Research · Vocabulary
A vocabulary for what is difficult to see
What is this institution asking people to become, and what happens when their experience contradicts what it believes it is doing? RIfT develops language for what is easy to experience and hard to name, so that it can be discussed, researched and contested.
A new colleague arrives full of ideas.
A year later she speaks less in meetings, checks before she proposes anything, and has become known as careful.
What did she learn here, and from whom?
Relational Architecture
Research programme
The study of what happens between people and institutions: what an institution teaches people to become through its relationships, rules, permissions and exclusions, and what those formations reveal about how it is organised.
An institution becomes visible not only through what it intends, decides or produces, but through what people must become in order to remain in relationship with it.
A transformation programme asks employees to become adaptive, resilient and ready to take ownership.
For twenty years, the same organisation rewarded them for caution.
What happens when those are not the same person?
Formative Assumptions
Every system contains assumptions about the people through whom it operates. Looking back: what has this system already taught people to become in order to belong and succeed within it? Looking forward: what does our desired change assume people will need to become for it to succeed?
Where those two answers differ, transformation meets a threshold, and the people asked to cross it may have to risk what their formation taught them to secure.
A resident stops coming to participation evenings.
The file notes: hard to reach.
What if her absence is telling us something about the evenings?
Relational Recognition
The moment an adaptation becomes readable as information about the relationship in which it became reasonable, rather than as a trait of the person.
People’s difficulty living within a system can be knowledge about the system.
In a restructuring meeting, everyone is invited to speak freely.
Only some of them have contracts that will survive what they say.
Who can speak, refuse, leave or act, and at what cost?
Relational Position
Working concept
Where someone stands within a relational architecture shapes both their capacity to affect it and the consequences they may face for trying. It asks who is being asked to risk what, and who bears the consequences if nothing changes.
We are reviewing related work on positioning theory before settling this term.
A nurse finally writes down why she stopped raising concerns.
The note reaches her team lead. It goes no further.
Can what becomes known travel back far enough to change what produced it?
Return
What people come to understand about their relationship with an institution travels back toward the relationships and decisions that helped produce it.
The engagement survey raises the same three concerns as last year.
The action plan is the same as last year’s too.
When does listening become consequential?
Answerability
The obligation and capacity of a system to be changed by what its relationships reveal. Not only whether an institution listens or responds, but whether what returns can alter its conditions, decisions, assumptions, relationships and distributions of agency and power.
The report is published. The recommendations are welcomed.
A year later, the same people are saying the same things.
What is this knowledge allowed to change?
Consequence
Working concept
The difference between knowledge that is acknowledged and knowledge that alters the conditions that produced it. RIfT treats consequence, not awareness or dialogue alone, as the test of transformation.