are often treated as collateral damage, too distant from the file to matter, too close to the grief to recover. They are consumed too, caring for their children and grandchildren in despair.

A truth is delayed until it no longer feels like truth, because the system knows very well that time is the best medicine.

Or is it?

I have a box in my garage full of medical papers and a so-called report. I know what it feels like when institutional language tries to cover an open wound with a toy plaster. If it were handed to me to grade as an undergraduate assignment, I would give it an F-minus, if such an option existed.

The issue is not only about one hospital or hundreds of families.

It is about what happens repeatedly when systems filter out the signals that matter most, especially when those signals come from the most vulnerable people, including those who have just entered the world, or never get the chance to enter properly.

When structure fails, virtue becomes consumable.

When care systems become sick, society has to ask a much harder question:

Who has the authority, courage, and clarity to heal the system that was meant to heal us?

Background for those interested in the recent case that prompted this reflection:

Sky News: 'Cost families everything': Nottingham maternity inquiry report published

Channel 4 News: Maternity scandal: Bullying and toxic culture at Nottingham hospital

BBC: What The UK’s Biggest Maternity Review Tells Us About Maternity Care

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time. Clarity under complexity.

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Tactics ≠ Strategy

Strategy is not just a plan. It is a way of staying in relationship with reality.

Strategy is field-level awareness, while tactics are execution-level moves.

The danger begins when tactical motion is mistaken for strategic clarity. A system can have many tactics and still lack strategy.

People can be busy, responsive, energetic, and well-equipped, while still playing the wrong game and believing they are making strategic progress.

Ontological coordinate in Relational Dynamics™:
Reality = relational dynamics under constraint over time.

When Stability Becomes a Moving Target

When I first came to the UK in September 2013 for my Master’s at the University of Edinburgh, David Cameron was Prime Minister.

I learnt a word called referendum. I had not learnt that word before.

When I came back in January 2016 to begin my PhD, also at the University of Edinburgh, David Cameron was still Prime Minister.

Whatever one thinks politically, there was still a sense of stabilisation in the background.

Then there was another referendum.

What came as a surprise was how rapidly that sense of stability began to change in the following decade.

On a somewhat absurd, and not exactly reassuring, note about institutional stability: because Sino-UK collaboration formed part of the context of my PhD research, I once thought it was sensible to mention a UK government representative in the very first section of my thesis, 1.1 Context and background.

However, the context kept shifting. Over the years, I decided to just keep that section more open rather than constantly modify it. I eventually deleted that line out of a practical concern for relevance. After all, there is usually quite a gap between thesis submission and graduation, and I really did not want one of the first factual things mentioned at the beginning of my years of work to become invalid or irrelevant.

Today, as I post this quote, which I shared on the Strategy Meets Reality podcast last week, I find myself watching another leadership change unfold.

I really do not think I know enough about the executive details of politics, nor do I possess the extravagant vocabulary to discuss much of it.

But I would like to think I know a thing or two about system trajectory, especially the relational-dynamic patterns that repeat across domains.

Perhaps this is not the most precise analogy, but once seen, the structural resonance is hard to unsee.

With the World Cup now taking place in North America, the football analogy feels timely too. As I said on the podcast, tactics can make a system look very busy. Players may keep running, passing, adjusting, and responding, creating the impression that the system is productive. But if all that movement remains trapped in their own half, there may still be no strategic advance.

That is the pattern across domains.

Leadership change can be necessary. But it is not automatically strategy.

A system can have many wonderful tactics and still lack strategy.

Related Work:

Shan, A. J. (2023). Exploring internationalisation of higher education: Chinese postgraduate students’ oral participation in English during their experience at a UK university [PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh]. Edinburgh Research Archive. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/3445

Shan, A. J. (2026). Relational Dynamics™ · Ontology of Relational Dynamics · v0.2 / 关系动力学™ · 关系动力学之本体论立场 · v0.2. ScholarLand Ltd. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20465007

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

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Figure 1. Visual coordinate map for this positioning note. Dao is treated as one interface, the Ontology of Relational Dynamics as grounding, AIR as historical condition, and Relational Dynamics™ as the wider OS.

Update, 24 June 2026: This piece has now been deposited on Zenodo as a positioning note within the Relational Dynamics™ body of work.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20804629

I keep noticing something.

More and more people are reaching for words like relation, process, dynamics, emergence, and ontology. They may come from different traditions and use these words with different levels of precision. The meanings are not always the same.

But the movement is there.

Something that used to feel abstract is becoming practical. Something that used to sound philosophical is becoming operational. Something that used to sit at the edge of theory is moving toward the centre of how we understand AI, education, organisations, governance, and human development.

I do not think this is accidental.

The Old Unit of Analysis Is Breaking Down

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making relational thinking newly visible because the old unit of analysis is breaking down.

For a long time, modern systems trained us to look at separable units: the individual, the tool, the organisation, the model, the learner, the user, the policy, the system. Each could be named, measured, improved, optimised, and sometimes blamed.

That way of thinking was useful. It still is, up to a point.

But it misses what often matters most. The relation.

By relation, I do not mean social warmth or interpersonal kindness, although those may matter too. I mean relation as the condition through which anything becomes meaningful, consequential, and able to move across time.

A human using a tool is one thing. A human thinking inside an AI-shaped environment is another.

A learner asking a question is one thing. A learner forming judgment through repeated interaction with AI systems is another.

An organisation adopting a platform is one thing. An organisation slowly reorganising its memory, language, responsibility, and decision-making around that platform is another.

At that point, the question is no longer only: what does the tool do?

The better questions are: what kind of relation is being formed? Who is augmented, through which interfaces, under what constraints, and with what consequences over time?

This is the shift I have been calling AIR: from AI as tool to AI as condition.

AI is not merely giving humans new outputs. It is changing the field in which reasoning happens.

That is why relational and dynamic thinking, and the deeper field-based logic behind them, are becoming harder to ignore.

The unit of analysis is no longer the isolated human, the isolated tool, or the isolated system. The unit of analysis is the changing relation among them under constraint over time.

Why Older Traditions Become Newly Legible

This also changes how we read older traditions.

For instance, the interesting question is not how to apply Chinese philosophy to modern problems. That question is too small, because it assumes the older tradition is merely a resource to be used by the present.

The deeper question is why certain relational, processual, and field-based modes of thought become newly legible when AI transforms the conditions of reasoning itself.

In many Chinese traditions, reality is not first approached as isolated substance. It is approached through relation, timing, position, pattern, transformation, and situated coherence.

This is also why, earlier this year, I wrote Dao: The Art of the Long Game, a series that appeared across my Substack and the Cynefin guest blog. It was not an exercise in applying Chinese philosophy to contemporary problems. It was an attempt to explore how path, pattern, position, sequence, intelligibility, time, culture, and system formation become newly visible in the age of AI and complexity.

In The Less-Known Partner of Dao: Li (理), I explored Li as inner grain, pattern, and intelligibility. That distinction is worth pointing out again here because Dao is not simply “order” or a smooth metaphor for process. Dao opens the path through which pattern can later become legible.

Dao, in this sense, is not a decorative cultural reference. It is a way of noticing how path precedes pattern, how formation precedes articulation, and how intelligibility depends on the relation between lived reality, naming, and time.

So I am not interested in using Dao as an “Eastern supplement” to a Western technological story. That framing is too neat.

What interests me is the deeper structural shift: AI is exposing the limits of entity-first thinking.

Once reasoning is distributed across human, machine, interface, language, data, institution, and environment, relational thought stops being peripheral.

It becomes necessary.

Dao Is an Interface, Not the Container

This is where I locate my own work on Relational Dynamics™.

It is not a Dao model.

Relational Dynamics™ is a wider relational-dynamic operating system (OS) for understanding human and artificial systems under constraint over time.

Within that OS, the Ontology of Relational Dynamics provides its upstream philosophical and theoretical grounding. Its core claim is this: reality is relational dynamics under constraint over time. The ontology asks how relational reality forms, stabilises, drifts, adapts, and evolves under constraint over time.

As a scholar-practitioner formed through Chinese intellectual traditions, modern academic training, embodied intercultural life, and long experience moving across different social, educational, organisational, and cultural systems, I approach Dao as one cultural-philosophical interface through which the Ontology of Relational Dynamics, and the wider body of work it grounds, become legible.

Dao helps certain patterns of relation, timing, position, coherence, and transformation become easier to notice. But it is not the container of the work.

Dao is one interface.

The Ontology of Relational Dynamics is the ontological grounding.

Relational Dynamics™ is the wider OS.

AIR is one historical condition in which this OS becomes urgent.

As I have argued in my philosophical positioning paper, Relational Dynamics™: Ontology of Relational Dynamics · v0.2, Relational Dynamics™ does not reject relational ontology or process ontology. It stands near them, but not inside them.

A relational ontology gives relation ontological priority. A process ontology shifts attention from fixed substance to becoming, movement, and change. Both matter.

But the focus here is more specific than relation in general or process in general. The focus is relational dynamics under constraint over time.

Relation Precedes Dynamics

I have explored this question of sequence in two earlier chapters in Dao: The Art of the Long Game series: Coupling Does Not Abolish Sequence and Relation Precedes Dynamics.

Both pieces examine a subtle but important point in complex systems: elements may be coupled, but coupling does not make sequence disappear. Relation and dynamics are coupled too, but within that coupling, relation still has ontological precedence.

This distinction is useful here because movement alone is not enough.

Something can move without forming a trajectory. Something can change without becoming coherent. Something can interact without becoming a system. Something can repeat without becoming meaningful.

Dynamics do not happen in a void.

Relation is what allows movement to matter across time, scale, and position.

This is why I say: relation precedes dynamics.

That does not mean relation is static. It certainly is not.

Relation is already dynamic, constrained, and temporal.

The precedence is not stillness before movement. It is field before event.

An event becomes consequential because it happens within a relation-bearing field.

A child does not learn simply because information is delivered. A team does not perform simply because tasks are assigned. An organisation does not adapt simply because change is announced. A society does not govern AI simply because rules are written.

Something has to hold the movement long enough for it to matter.

That holding is relational and constrained. And it always happens in time.

Another way I often put this is: what is formed is still in formation.

A form does not become fixed just because it has become recognisable.

A school, a profession, a family, a governance system, a public discourse, a language, an AI interface, none of these is simply a finished object.

Each is a temporary stabilisation. Each continues to be held, altered, strained, and carried through relation, dynamics, constraint, and time.

Pattern is not the end of movement.

Pattern is one way movement becomes temporarily legible.

Figure 2. How movement becomes temporarily legible. Path, pattern, structure, and constraint are shown as temporal formations rather than fixed objects.

Governance After the Tool Frame

So, why does it matter deeply in the age of AI, or as I call it, the age of AIR?

AI systems do more than produce answers. They participate in the formation of habits, expectations, categories, shortcuts, dependencies, styles, and judgments.

They do not only respond to questions.

They also reshape the conditions under which questions are asked.

That is why governance cannot only ask whether an AI system is accurate, safe, biased, compliant, or explainable.

Those questions are necessary, but insufficient.

We also have to ask what kind of human-AI relation is being normalised.

Is judgment being strengthened, displaced, simulated, bypassed, or slowly weakened?

Is the interface making responsibility more legible, or simply making action smoother?

Who receives augmentation?

Who carries the risk?

Who becomes invisible inside the system?

These are not just technical questions. They are educational, organisational, political, ethical, and ontological questions. They are questions of relational dynamics.

A Small Analogy at the Edge of Resolution

A timely prompt came from Professor Seeram Ramakrishna, who shared with me a Nature Physics paper titled “A yardstick for quantum gravity”. I do not want to overextend the comparison, but the title brought a useful connection into view.

A similar issue appears when any system reaches the edge of its own resolution.

There is a loose analogy here with Planck units in physics, though I only want to gesture toward it lightly.

At ordinary scales, the background can remain background. At extreme scales, the conditions of measurement themselves become part of what must be understood. The issue is not simply that the unit becomes very small. It is that the old system of resolution begins to reach its own limits.

AI is producing a similar shift in reasoning. The conditions under which thought happens are no longer safely invisible.

I do not mean that human systems can be reduced to physics. They cannot. Human systems carry meaning, language, judgment, memory, power, and responsibility.

But when a pattern holds across very different domains, it may be pointing to a deeper structural problem: how relations, constraints, scales, and conditions make certain aspects of reality legible in the first place.

So yes, relational thinking is becoming visible now.

But I do not see this as a trend.

I see it as a response to a structural pressure.

AI is forcing us to notice what was always there: intelligence has always depended on relation, action has always depended on conditions, and meaning has always depended on the field in which it becomes legible.

Reality is relational dynamics under constraint over time.

AI did not create that reality. It made it harder to ignore.

Related Reading

Relational Dynamics™ · Ontology of Relational Dynamics · v0.2
The philosophical positioning paper for the Ontology of Relational Dynamics.

From AI to AIR: Augmented Intelligence Reasoning · v0.2
The positioning paper for AIR as the shift from AI as tool to AI as condition.

Relation Precedes Dynamics
A chapter from Dao: The Art of the Long Game on why relation has ontological precedence within relational dynamics.

Coupling Does Not Abolish Sequence
A chapter from Dao: The Art of the Long Game on why coupled elements still require attention to sequence.

Dao Models of Mutual Generation
A chapter from Dao: The Art of the Long Game on mutual generation, sequence, and relational formation.

The Less-Known Partner of Dao: Li (理)
A chapter from Dao: The Art of the Long Game, published on the Cynefin blog, on Li as inner grain, pattern, and intelligibility.

What is Formed is Still in Formation
The closing chapter of Dao: The Art of the Long Game, on why recognisable forms remain held, altered, strained, and carried through relation, dynamics, constraint, and time.

Small Analogy Referenced

A yardstick for quantum gravity

A Nature Physics piece on Planck units as a system in which quantum mechanics, relativity, gravity, and thermodynamics meet on equal footing. Referenced here only as a light analogy for what happens when a system reaches the edge of its own resolution.

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time. Clarity under complexity.

Subscribe below if you would like to follow this work as it unfolds.

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We explored a distinction that often gets missed:

Strategy is not just a plan.
Strategy is a way of staying in relationship with reality.

Strategy is field-level awareness, while tactics are the executive moves.

The danger begins when tactical motion is mistaken for strategic clarity.

A system can have many tactics and still lack strategy. People can be busy, responsive, energetic, and well-equipped, while still playing the wrong game and believing they are making strategic progress.

One phrase we discussed was the Chinese idiom 纸上谈兵 (zhǐ shàng tán bīng), meaning “discussing military strategy on paper.”

It was a pleasure to share that a pattern we still encounter today already has an ancient name. It is a pattern as old as time. The names change, the domains change, the languages change, but the dynamics repeat.

Essentially, 纸上谈兵 is what happens when strategy fails to meet reality.

Or, as I apparently started freestyling in the comments afterwards:

Written in PPT,
they call it strategy.
They want us to believe,
but it ain’t reality. 🎵

From timing and interface to language, communication, business, organisations, consumptive virtue, complex adaptive systems, sports, the World Cup, and AI, we certainly covered a lot. :)

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time. This Talks section gathers spoken encounters where ideas meet voice, audience, and live dialogue.

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Capacity does not become judgement by itself. The organisation must create the conditions through which it can enter, act, and develop.

An organization can hire capacity and then remove the conditions through which that capacity becomes judgement.

The problem is not only insufficient trust. Expertise needs context, constraints, authority, interfaces and autonomy to enter the system coherently.

Otherwise, the organization creates dependency and then diagnoses the dependency as a lack of maturity.

Autonomy is not the reward for development. It is one of the conditions through which development becomes possible.

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

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AJS Key Vocabulary 01 · Consumptive Virtue: When structure fails, virtue becomes consumable.

One-line definition
Consumptive virtue is when a system turns people’s commitment, care, professionalism, sacrifice, or loyalty into fuel for missing or failing structure.

Plain example
When a hospital, school, university, research lab, family, charity, start-up, public service, or wartime system keeps functioning because committed people keep absorbing what the structure refuses, fails, or cannot yet carry.

Structural meaning
The issue is not that virtue is bad. The issue is that virtue becomes consumable when it is used to compensate for missing structure.

Common misreading
This is not an argument against care, duty, sacrifice, or professionalism. It is an argument against systems that depend on consuming them.

Related terms
capacity, coherence, structural failure, interface, constraint, endurance

Anchor sentence
When structure fails, virtue becomes consumable.

Note
In practice, consumptive virtue often hides behind respectable phrases such as “this will be good for your CV.” The phrase is almost too perfect: CV as curriculum vitae, and CV as consumptive virtue. What is framed as career development can sometimes become a polite way of asking people to absorb structural gaps with their own time, body, care, and future.

Relational Dynamics™ is an original lens for understanding how systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time. AJS Key Vocabulary offers short entries for the terms, phrases, and concepts that carry this work across contexts.

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